I have an eye appointment tomorrow. If glasses will help or if I need them is debatable but I am experiencing some ick eye strain at work. It started when they moved me over out of the creative area into IT. Office lighting will not only suck out your soul, it’ll also apparently make you go blind.

Update: Got glasses, two pair. Eyes not all that bad and generally in good health. They are bumpy and the right one is somewhat nearsighted but it’s nothing that corrective eyewear won’t fix. One pair thick hipster glasses and the other a kinda funky green tortoise shell. Also found the world’s biggest hippy eye doctor. If you’re looking for him, he’s in Bloomingdale at For Eyes.

A couple things in the works: a children’s book. It’s actually in the initial draft stage and not just some idea floating in my head. Illustrations in progress too!

Updates to personal web sites.

A pumpkin! A pumpkin seed planted is actually growing. It’s the one Charlie was most excited about so it’s nice that it’s the one to grow. Not sure how big it’ll get but at least it’s growing. I’m a horrible gardener so the fact that anything is growing at all surprises me.

That’s all for now.

Do you really hate sleep? How about smelling nice and always having clean clothes? Well, you just might want a baby!

Part of me just wants to skip past all this about a year and the other part hears cute giggle noises. How the hell anyone does this alone is beyond me.

So many of the things I’ve learned in my professional career have had very little application in day-to-day life. I’ve known people who can crossover their professional careers into daily life to the point that they’ve made something really useful but I’m just not one of those people. My skills as a graphic designer would do very little in my household except possibly make things more visually organized. At least with enough effort to make my time well spent.

With that, a lot of the things that I learned in supposed “shit jobs,” or the ones you’re doing while waiting to grow up, have given me some really useful skills that made my life easier. As an example, while bartending I learned a really useful way to quickly wash glasses so they don’t need to be dried all that much and dry without spots. You take two baths of water, one soapy and hot and the other very cold. Wash your glass or bottle or whatever in the hot soapy one and then immediately dunk it in the cold one a couple times and set it to drain. It’ll be dry and spot free in at most half the time it would take if you just washed and rinsed in similar temperature water. While this is an incredibly simplistic example of a learned skill, it’s practical. Much more practical (at least for me, especially right now) than being really good with spreadsheets or computer programming.

There are others and they’ve mostly come from jobs I’ve had in my youth. I’ll also add that these jobs do a lot to teach independence while office jobs keep you focused on the task. If your printer breaks in the office, there’s someone else to fix it for you. I can remember a lot of times in restaurant jobs where if something broke there was someone to fix it for you but that person would also teach you how to do it yourself if the time allotted. I think a lot comes from the willingness to learn as well. There were a few managers I had in restaurant jobs who were excellent teachers whether they knew it or not and that was independent from how good of a boss they were.

As much as I might not have liked some of the jobs I’ve had in the past, I certainly remember the good bosses. Those are hard to come by.