So after quitting as a contract hourly employee with scripps, having worked for them for a year, I went on vacations. For the first I braved the wilderness in the Boundary Waters. For the second, I braved wave after wave of uber-geekiness at GenCon in Indiana. On the way up to the first vacation, on the road in the middle of Peoria, my (now) boss calls me and tells me the position I had applied for six months earlier finally got funding approval. This was a good thing, because per life’s quirks, fully three months of freelance income painstakingly planned and counted on had all vanished like the dark at dawn.
I’m now the Interactive Advertising Operations Manager at Scripps, working with a great team of guys and gals quite a bit further down the web publishing stream than ever before. Upstream being a web designer, or part of the team that works with a client to get the ball rolling. Now I work on dressing up the table for dinner, making sure that the donations box is fully visible!
Normally I am a designer with other duties.. ie a designer that manages designers, or a designer that meets with corporate types and does stuff on the fly.. or a designer that gets into code and finds out he likes it and is pretty decent at it so gets stuff tossed his way. But no.. not now. I don’t even have photoshop on my machine at work.. Go ahead and laugh, you! (looking at you, X!)
I do get to creatively problem solve, so that is a sort of design I suppose, albeit not visually. I’m working on a set of tools my team uses to create code they then put into various ad management systems, and these tools are pretty old. For instance, the first one I’ve finished is a generator that takes in some parameters via a form and then spits out code that our team drops into a “creative” (ie snippet that calls in a graphic or swf file) and is then scheduled for publication.. this code was using some pretty old school flash detection methodology, so it was fun to go in, clean it up visually, strip out the unnecessary stuff, figure out how it worked, what bit were STILL in use today and had to be kept, and then take out the guts and build it up from scratch using a more contemporary Flash embed system.
This kind of thing is interesting to me. Not only the application part, but the process part. Learning new systems and processes, and then trying to figure out ways to make them shorter, simpler, and more efficient is probably akin to my need to straighten objects on countertops and make sure they don’t overhang the edge (NEVER!), but that’s ok since I’m getting paid for it. Pay is good. I haven’t had a healthy regular paycheck since leaving Reynolds in April 05, so I’m still slightly put off to think as I get my coffee and check email in the morning, (”wait, I’m getting paid for this?)….
My long term goal is to phase out my freelance design and coding efforts in order to pursue fine art more aggressively. If I’m not in the office working, I don’t want to be working, in essense. That may take a while since we have so many projects we would like to tackle on the house that will require some chunks of change. Time will tell.
One such project was removing the old nasty smurf blue toilet from our master bath this weekend. This toilet had been doing brisk business since 1981 so its time had come. We picked up a (new and unsused! ) replacement for it from a friend of a friend who buys display and damaged merchandise from big box outlets, restores them and sells them for cheap. Reminds me a lot of my dad in that the guy can fix probably about anything and likes to do so… On a coincedental note, this same friend that told me about the friend of a friend is also hiring MY dad to work on the houses that his organization uses to host the men they take care of. The org is called Agape, and at some point they will have me do a website for them 
(talking to you, Benjamin!)
Right now I have two paintings in the works. One is a smaller, vertically oriented portrait of my sister as she stands in a restored building in the Old City, Knoxville. She is looking wistfully out the window, with lots of exposed brick and a nice view of downtown. The other is a 30″x30″ abstract sort of in line with some other abstracts I’ve done in pastel in the past. We’ll see how they both turn out soon I hope.
Last, but not least by any means, my family and I are anxiously hoping for the best but preparing mentally for the worst. My mother’s mother is in the hospital in critical condition, and things took a turn for the worst this morning. She was doing really well post-surgery for a heart attack, and we were encouraged by her strength and will to live. Today however she had some pretty big setbacks and the docs told the family to begin saying our goodbyes.
How does one do that? Our family has been lucky in having our elders with us for many years past the average, but that doesn’t help you prepare to say goodbye. More memories, more time shared, I think that just makes it harder to let go. My sister and I have lived away from our grandparents all our lives, and only gotten to see them on special occasions and vacations… i think it’s harder to say goodbye when all you have are bright flashes of happiness shared, a small selection of treasured memories to remember, and a lifetime of guilt for not staying in better touch, not writing more, calling more, and thinking of them more…
How can you prepare to say goodbye?
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