Halloween and my birthday are looming. Temps have dropped and leaves are turning. Aaaaaah!
For us, it has been a season of much change. Nick got a new job at a large format printing company and will be doing much of the same things he did at NuVision back in the day. It’s an all Mac shop (as it should be!) and he’ll get to do IT as well as prepress work. The pay is only $20 to start, but this will go to $21 in 60 days, with another evaluation at 6 months. We are confident that he’ll get towards the rate he should be making within a year or so. He’ll never make $75k like he did at NVG, but being around the $55-60k mark would be about right for what’s left of the print industry. He’ll be doing two jobs, after all, so compensation will be commensurate.
I picked up a p/t prep job at a nearby cafeteria. It’s simple work: veg and salad prep. I’m making $15/hr, which is pretty much minimum these days. The place is on autopilot – there really is no leadership at all. The line cooks run the kitchen and the food they cook is MEH on a good day. They do a few things right, but overall the food is bland and boring. One really funny thing is the “mac n cheese”. I put that in quotes because they do NOT make mac n cheese. This guy makes some sort of abomination that is egg, (YES EGGS IN MAC N CHEESE!!!) milk, cheddar cheese and elbow macaroni. It breaks when it’s cooked (no binder such as flour) and it is NAISTY. I dunno where he learned THAT recipe (yes I do, it’s from S&S cafeteria, GROSS), but that is NOT mac n cheese! Aside from nasty food, the work is fine. Since there’s no management, I come in and manage myself. PERFECT! No one bothers me, no one asks me how long it takes me to poop (YES this happened at TJX) and I enjoy observing how the kitchen works. One thing this job has also done for me is to confirm that I do, indeed, know a LOT about running a kitchen and overall restaurant ops. I work a coupla days a week, but the manager has already detected that I can work pretty much any position, so he’s asking me to pick up shifts outside the kitchen. I like being an all purpose employee. Variety suits me. :) [Unfortunately, they steal wages. I have to leave. And I have to report them. SIGH.]
We saw Weird Al on Friday night. We don’t recommend this tour AT ALL. Emo Phillips opened, and while I’m glad I can say I saw a set by him, it was overall, very sad and not funny. As for the Al part, when the band came out and SAT DOWN, I knew this was not going to be a typical Weird Al show – and it wasn’t. This tour is pretty much all B sides, so no one knows the songs. The crowd was not very engaged and we left early. Nick had been overserved, was not happy with the music and became agitated, so we bailed. The good news is that we earned enough $ this weekend to cover the cost of the Weird Al debacle.
That’s really all I got for updates. We dealt with a LOT of anxiety in the weeks before Nick was hired and now we’re getting through the last week of his MM employment on the other side of town. The new gig is about 15 minutes from here with NO INTERSTATES!! That alone will make all the difference. Well, that and his having a REAL job, not just some shitty print shop where it’s all about volume and he’s just a brain attached to a PC.
My birthday is Nov 11th and I don’t want to discuss the number. It freaks me out a little. Suffice it to say, I don’t look it, I don’t act it and I certainly do NOT feel it.
DON’T FORGET TO VOTE!!!
Happy Halloween, y’all!