feather2pixels

This is not a picture I would have predicted being in at age thirty.  But overall this picture is not a bad place to be.   Don’t my students look so cute in their dress blues?

It’s been the worst commuting week of my life.  Storms every day with a near death experience on the Bay Bridge yesterday.  Basically the rain starts when I leave home and ends right before I get to work.  I know, I know:  everything’s all about me.  But I have the rainbow pix to prove it.

At home:

At work:

(Just in time for the gay marriage trial.)

I recently organized a dinner for our department’s top seniors and so it was that last night at Chevy’s Fresh Mex Vallejo a table for twenty-six was reserved for Professor .  My colleagues thought that was really funny.  Then I got carded, which was even funnier to everyone.  Funniest yet and several Gold Rush margaritas later was the check.  I didn’t think it was possible to spend this much money at Chevy’s.

Instead of explaining the last few weeks, I will just post some pictures:

USA Today was the talk around campus today.  Vallejo made the front page because we’re broke.

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A sneak preview of this morning’s quiz: (more…)

My plan to post every day of this week was about as successful as Glenn McCoy’s plan to be an acceptable member of the media.  Keep your internet goals as vague as possible to avoid letdown, I guess.  On the other hand, there are many gratifying things in this life.  One of the most gratifying things about screen printing is its ability to translate almost any image, almost always for the better.  This encourages the hoarding element of human nature.  Forgotten texts and found trash treasures take on a new life printed through a polyester screen.

I’m way in to the idea of discovering great things in the world and then finding a way to make them work squeezed through a screen.   I’ve been working on a body-themed poster for one C.W.’s harebrained schemes.  After a lot of getting nowhere on the design, I finally turned to America’s favorite last resort.  The library.  For unknown reasons, the Maritime Academy library stocked a 1973 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and I unleashed the awesome scanning power of my Canon LIDE 80 upon it.  Now dozens of striking technical drawings from a bygone era are mine. All mine!  I cannot lose.

Notes from my sophomore Statics course:  Not only was this team’s pasta bridge well designed, but it was the best looking in the class.  When you are going to school the boys, you might as well add some rhinestones for good measure.

Today my job was to operate a jet engine.  Then I went home and took a nap.
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Since the beginning of the fall I’ve been bringing food to work.  I have never been able to do this before and I have no explanation as to why the O.C.D. is taking hold so late in life.  But five days a week this has been my lunch:

So it was that last week was a special treat.  I am not gonna gloat, but I’m coming off an unbelievable five days of eating with my friends. The undeniable highlight was Brothers restaurant, in the Korean BBQ district of San Francisco.  We got the meal for four, which yielded 38 plates, 3 pounds of meat and 1 hot-coal grill and the recommended Korean daily serving of approximately twenty thousand grams of sodium.

For reasons too boring to get in to, I ended up arranging a weekend field trip with a handful of my students. They drove from Vallejo, I biked from the Mission and we rendezvoused on a unusually wet and gray Saturday morning. The destination in question: Candlestick Park, ex-home of the San Francisco Giants, current home of a stray cat colony. As we poked around behind the scenes I was struck by how decrepit the place was. For example, the entire lot under section 25 is filled with junky old wooden tables. According to Wikipedia, “Candlestick is currently the only NFL stadium in which upper-deck supports obstruct sight lines from the first-deck seating.” And apparently, it’s currently the only NFL stadium with it’s own self-sustaining ecosystem.  The cats are tolerated because they eat the mice. I asked our tour guide Dave what eats the cats.

“The barn owls,” he answered un-sarcastically. “They’re like this big” (chopping at his neck).
Anyway, I’m making fun of Candlestick, but it was pretty cool. Plus, the tour gave me pause to appreciate my job, which is essentially to always amuse 19-22 year olds one way or the other. That is pretty good as far as jobs go. If I were a research technician, I might not be holding a fake press conference in the 49ers home locker room.

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I really thought I would never get sick again.

But with the first rain in months came the strong sensation of autumn, a flooded ground floor, and a sick day in bed.  This was all after days of doing nothing but eating nachos and completing my “Working Personnel Action File” for work.  What is a Working Personnel Action File?  Well, it is a dossier in which I argue the case for my retention and in my case included sentences like the following:

“On a warm night after a basketball game, walking along Maritime Academy Drive, the sugar factory and the bridge blinking on the horizon, I realized that I felt incredibly fulfilled.  It was a remarkable moment for me.  While I had determined from the start to exceed the expectations of CMA, I had not anticipated that CMA would exceed mine.”

Wow, you don't just casually jot down gold like that. No wonder I have a 101 temperature.  Anyway, my WPAF took a week to finish and it's 109 pages long. In other news, I tricked a local coffee shop into letting me hang up my panels on their walls.  I didn't even have to show them my art, I just had to promise not to nail in to the wall.  Who knew is was that easy?  Also without nails, I finally hung the pieces up online, too.  Here's the scene in Cafe La Boheme: