Let It Be

What do the following bands have in common?

Ozma
The Get Up Kids
Ultimate Fakebook
The Anniversary
Chomsky

They are all bands I enjoy that broke up, went on semi-permanent hiatus or pretty much stopped making music all together during the past year or so.

The beauty of a CD album is that it is a moment captured and frozen in time forever. The voices never get any older or less inspired, they are just as you heard on your first listen, for better or for worse. So they never really do go away do they? After all, there are dozens of bands on my iPod that never even existed during my lifetime. So I am left to appreciate what I have and only wonder what the future of these bands might have held...


And in an effort to keep The Deathray Davies from joining this list, go buy their new CD, "The Kick and The Snare". It is awesome... CD money well spent.

Plotting

Last night my boss asked me if he should fire two of his employees. I work in an office of six people. That's potentially a 33.33% staff reduction. How am I supposed to answer that question?

This morning I got a call at work from a headhunter, or as you may know them by the more politically correct term, executive recruiter. I usally don't really talk to them but this guy actually called himself a headhunter and he had a cold so his voice was all deep and forboding like James Earl Jones so I thought I would chat with him a bit. He was contacting me to see if I might be interested in a position as the assistant chief engineer of the Kansas City Southern Railroad. My duties would be to help the chief engineer with reviweing plans and estimates, and scheduling all of the various engineering projects on the railroad each year. It would be a pretty cool job and the title alone is pretty enticing. However, I wouldn't be doing railroad design work but instead reviewing the work of others, and it's the opportunity to design that is what I like about my current job situation. The position would also require moving to Kansas City, which is rather undesirable. Then there is that whole sticky work visa and green card issue. So I'm not seriously considering it at all but I think I might persue it a bit farther just to see what they really think of me. It also might help leverage my boss into getting me a little bit bigger raise during the next review cycle. That may seem a bit unethical but I feel that I've been underpaid for quite a while. Either that or I've been giving my employer more than they are paying for. Just tonight before I left I wrote a plot driver from scratch so that I could print out cross sections on a giant 3'x12' roll plot. There is something very satisfying about creating a drawing that is 12 feet long.

Amy's new Mini suffered a supercharger bypass valve failure this morning on her way to work. I'm preturbed by this since the Mini is only a month old. I'm upset. I don't want things like this to go wrong for her, espcially on a brand new car. I drove it home from the Animation Show 2005 on Saturday night and I somehow feel guilty that my overzealous acceleration onto Central Expressway somehow led to the demise of the valve. But it's a Mini; it's built to motor. Thank goodness for the warranty.

So it begins...

I was at the supermarket today and among the items I had to pick up was Kleenex. This led me to notice just how feminine the designs on the outside of most kleenex boxes are. All flowers and swirls and pastels, no primary colours and geometric patterns. In other words, nothing to match my decor. Wouldn't a Kleenex box with Ferraris on it be really cool? Or better yet, dogs playing poker? I'm guessing that the Kleenex people have done a lot of market research and concluded that males who do grocery shop either don't care what is on the outside of their Kleenex boxes or they don't buy Kleenex at all and just use that handy towel by the sink.

Not the most exciting way to start a blog but you have to start somewhere. Of course, had I started this a week ago I could have written about going to the renaissance fair, a sci-fi convention, Star Wars EpIII at midnight, the Animation Show and a 99-degree weekend in May.