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Work Report - Mike Crowl focuses on jobs and work and anything connected to the two.
Mike blogs in two places on Orble, and two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
While I was clearing out a couple of large drawers today, drawers full of old magazines and various other paraphernalia, I came across a copy of The New Scientist, that self-important British magazine which is always proclaiming itself on the cusp of new information. At least that’s how it comes across to me.
I’ve pretty much given up reading it. I don’t think it’s reporting is half as good as it’s claimed to be, because even though it presents its material in scientific-speak, a lot of what it reports isn’t factual, and hasn’t been verified in any sense
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When I was involved in the production of the play, The Diary of Anne Frank, a couple of years ago, at least two of the actors had recently had small parts in a movie that was made locally. The film eventually came out with the rather innocuous title, Out of the Blue, because the makers weren’t allowed to use the word, Aramoana, in the title, Aramoana being the name of the coastal village near our city where more than a dozen people were gunned down in one day by a man who lost the plot and shot at everything that moved.
One of these actors was telling me at the time that he’d signed up with an agent, because he was interested in getting more film work, and I’ve just come across his photo, and that of two other people who in the play, on a site called Otago Actors and Talent Agency. I’m not sure if this is the ‘agent’ he was referring to. I rather think it’s more likely to be yet another way of getting his face seen
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With this new job I’m having to learn to be less ‘precious’ about the stuff I write. Because I’ve pretty much always written for myself, in the sense that at the end of the day I still own the stuff, it’s a bit difficult making the transition to writing for some ‘entity’ other than myself and thus not being worried about what happens to it.
For instance, I spent a lot of time a couple of weeks ago rewriting material that had previously been used as part of a proposal. What I had to do was make it more user-friendly. It took me two or three days to find a way into doing this, between other things, and I was pretty satisfied with the result. However, it didn’t get used, and the new version of the proposal was sent away without it. In fact, the new version had a rush job done on that part of it, with me culling together bits and pieces that had originally belonged in other places
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Worked overtime this last weekend. I was required to be at the Presbyterian Synod’s AGM. (A Synod, in this case, is a group of presbyteries, which each cover a group of parishes.)
Because both my bosses were involved in presentations and such, and because I play the piano and they sing, I was roped in to play some music at a few points during the gathering. It gave me a chance to play three new piano pieces I’ve
written since the beginning of the year, which was good, and besides that I was involved in playing with the music group who played for the congregation during the various services we had over the day and a half
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Remember sunglasses like these, the ones that used to flip up? I've owned more than one pair of these in the past, and, like all my sunglasses, I had them long after everyone else had gone onto the next trendy look.
In fact, for years, my children would claim I wore buzzy bee sunglasses, because they were so large. Everyone else had gone onto tiddly little sunglasses that kept out about a centimetre of sun and no more. When I finally caught up and bought some new specs that came with their own magnetic sunglasses, I knew I’d been right not to go with the flow. The pathetic little sunglasses that covered my new much smaller specs kept nothing out. In fact, they made it harder to see than normal
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Well, the last few months have been a considerable learning curve.
I’m still struggling with the wonderful Adobe Insight program. Great as it is, it’s not easy to learn – not for me, anyway. I suspect that someone with a background in the earlier types of programs along this line might have an advantage. For me I’m having to learn from scratch, and it’s very frustrating. Especially when something goes wrong and for the life of me I can’t figure out how to undo the problem
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Back in February a young man by the name of Jolyon White spent a month living on just NZ$1.49 a day – like some 1.2 billion other people in the world. He camped out in what is known as The Town Belt, an area of bush and trees that rings the city of Dunedin, and managed to survive, though there were some unpleasant days when it rained heavily.
He’s just got back in the news because he’s wondering why so many supermarkets and food places throw so much food away. When he was living in his poverty period, he found that it was far too easy to scavenge fresh food from rubbish bins around the town. He said it negated the point of what he was doing.
‘Given that the month was supposed to be a personal act of solidarity with people in poverty, the quality and quantity of food I could access was ruining the exercise
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For those who remember when this blog focused on work and my working life – and prior to that on my inability to get a job – this is a brief return to the past in the sense that this post once again has a bit of a work focus. I’ll return to green things again soon.
I’ve recently begun yet another blog – it must be a disease, I think. This one I’m allowed to do in my work time – and I get paid for doing it as well. That’s because it focuses on posts that relate to resource material for Christian ministers; such things as reviews of new books, DVDs, information about what other church leaders are doing, innovations in the church scene and much more. In fact anything that I think may be of interest to these guys
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A few years ago in the book and music trade – and probably in a number of other retail areas as well – Celtic was all the rage. What started as something that brought value to our lives became nothing more than a retail fad. The Celtic people would have been mortified, I suspect.
Now, of course, we’re in the middle of a Green fad. Green is good, in itself, but when it’s used just to promote everything under the sun, including pet supplies, then the good thing becomes a piece of nonsense
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For years my wife kept a shower chair she’d bought at a garage sale because she thought my mother might one day need it. My mother was fairly independent however, and had no need of some damfangled shower chair.
Nor have we ourselves have ever thought of using shower chairs; even now that my mother has died, the one
Amandanwpa's cat with shower chair
we kept for so long is eking out its remaining years in the glass house, where it serves as a stand for the clothes basket. No doubt it feels some ignominy in this, but at least it hasn’t gone to the great recycling place where most things that are no longer wanted around our house have gone
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I love the Dentist - by betsssssy (from Flickr.com)
Both my wife and I have had the pleasure of visiting the dentist this week, she today (on her birthday) and me yesterday – with a follow-up tomorrow.
My wife’s tooth had become so painful she’d had to get drug treatment in the form of antibiotics. My situation was somewhat different: I lost the last part of a tooth that I’d had for more than fifty years. It was a sad but short parting. The tooth had been cut down until it was nothing but a fitting for a crown, many years ago, and in fact at least one more crown had been fitted since then. But over the years it delighted in getting abscesses in above the gum line, and finally the dentist decided enough was enough – even though it had been 18 months or more since the last major upset
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245 Posts dating from December 2006
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