It’s 8:30pm already, Wednesday night. Tonight is garbage night, so I have to get the various garbages together and haul them to the bins, after which I’ll haul the bins themselves down to the street. After that, I need to clean up the dishes from dinner, and maybe try and pick up Keaton’s scattered toys from her busy day at home with mom. I hate nights where the late creeps up on you, like tonight… where it’s 8:30pm already and I’ve barely had time to do anything but get home and sit down. Nights where the late creep up on you are almost as bad as sleeps where you wake up 15min before your alarm clock is about to go off. Anyway… back to tonight – let’s write something.
I like friendly people. Today, as I was walking out the door heading back to work after lunch, a truck was parked outside my house and a guy was unloading some boxes from it. “Hey,” he said, “got some boxes for you here.” “Boxes for me?” I wondered aloud, “OK.” As I walked towards the guy, he must’ve seen my company-logo’d polo shirt and asked me, “You sill work for Company-X?” (I’ll call my workplace “Company-X” for this one). I told him I did, and he proceeded to tell me how he’d just been laid of from Company-X. Having worked previously in some shipping/receivables department, he’d been let go just weeks ago and was now delivering for FedEx (in a Penske truck, no less).
Anyway, he was quite the talkative fellow, asking me what the situation was like now at Company-X: was it still bad, heads still rolling, etc. The guy was genuine, if a bit of a jabberjaw, and sincere. And I stood on the curb for a good 10min just talking about this and that with him. For instance, I learned that his dad recently died, and he’d moved back in with his mom to take care of her. You know those people who get personal too quickly when you meet them, he was one. But, I enjoyed myself, standing in the sun there – me still having my cush position at Company-X and being able to look down on his now lowly profession of Penske truck drivin’, box lugging deliveryman. No, no, that was a joke. The point here is that sometimes it’s encouraging to meet people who are just straight up nice. We need more of those people.
Helped Sharaun work on her resume tonight, as she’s applying for some part-time work as a freelance elementary school textbook editor through a connection. Would be stay-at-home work done on the computer, but we sure wouldn’t mind even the part-time income. Y’know, I’m glad, though, that she decided to leave work and do the mom thing – I honestly don’t think I could do it full-time. Watching the baby is one thing, but I’d fear I’m just too selfish to do it long-term. You think spending all day “playing” with the baby and reading to the baby and feeding and changing and singing to the baby is easy work, wrong… for me I get caught up wanting to do my own things. The things I’m used to being able to do when I want to do them. Yeah, I’ve got a lot of respect for what a selfless act the full-time mommy gig is, and I’m glad Sharaun’s the one doing it the same way I’m glad some dude (who’s not me) drives a garbage truck and takes away my refuse.
Well friends, the CD ripping part of my CD-ripping project is about 99% complete. I don’t know if I ever figured I’d really get this far. What’s left now is to optimize the entire resultant digital files. Because, out of roughly 150 gigabytes of music, some 50 gigabytes were ripped from discs that wouldn’t auto-grab MP3 ID3 tags from the ‘net. This means I’m going through and attacking them manually to make them more usable. But through a combination of some scripting I’ve done with the wonderfully extensible Godfather tagger, and just good ol’ done-by-hand data entry, I imagine the entire library will be finished sometime in early December. Make no mistake though, it’s downhill from here. All my tunes are now stored as safe digital copies, on a redundant disk array – and I couldn’t be happier. It’s a good feeling, to see my mater spreadsheet (which I started over two years ago) finally be completely green. I have now arrived at the digital age, ’bout time.
There we have it then, goodnight.
Also written on this day...
- a family portrait - 2010
- better late than never - 2009
- elevenovembers - 2007
- vacating - 2005
- slumpin' - 2004