Efficiency! I’m so proud, I have finally achieved a state where I can go infinitely without showering. Nevermind, that sounds gross, let me reword it better. See, for the longest time, I would feel gross and awful if I didn’t shower every single morning. This is a pain, though. It means less sleep on days I need to get up early. I also don’t get that dirty every single day, and I really hate that if I wake up too late for a shower, I’d just feel awful the rest of the morning. It was psychological, and needed breaking. It was a big pain at first, but I have acclimated myself now to being able to get up and throw on clothes and leave without bathing, and to not feel like I’m super gross for doing so. It usually makes more sense to shower at night anyhow, since I can wash off after I’ve done something super sweaty/dirty, rather then waiting for the next morning to do so.

I’m applying to be a part of a sleep study. I would disappear for 2 weeks into a lab, and get paid around $2,500. It’s not like I’m doing any other work right now! Looks like there’s a lot of testing to see if one qualifies though.

Pretty sure I’m headed to another Drupal meeting tonight. I’m growing bitter with Drupal, though. I mean, I know I’m asking a lot of it in what I try to do sometimes, but it’s just not very well organized. I just use WordPress for blogging, so it’s not like I’m stretching it’s limits very much, but it’s so nice how easy it is to upgrade things. Just a button click, and it’s taken care of. Magical! No such simplicity in Drupal. It’s all “download this, then dump this thing here.” And this is why Drupal shall never have the market share that WordPress has. There is a way of simple module upgrades, but it’s command-line interface. Which is fine for most developers, but this sort of thing helps guarantee that Drupal will make little headway into the non-developer world.

Boy could I use some pizza right about now!

My recruiter had an interview lined up for me when I got back, and it turned out that it was less of an interview and more of the guy having already decided he was interested in me based on my website, and just wanted to see if I was interested in the project. This still confirms in my head that I am bad at interviewing, since I didn’t really have an interview for this position. Also, there are other people working there who do both design and dev, so I was saved from the hated question of “which I like doing more”, which I think is only given by people who only do one or the other. Anyhow, it lasts a few weeks, since it’s just for a project, but assuming all goes well, it will make me more employable and give me money and all that good stuff.

I’m also in the middle of the DMS website (and by “in the middle” I mean, “busy hacking up Drupal and making a big ole mess”). Sometimes I’m uninspired for design, and I have that problem right now. So this is what I work on when I get home from the other job, since they want it done soon as well. I could also have a census job, the next round of followups, with training starting this Thursday, but I’m gonna have to call and cancel because I have no time. It’s like I went from famine to feast here. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, work is a good thing, it’s just exhausting when that’s all you do.

Also, this weekend I went to Drupalcamp Colorado, which was neat. I’ve got some fun ideas for new projects, once I have to time to get around to them, that is.

Here’s the thing: it’s pretty freaking disillusioning to spend large quantities of your time applying (and failing to get) jobs. Eventually you start wondering what the point is in the first place. My veeery sllooowly moooving job building the router site is, well, slow. Doesn’t take up a huge amount of time. And, I need money. Even if I’m earning a rather paltry sum, at least I’m earning something. There’s also the fact that winters are infamous for making me lazy and get no exercise. So, it’s like I’m getting paid to go to a gym/club. In theory, I’m also boosting my confidence, by waving at complete strangers and having them wave back. There’s the occasional middle finger, but for the most part (when people respond, at least), people are friendly and some downright bizarrely happy to see me. It’s also pretty fun to wear a costume. I would take on a job as a Chick-Fil-A cow in a heartbeat, incidentally.

I also find it easier to organize my time when it’s broken up into chunks. Now that Drew is at work all day, my day stretches before me like a vast plain, all to be spent in front of the computer doing *something*, in theory, that will propel me to the next job, or give me another thing to slap on the ole resume. With this part-time job, I *have* to get work done in the alloted time available. Also, dancing around for several hours in a row makes it much easier to sit in front of the computer for long stretches of time. I’m rather restless for the most part, and like to wander around, and the fact that I eat more then my fair share of sugar during the day does nothing to ameliorate this tendency. So, being exhausted helps with this. And, if things go well, I’ll be super-toned by springtime!

And that’s that. Here are other things going on in my life right now, in list form:

• Have more or less gotten the hang of Drupal hooks. Am looking forward to trimming up my new shiny module and maybe getting it published on the Drupal site.
• Have decided that, as we don’t have friends out here in Denver yet, it’s time to start watching more anime. I never saw Evangelion, so we just started watching that last night. And will apparently need to finish watching it very soon as well, as I’ve now got Bleach sitting at the library waiting to be picked up.
• We’ve been eating free Chick-Fil-A for several months now, at least once a week. We thought we’d get sick of it at some point, but no. I still crave it as much as ever.
• Did you know you can stick slices of tofu in the toaster? It’s pretty neat.
• At some point, I need to get a phone with decent web-browsing capabilities. I mean, how am I supposed to make sure websites are designed to look good on mobile browsers if I don’t even have a mobile browser in which to look at them?
• I got all extravagant recently and bought a cactus for $3.50. It’s succulent and adorable. There’s the best shop ever in Manitou Springs with a greenhouse-type room filled with cacti/cactuses/cactodes of all shapes and sizes. When I go in there it’s like I go into a pet shop. Even better, actually, because pet shops make me sad. I feel for the plight of those poor Betas trapped in those teeny little glass bowls.
• Grilled cheese sandwiches are the Fruit of the Gods.

I think I might go ahead and convert the Salami Day website to Drupal. I was originally using it as my CakePHP learning experience, but since not getting the job that I originally tried to learn CakePHP to impress, I feel like Drupal is just a better direction to go in, for now at least. That was an unfortunate job experience, anyhow. It’s really crappy when you go to an interview, find out that there’s something they really want you to know that they never bothered to tell your recruiter about, or bothered to mention in the telephone interview you’ve already had with them. Then, when you mention you’ve been thinking about learning it and can pick it up in the next week, they give a dismissive comment, as if they don’t believe you. Pretty much my entire design/development career has consisted of “Hey, I need to learn this program to do this thing. Guess I better do it.” I mean, that’s how you learn, right? Mind you, I didn’t have any sort of fabulous grasp on CakePHP, but after a week I’d rebuilt Salami Day and had a decent enough understanding of it’s structure. The job looked pretty nice, too. Oh well. Considering how many applicants they might have had who actually *knew* CakePHP, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I didn’t get it. Nonetheless, I wish I could just jump up and down and flap my arms and scream that I’m a hard worker and love deadlines, and have them listen and fall in love with me and give me a bucket of dollars. If only!

In other news, I’m getting sick of ham + salad. We did Christmas with Drew’s aunt Pam, and as she was fortunate enough to get invited to a friend’s timeshare in Hawaii for the remainder of the holiday break, we got to take home all the food that Drew’s cousin Travis wasn’t going to eat. So, we have this gargantuan bag of salad, along with a nice pile of ham. Thus, ham salad! Goes great with Ken’s Steak House honey mustard dressing! Also, mmm, Christmas latkes. They went fast. We also have a metric ton of chocolate. Pacing issues with that, of course. Also, a post Christmas present – me finding a workout machine for free on Craigslist! It’s some sort of step resistance machine, nothing too fancy, but it’s free, and that’s the important part.

We leave for Nashville in two days. Drew’s family reunion and all that stuff. I get my sewing machine back, which shall be glorious. My butt will also get numb and fall off from the driving. Less glorious.

Also! On the 6th, I go in to take an application to become a Census worker. Could be fun! I have been spending waay too much time playing Oasis, which is this fabulous “Civilization meets Minesweeper” type game, which came out a few years back and I’m playing on my computer and is really cheap through the Amazon game downloads section. Andrew has been similarly productive, in that he just finished reading all of Dragonball. Which is a godawful quantity of manga.

Hmm, about time for another infamous ham salad. Hope everyone has a Happy New Year!

Andrew just hijacked this post, but I’m leaving it there for posterity.

Anyhow, I made sushi the other night. It was awesome. If you are interested in such things, go read about it and see pictures here! I also made mesir wat, which is essentially a giant vat of lentils. It’s really good and really cheap and lasts forever (and makes you regular to boot!) No pictures up for that, yet.

So I’m back to square one for social time. We’ve been moved in here a total of two months now. The first bit of that was occupied with the basics of unpacking and locating furniture. Then came the need of “need to be social!”, so I signed up for approximately one gazillion Meetup groups. Went to two different hiking meetups, and while the hiking was fun and the people were nice, the groups seemed a.) mostly of people a bit older then us, b.) mostly of people who were far more interested in expensive equipment and less so in “I just wanna walk up this mountain for awhile”, and c.) caused my car to get rear-ended. In an ideal world, none of these should be an issue. But, in any case, I think we might need to seek out people with more parallel interests then just the shared one of enjoying wandering up large hills. Especially since winter encroaches, meaning my car is much more likely to go sliding off a hill into a ditch whereupon I freeze to death.

November was convenient for social time, because of Nanowrimo. There were writeins everywhere, and did one every Thurs. at the library near us as well as every Sat, at random locations around Denver. Number of common interests was definitely much higher then the hiking meetups, but now Nano is over, along with the writeins. Mind you, I could still certainly use them, as the book I’m working on is far from done. Anyhow, I suppose it’s back to Meetups. Debating going to a Drupal users group. Or maybe a Harry Potter fan meetup, could be exciting. Gainful employment would also help things along as well, but then again my OWP experience, where there were lots of neat people, is not exactly representative of all of my employment experiences. In any case, I suspect this is a common experience for anyone that moves to a new location, and I’m confidant that time + getting settled in with help expand social opportunities.

As for job stuff? Still in the air. Have spent last week rooting around in Drupal. I need to learn how to make patches, as Ubercart is littered with inline CSS, which is simply not appropriate for anyone that wishes to design the checkout process without hacking up code they really shouldn’t have to hack up. I’d heard that Drupal was better for developers then for designers, this might be why. Of course, first I need to learn how to use CVS, in order to check out files to make changes to be able to make a patch. Which is good, in that I shall learn things and can put things on a resume, but still, it can be a bit aggravating when I have a simple little change in mind and I have to plow through 23489389423 processes to make that change happen. However, it would be super cool to be a Drupal contributor, so plow I must.

Oh yeah, Job stuff. Meeting tomorrow with a cousin (the relation is more complicated, but cousin works for now) to build a few University health websites. We’ll see how that goes. I may or may not be hired by someone in North Boulder, but the communication hasn’t been steady so we’ll see. That would involve some commuting and some working from home. Pay is a bit less then I could hope for, but definitely more then I was afraid I’d have to settle for. Anyhow, I’ll just see how things go. The router site is coming along, still some bugs but it all seems manageable enough at this point.

Oh yeah, $3.50 theatre nearby. Gonna go see Zombieland (finally) sometime this week. Yay!