Waiting to hear about the job is a lot more stressful that I thought. You know, the job looked good on paper when I first read it. Then I applied and had a good phone interview and learned a little more about it and it sounded a little better. Then I interviewed there, saw the mine, met some nice people, talked about dirt and plants instead of diesel and hazardous chemicals and got a little excited. In other words – I sorta wanted it, then I kinda wanted it and now I really really want it.

So sitting and waiting for a week and a half is harder than I thought.

Here’s what I think happened the first time around: They posted the job because they needed a department head. They had an intern on site, in house already who was a perfect fit for the job; her name is Rachel. But it’s a big corporation so there are procedures. We all applied and the intern got the department head slot. I figure this because I found several articles about the mine where Rachel is referred to as the environmental intern. Rachel would be my boss if I get hired there. I may have missed the boat on the dept. head position, but, in truth, I’ll be fine not being a department head anymore.

They need two more reclamation people to work the mine. There looks to be a north and a south sector so my guess is that each person will be responsible for a sector. If I understood correctly, I would be doing a lot of planning and then it would be my job to supervise the execution of that planning by the subcontractors. I would also do cool, reclamation-ish stuff like soil sampling and biological surveys.

So that’s why the job got posted, went away, and then came back. The posting is the same for the department head as it is for the two newer slots. That’s my theory, anyhow.

The stress started almost immediately. I probably slept about 3 hours the night after the interview while my head found something wrong with almost everything I’d said. I’ve slept better since, but the stress has mounted in that not only am I worrying – pointlessly – about getting the job, I am also suddenly faced with looking at having to possibly sell a house in a bad market (we may decide to rent it) and move my family to a small town that is best know for an isolationist cult and an ATF massacre (Waco).

I was supposed to hear something by yesterday (Friday). But I didn;t. I heard something Wednesday – and that something was that I probably wouldn’t hear by Friday. Rachel called me to say that two interviews had canceled on her. She had to reschedule them in order to finish the process. She hoped to have that done this week but she didn’t know.

The good news was that she said I was a “top” candidate and that she had already called most people back to say that they were not interested. All good stuff.

But then Friday crawled by with no phone call and I knew I was going to have to make it through the weekend without knowing.

Am I boring you?

Why did the dragline cross the road?

That’s video from the actual Kosse mine. They have to build the dragline on site. It not like a little crane that you can throw on the back of a truck and mark “wide load.” It’s huge. You can see it from space. (You may have to clikc the “+” to zoom in.)

View Larger Map It takes more than a year to put it together. It doesn’t sit on tracks like a bulldozer. It walks. It’s size and weight would tear up a track. It’s a moving building. They built it at a staging area and when it was time to have it walk across the road, they had to pile yards and yards of dirt onto the road otherwise the dragline would destroy it. There’s two of them at Kosse. The other one didn’t need to cross the road.

And here’s a nice little video that’s kinda about the job:

I’ve been getting a question or two about the oil spill in the gulf. It’s nice that you all think that I am smart enough to know anything more that you all.

And I sort of do, but I don’t.

What I typically do in the world of spills and clean up involves about 50 gallons of diesel fuel onto blacktop or soil. This is a pretty stable situation involving a known material, volume and media that adsorbs/absorbs the spilled stuff.

Crude oil is a sloppy mess of chemicals and slop. Some nasty, some just annoying. Most of that slop is lighter than water. But it’s not just in water, it’s in salt water. So as much as this sounds like a spill, it’s not a spill that I have a lot of experience dealing with.

I will say that I think it’s going to get pretty bad. I mean, it’s bad now. If it were a known volume, it would still be impacting the coast for a few weeks. And we’re not talking about just a coast line, we’re talking about the Mississippi delta. But it’s still going, so the scope is growing literally by the minute. Not good.

As long as I’m sharing my thoughts and opinions, I’ll comment on the Arizona law that either allows polzi to shake down, beat up, bind and imprison or kill anyone who looks vaguely Hispanic OR trains and empowers local police to check the immigrations status of anyone that they have arrested on other charges.

I can’t tell you how many different things I’ve heard about this new law. It’s either the most ridiculous violation of our freedoms or it’s a common sense fix to the powerlessness of local police to enforce the law. I guess the only way to know for sure is to get into the Arizona state website and examine the wording of the bill (and I will do that as soon as I get my Masters in Constitutional Law and pass the bar) because I obviously can’t trust the news, politicians, rally-goers, or facebook posters to tell me the truth.

My opinion is more about how I still have no real idea what the law is about here in 2010 where information is more available than ever. And yet all I am is confused. By design.

The thing that sticks out to me is that, right or wrong, Arizona is trying to fix a problem that most of the rest of us don’t have to worry about as attested to by the illegal alien drug-dealer shoot out yesterday. It’s easy to point fingers and protest when nobody that you know has been shot by an untraceable drug dealer in a Hummer. I’m not saying that the law is right – as I have no idea what it says – I am just saying that we all need to think about why such a law could or would be proposed and be passed it there’s not a bigger problem.

The truth is, though, that I have too much of my own crap to study and worry about. The good people of Arizona will have to figure it out.

Post Script: After a little searching, I did find the Arizona bill itself. After reading it only once, I still have to say that I know nearly nothing. Being that I deal with environmental law pretty regularly, I can say that a lot of law that seems specific turns out not to be.

It does strike me, though, that lawmakers feel the need to write a law that seems to allow them to enforce laws… Point being were they previously hamstrung or is this just some political positioning? I’ll hold on having an opinion until I have a chance to ask the Arizona deputy who got shot yesterday what he thinks.

http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/summary/s.1070pshs.doc.htm

It went well.

As usual, I am hyper-analyzing nearly everything said. But over-all I did well. Should hear something by next friday, they said.

Good news. The job opening at the Kosse Mine is open again. You may remember that I had applied for a reclamation position late last year and it fizzled and finally flopped in December. I don’t know the full story. Either they decided against filling the position(s) last year or they’ve burned somebody out already and they left.

Even better, I got a call Thursday and am interviewing Tuesday at the mine. That’s one step closer than I got last time. So I’m trying to not get too excited about it; it could suck, I could not get it, it could not start until November or something weird like that. But the possibilities are nice.

It’s not coming at too bad a time for me because not only are we short people at work (which means I’m on call more) but we just had a guy leave….so we’re shorter and I’m even busier. So I’m fried, people. Send me to Kosse!

SCBA

I am going through “Citizens Fire Academy” which does not mean that I will be a fire fighter. It’s a community awareness program where they teach you what your local firefighters do and how they do it. I get to wear bunker gear and drive a fire truck and climb into a CareFlite helecopter and eventually (Mom, don’t read this) sit inside a burn building in SCBA and watch some fires burn. I signed up because I hadn’t done much of anything new lately. This is new. And I get recertification points for my CHMM for it. So far wearing the bunker gear is all I’ve done other than classroom stuff. If it continues to go well, I might do Citizen’s Police Academy too.

A couple odds & ends for you:

I saw this sexy and seductive morsel of frozen culinary yumminess at Target the other day in a clearance freezer. Immunity Blend. Mmmmmmmmmm. Gotta get some of that almost-like-medicine-sounding goodness in me!

This is just a little funny all by itself. That’s a computer monitor with a large piece of paper taped over the screen. Two feet out of the photo is a traditional in-store sign made of wire with a piece of paper IN it (because the wire frame was MADE to do this at significantly less cost that a flat-panel computer monitor).

Even more funny – to me – is imagining the logic of the beer distributor who came into the store, stacked the beer cases, set the monitor up and either a) it didn’t work b) he didn’t know how to work it or c) it works and he know how to work it but he has no computer to generate an eye-catching display. AND THEN he felt that his best fall back was to tape a print out over the screen.

Maybe that’s just me.

Whenever I think about Easter, my mind tends to wander to my first Easter on my own. I just moved into an apartment over Damrow’s Restaurant in downtown Appleton and all my roomies left me there with no plans of my own only days after moving. And it rained. Torrential downpour kind of rain. I watched the streets of downtown Appleton fill up like a river and watched whatever I could on an old TV in the living room.

I wondered if I had made a very big mistake. Truth was, of course, I had only begun to make mistakes and this one would soon pale in comparison.

Speaking of mistakes, I did my own taxes this year. I have been paying a guy; since I moved here, I think. First because I was in a hurry and the price was right (it’s through a sister company @ my job). Then because my lovely bride worked at a non-profit. Then because she was self-employed and had royalty income. Then because I bought a house. But nothing has changed in about 5 years and when I looked back at those last 5 filings, it’s all the same forms and the same deductions and the same blah blah blah. And they raised their rates again and the guy pissed me off. So I did them myself. I hated it, but I hate working on my car too.

Don’t freak out, you found the right website. I’m playing with new names. I can do that – I only have four readers and it’s not like any of you will get too cornfused.

What a week – and now there’s about three inches of snow on the ground. It was partly sunny and in the 70’s Friday. They were predicting all this snow but I didn’t believe them. About three months back, I think, they foretold of a huge snowstorm and they were right about it. But that just made them feel like Shamans or Sooth-Sayers or something because they suddenly became less mealy mouthed about their forecasts predicting “major blizzards” about every other week. None of those showed up, but it hasn’t stopped them.

So when they predicted this one, I didn’t really believe them until the temperature dropped 20 degrees in two hours and I could see the snow coming in on the weather.com radar. Even then I was skeptical about the amount – but here I sit hiding from the cold.

Busy work-week for me this week. It’s spring break so my co-workers are in and out. Most of them trying to take care of their kids and keep daycare expenses down, but some just taking poorly-timed vacations. I was the oncall that past weekend and took on five new projects. Then I was on again on Thursday and took on three more. That’s a lot – you’ll have to trust me.

WebStuff: Are you a dork like me? Do you like to correct people when they are correcting other people? Are you interested in where to get salt-free, brine-free, fat-free, free-range bacon in the DFW/Metroplex? We’ve got a radio show for that! Check it out. I love it! http://www.kera.org/audio/anything.php Some of it will be Dallas- or Texas-centric, but it’s great fun.

We didn’t see any movies this week, but I did forget to mention that we saw the first few minutes of “Up in the Air” last week. After listening to Danny Ocean cuss for that long and then sleep with a lady he met 20 minutes before in the hotel bar, we took it back to the Redbox and traded it for “Everybody’s Fine.” And we all know how that went.

Jack and I visited the museum this weekend while mom went to a quilt show. I was amused by the vomit exhibit and even more amused by the sign that let you know that you might have to wait 30 seconds if you want the exhibit to vomit for you.

Here’s something that should be illegal: “You want regular fries or curly fries?” When you order a combo at Jack in the Box, they ask you that and it implies that you just have a choice, right? It doesn’t sound like an up-sell, it sounds like “Do you want the black one or the white one?” And that’s what they want it to sound like. But it’s not. Curly fries are almost $1 more. I probably gave Jack $300 before I figured that out.

Movie previews should also be screened to ensure that they represent the actual storyline of the movie. A few years ago we got tricked into watching “Riding in Cars With Boys.” The previews made it look like a young girl’s adventures in dating and hilarity ensues. But it wasn’t that. It was pain and depression topped with hopelessness, guilt, loneliness, strife, and heartbreak. Last night we rented “Everybody’s Fine.”  Here’s the trailer:

That’s the trailer I saw in a theater about a year ago. It did not suggest to me that this would be a laugh-it-up yuk-fest, but it looks light and funny and sweet. A lot of good actors. Right? Seems like it’d have enough content to make it good and enough laughs to make it light.

First let me tell you – and this is no real surprise – you just saw ALL the laughs in the movie.

(Spoiler Alert – Read no further if you haven’t seen the movie and you want to without know what happens.)

But here’s the deal. Frank’s wife died after the holidays last year and he is painfully alone. That’s one of the reasons his kids used to come every year and don’t anymore. But mostly, they canceled on him because three of them are trying to figure out what happened to the fourth because they got a call from the Mexican police that he’s been arrested. (Because Mexican police are always so helpful that way.) That’s a lie they tell you early on because they don’t want to tell you that he’s overdosed in a Mexican prison, they want to layer that pain through the entire movie while you grow to love Frank as he visits each of his kids who are lying to him and trying to ditch him off on the next kid in line. Oh, and Frank is sick with a lung disorder that he got while working hard to give his kids a good life so when a homeless drug addict mugs him and stomps on his medication, we have to watch him take it for the rest of the movie by scraping the broken dust that he scooped up from the train station floor out of his coat pocket so he doesn’t die right there. The movie peaks when we learn that #4 kid is, in fact, dead, it becomes obvious to everyone that all the kids have been lying about everything, and Frank has a heart attack on the plane on his way home after running out of his medication.

Light. Funny. “Heart warming,” as one review put it.

I’m writing my Congressman. Why is Obama not doing something about this?

Bird Swarm

Good news for all you people up north – although from the interwebs I can see that many of you already know. Your birds are here. I’ve never seen them do what they do here in Texas anywhere else. They swarm.  Mostly in the fall and the spring as they head for Rio or Belize or wherever they winter. But sometimes they all just show up like in the movie.

They are pooping on my car. And my house. My sidewalk. They are eating something red and pooping everywhere.

That’ s good news for you because I assume that they are on their way north because it’s spring-ish. So all of you pale, chubby, house-bound people can start going for walks again. Hopefully the red stuff will be all crapped out of them by the time they get there.

As I mentioned last, I really enjoyed Star Trek. But an observation came to mind that my wife thinks is sort of Trek-o-geeky.  I think it’s just stupid-geeky.

In Star Trek IV, the crew of the enterprise steals a Romulan ship, travels back in time, builds an aquarium on the ship, and travels again forward in time to save the whales (an ultimately the earth). In Star Trek 2009, the entire planet Vulcan is destroyed along with something like 28 billion Vulcans.  Spock, the guy who engineered the time travel in Star Trek IV to save the whales is standing there chatting with himself at the end of the movie and nobody ever thinks to go back in time to – I don’t know – squash Nero or maybe prevent the planet Romulus from being destroyed in the first place? No, of course not. No whales on either of those planets.

The other thing that stuck out to me was this: Why the hell was that mining ship so heavily armed?

I may just change the name of my blog to “I’ll Write More Later.”

If you have a remote car unlock and have never heard of this before, I’m about to make you look stupid for years to come. Did you know that if you touch your remote unlock keychain to your chin and open your mouth that you extend it’s range by about 1000 feet? I can open my car trunk from across the vast Wal Mart parking lot – or more importantly, FIND my car. Yeah. It’s true.

We saw some guy do this a few years ago. He was feeling a little stupid but explained what it did. For a long while I didn’t do it for fear that he’d just set me up. But I use it all the time now…and so will you. And I’m telling you this because, yeah, I want to be helpful. But I mostly just want you to do it and look and feel as stupid as I do. I mean, it’s not bad enough that I lose my car in the first place. Now I have to do this to find it.

Two Quick Movie reviews:

Star Trek – When I saw the previews a million years ago, I thought I’d hate it. Figured I’d save myself the money and be disappointed at home with the DVD. Everyone kept telling me how good it was. They were all right.

Inglorious Basterds – Typical Tarantino crap but this time you have to read subtitles. That man needs a therapist. I didn’t finish watching it, even.

Sandra Bullock has, by the by, been in some good movies. I watched part of 28 Days a while back and she was brilliant. We really enjoyed Miss Congeniality.  Two Weeks Notice was good and While You Were Sleeping is a favorite. They’re all sort of sappy, happy date movies (except 28 Days) but hey, you can’t watch depressed people dying of cancer on a desert island after they loose all their retirement money when crack dealing gang members take over their neighborhood all the time. (Isn’t that the movie equivalent of country music?) She’s not as much of a movie red-flag as you might think. And she’s from Texas so there’s a local ordinance that says I have to like her.

Now Keanu Reeves is a pretty red red-flag. There was something novel about The Matrix and Reeves had the right look, but it wasn’t enough to make me watch it or any of the sequels again. Compare that to Ocean’s Eleven (Twelve and Thirteen) that I tend to watch once a month. Nothing else he did comes to mind.

And then there’s Johnny Depp whose movies should be banned from US screens until he publicly apologizes for being an anti-American turd.  Don’t see Depp movies – even if they’re good. (Unless you can pay for the tickets in Euros or Francs.)

I’m only half-serious about this, by the way. I’m not plunging off the deep end, I don’t think. There’s just something about a guy who banks American dollars to finance his French life off the US movie market saying that I’m stupid.