Infinitely Expanding

Being a life long city boy I’m always a little impressed when I come across people who heat their home with wood burning furnaces. Well, I should say people who aren’t Amish as if your Amish that’s expected. What impresses me is not so much that people still do it, but that you can store enough wood to be able to heat a house through the winter. At my last job there was a guy who had a combination wood/gas burning furnace. He would burn about a cord of wood a season. He primarily used wood, but would switch it to gas if it was going to be extra cold during the day or he was going to be away. That’s the other aspect that I wonder about: how to keep your pipes from freezing. Obviously in that case he had a backup. Does everyone who has a wood burner also have gas or oil? I don’t know. I’ve never looked into it.

I picked up a load of firewood from a friend today. I’d asked him before if he knew where I could get a good price without buying a whole cord, which I would have been unable to store. He told me just to come by his parents place and take what I wanted. So I took a CRVs worth. I only have the little fire pit, but that should be enough to get through the winter, depending on how bad the winter is. If it’s not mind numbingly cold I’ve found that a snow covered camp fire can be fun. Hell, two years ago Turkey Fry was entirely outside and the fire pit was going all day. My mother also had a tree taken down and the wood saved so I’ll have some wood for next year too.

Of course this means that I’m going to have to finishing building the wood box I keep meaning to build. We always seem to decide to have a fire the day after it rains. Guess I have my project for next week.

I have spoken previously on why job searching is the devil. Yet once again this is the position I find myself in. It’s a familiar routine, really. Update your résumé, gather a list of contacts, contact said contacts and hope someone has something vaguely resembling good news.

There’s a sort of desperation. Every time you meet someone who might even possibly have passed by someone who might have once known someone who works in your industry there’s an awkward “As it happens I’m currently looking…” But as awkward as it gets sometimes, there’s also a quick learning curve to realize that it doesn’t matter. You never know who knows who.

I was once attending the birthday celebration of a good friend. The party was catered by a well known restaurant. I found myself talking to the owner of the restaurant who, as it turns out knows someone fairly high up at NASA. Might be time for a fancy date night. After all, a nice restaurant is probably an infinitely better place for an interview than an actual interview room.

I’ve done quite a bit of job searching over the years and probably the one lesson I’ve learned is to never leave a stone unturned. Every meeting, every phone call, every meeting, every blog post…

As it happens…

One of the issues I’m having with the concept of a daily post is that of being able to formulate an idea in a limited time frame. That limited time frame, of course, being the time from when I sit down to actually write to when I hit “Publish.” It’s not so much that I can’t think of a topic, but more that I want to be sure I “get it right.” On the same token though, part of the whole exercise is not worrying about “getting it right”. That will likely be the one thing that I will struggle with the most for the remainder of this month. Continue reading “Getting It Write”

As far as a daily post goes, I definitely got lucky with that little trip to St. Thomas. After all, it’s pretty easy to come up with something to write when you’re essentially keeping a journal about saving the world. But then the world is saved…so what do you write about? The gods know I’m no more interested in writing about the mundane day to day activities of living in a saved world than you are reading them. And when you have to post once a day? What insanity is this?! Continue reading “Carry On”

So there you have it (or rather will have it as I have not yet finished dispensing with it), the adventures of the 200^th RHS in St. Thomas, USVI. Continue reading “Backlog”