Summer

Its hot. I guess that means it must be Summer. Most folks around here get excited about California summers. I could see how that would be fun if it got cold here during the winters. For me the winters here are mild enough to be just right.
I guess theres nothing much important going on if Im talking about the weather.
My friend Andrew invited me to display my artwork at his upcoming Space Station show. Its a good opportunity and I really appreciate the energy he brings into any given situation. Though the day after I agreed to do it, I realized another option. That same day (actually the day before) is the launch of the last ever space shuttle mission. Ive been trying to fathom where to spend my next holiday and that sure sounds fun. Not only could I see the launch of the shuttle but I fancied going out to see the Florida Keys. I've always wanted to sample key lime pie from Key West. I also have a friend who might be going. The only drawbacks are that its kinda short notice and it'll all cost a lot of money. Im still trying to hold onto my money for the Burning Man festival.
So what should I do?
Its a tough choice and Ive been debating it the last few days. I think my default mode will be just to do the show and save my money. I don't really think anything will come of this other than maybe meeting some cool people and possibly some networking. But I really do need to save my money for a ton of things like glasses, dental exams, clothes, car stuff, and a trip to Europe. I've been obsessing about the Alps lately for some reason.
So what else is new? I went to the gym yesterday with Vach. It was the first time we went since he had his 2nd kid. I've been out for a while since Sam and John are not available to go lately. Wow I'm sooooo sore!! But I was buzzing off the endorphins all day yesterday and that was good. Last night I made fresh pretzels drizzled with chocolate. I think they came out really yummy.
Last week I did a new DVD cover for Scotty JX and that was fun. Hes always a fun person to work with and this latest job was no exception. We were talking about an Actiongirls BBQ. He always has way more ideas than can be done, but I'm gonna bug him about this one until he does it.
ok thats enough for now.

My Love and Hatred of Apple producrs

I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I once found myself watching a series of short films with about 50 other people. One of these films was just a guy going on about all the things he hated about apple computers. He was going on and on about all the things about the operating system that don't make sense, and all the things about the interface that are counter intuitive. At the end of the movie he says that he only ever uses apple computers and that he made the film on one. Now most of the folks in the audience were sitting there not really sure what the hell the guy was talking about. Probably 45 of the 50 people were clearly PC people and just didn't get it. But I and about 5 other people were practically in tears rolling on the floor with laughter.
Like the guy in the movie, I have a lot of issues with Apple products and services. And like that guy, I only ever use Apple computers. Its a total love hate thing. It really hit home recently when I got my first i phone. I just love my i phone. Its soo cool! But the only problem is that I cant currently sync it up with my Mac. To sync the i phone up with the Mac, I need i Tunes 10.0 or later. Now i Tunes is free, but I can't get 10.0 or later until I get a newer operating system. The latest is 10.6 but I can't get that because it requires a mac with an Intell processor. My mac was from the last non Intell batch that was made. At home I run OS 10.4, and I can go up to 10.5 to get the newer i Tunes that I need but its just a big pain in the ass! They know what they're doing over at Apple. They sure know how to make money with great products. Technology is like a great stampede of bulls and if you wanna run with the bulls you gotta keep up. If you don't keep up you'll get trampled. So that means buy the latest stuff even though it costs a lot more than PC products.
Now I've considered using PC's and then I've tried PC's and it always reminds me of why I love Apple computers so much more. Apple products are the shit! I love everything they make. My i pod has long been one of my most prized possessions. My i phone is great too and my new favorite toy. Apple computer has to be one of the most useful and innovative companies in our country. They've opened up one of the largest growth industries for this decade. Smart phone apps are huge and blowing up like the internet did in the 90's. Its global and I know a lot of folks who owe their careers to the innovators over at Apple. I really doubt we'd have that market if it weren't for the i phone. In an age where more and more companies are outsourcing labor abroad, we need all the industry we can hang onto locally.
Apple products are the shit and I love them. Their constant upgrades are overly demanding and I hate them. At least for the time being, we have achieved balance.

Homesick

I had a strange dream last night. I went to Burning Man and realized that I forgot all my gear! It was a fairly typical anxiety dream. Whats odd is that I just started a new job as a supervisor in my waking life and had not a single worry or anxiety about that. Anyhow in this dream I went to Burning Man and it was all indoors at some dusty old convention center. It was small and lame and felt like a low energy Trekkie convention or a trip to MySpace. It was really sad and I was trying to convince my friend Cooper that it wasn't so bad, and that we could recreate all the good times of old once again. I think its time to start my annual Burning Man poster.

The Deep End

After 2 and a half years of being mostly out of work, Im suddenly swamped!! A few months ago on a whim I sent an email to a guy I'd freelanced before. Actually I also used to work with him fulltime about 10 years ago. Anyhow he got swamped with work and needed some help. I was there every day last week for about 12 hours a day. In the middle of the week, I got a call from some folks I'd interviewed with over at Art Center. They want me to work there on a permanent basis!! I now have 2 jobs, one semi full time and permanent at Art Center and one freelance contract job. I've told both employers about the other and theres no conflict. I'll be at Art Center in the mornings and working at Hipzone in the afternoons and early evenings.

The first job is Art Center and its not a teaching job but a staff position. I'll be running the prop room and telling the student employees what to do. I'm a manager now!! There are a lot of great things about this gig , though the pay isn't one of them sadly. I worked in the prop room when I was a student so that makes it much easier as I know exactly what to expect. My old supervisor Wendy who used to do the job I'll be doing, moved up to model office supervisor , and she'll be my boss once again. Shes really cool and fun to work with. Another perk is being in the Art Center environment. Its like the Shaolin Temple for artists and theres a lot of good energy and inspiration there.

The second job is Hipzone. That's the contract work. Hipzone is the complete opposite of the Art Center job in that the only good thing about it is the pay. Though they've been pretty understanding and flexible about giving me the room to come in after my other job to work there. Its not a fun laid back place to work. It's a small , stuffy entity which outsources most of its labor to China. The rest is divided up between one office in monterey park , and a photo studio over at the Brewery in downtown. Its high end photo retouching (China does all the simple stuff).

Its been pretty odd going from sitting at home unemployed to being swamped. I've found it a major task staying focused and concentrating on a job all day. It feels like I've dived into the deep end of employment. I'm pretty exhausted from the last week and have spent most of the day today gearing up for the coming storm of work. I've been making food, doing laundry etc. I'll need to go to bed early as I start at the school tomorrow at 7 am. Im really excited about the new life I'm about to start. I'm looking forward to having money again. I've got endless holes of debt that need to be filled, but it'll be nice not having to always borrow money from people. In the back of my mind, I'm already toying with ideas of what to do with my extra money. Maybe I'll get a smartphone. As it is I dont even have a phone of my own, just the family landline. Maybe I'll take a vacation somewhere, or get an i pad. Wit my schedule as it is, I won't even have time to go out spending. For now, that's probably a good thing.

Hope and Fear

Last week was all about the fear.
First it was my usual worries about job and money, which I have neither of. I had worries galore and then the worries all went away as I saw the prospects of getting a job. There is an opening at my old school Art Center in Pasadena. Its not a teaching job, but just a staff position. Id be supervising the prop room looking after students who've enrolled in the Federal Work Study Program. Its a roll I am quite familiar with as I used to be in the program when I was as student. I'd be working for my good friend Wendy who was the supervisor when I was in the program as a student. So all around good prospects there. My fears dissolved and were soon replaced by another...
Shortly after getting home from the interview, another worry took over. We found a stray cat had taken residence under our house. There is a little crawl space and after some recent rain and cold weather, this cat had decided it was a good place to camp out. So after some coaxing and persuading we got the kitty to come out and we isolated him in the garage. This was no alley cat, this was clearly a well fed and groomed domestic kitty. Now my worries about job and money had been replaced by the cat. I have a huge softspot for cats and considered it my obligation to take care of this cat. The cat was starving hungry, but in pretty good shape. We put him in a carrier and spent the afternoon and evening going around the neighborhood trying to find if the cat lived locally. Eventually we found that the kitty had come from a house around the corner and down the street. The people who owned the cat were quite retarded and backwards. They had big dogs which lived inside the house, and a little kitty who lived outside the house. I only met a young boy who seemed to be home alone and not especially thrilled that the cat had been brought back. I told him that if I ever found his cat wandering the neighborhood with neither collar, nor nametag, that I'd come back in the middle of the night and kill him and his parents (like I said, I have a softspot for cats). My fears dissolved and were soon replaced by another...
I got an email from a friend. This was an economic forecast. It was pretty grim. Now I've heard whispers of rising oil prices leading to higher food prices and the effects it would all have on the recovering economy. Now the last time my friends warned me with economic forecasting, it was about 8 years ago, and they told me that the economy was about to crash and that I should invest every penny I had in gold. I wish I'd had more money to invest at the time, but what I had I put into gold. I doubled my money in about 5 years. That was good. The current forecast for the economy is not so good. Mostly its the problem with rising gas prices and the global reserve currency. The US dollar has been the consistent global reserve currency for decades, but lately as our economy has been failing, more and more international trading has been done using other currencies. This is very bad for our economic recovery and the more I look at it the more likely I think things are just gonna get worse. Rising prices of gas will lead to rising food prices which could even lead to food shortages and riots. Its a big complicated mess and Im no expert, but my intuition says that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
This week has been all about hope.
I spent the last 4 days helping my friend move and I always feel good when I have the opportunity to help a friend in need. I've been kicking back today and for the next few days I've got some freelance work. I get to go back and work for some people Ive worked for in the past. Its not a fun job, but it pays well. That gives me hope. I've not heard back from the folks at Art Center but Im hopeful about that as well.

More Odd Dreams

Well I guess there aren't a lot of normal dreams, but I had so many strange dreams last night I just felt like writing some of them down. The first was a trip to Burning Man but this time instead of being out in the Nevada desert, it was on a secretly built US spacestation. It was part of the classified government run space program, though it wasn't much of a secret after the burn. It was sorta like the deathstar except it was maybe a bit smaller, not quite finished, and the level we were on was completely open without walls. It was just a gigantic circular room with a high ceiling. There were a few areas where there were loading shafts without any guardrails and if you weren't careful, you could just walk into one of these shafts that dropped off for hundreds of stories. It wasn't a danger though because they had turned off the gravity in those areas. So of course people were having lots of fun floating about over these areas. At a certain point I had a long hose I'd found and tied about myself and I wanted to float outside the station where there was no gravity, but air for some reason. I was using the hose as a lifeline, and had the other end tied to the station. Im not sure why the government run space program had volunteered their secret station for burning man or why the burners all trusted the man, but it was a lot of fun. When I got back to Earth somehow I got into a conversation with some people about government secrets and they didnt think that there were any big ones and I stood up and said "Oh really? Well I've got a whopper to tell you about!..."
The next memorable part of my dreaming was when I got a job on Attack of the Show. I don't know what I was doing there or why but I was just amazed at how little the folks at that office got done. We all went out to lunch and Sara Jean Underwood went with us. We all set out on foot down the street to some place they all liked. I think it was Melrose or Wilshire, but it was all huge and sorta reminded me of Tokyo. We made several stops along the way at a bar, a comic book shop, and a video game place. I kept thinking we were taking way to long with lunch but they assured me that this was their normal routine. By the time we got to the restaurant we'd been gone for about 3 hours. The place felt like a cabin or lodge and was out in a sorta hilly backwoods area. I ran into some old friends there and we all sat down for some mean BBQ.
I think the family dog woke me up after tha

Dreams

Ive had some odd dream experiences lately.
Yesterday I awoke from a rather odd dream which featured my friend Vach complaining about his runflat tires on his minicooper. He has this rather fancy little car with fancy little tires on it that are supposed to run even when flat. I dunno how it works but a few months ago one of them went flat. The tires are soo fancy that he has to go downtown to the dealership to get it taken care of. It costs hundreds of dollars to replace one of these special tires. He had it done and it the new one is also flat. I guess its a problem with the car. Anyhow, its been a problem for a few months that his special runflat tire has been the most flat tire he's ever had. So I had a dream where he was complaining about the tire. I thought that it was odd that my dream focused on someone else that way, so I mentioned it to him. He said he also had a dream about his tire and lots of him complaining about it. Was it the same dream? Was it a coincidence? Ive had shared dreams in the past with a girl that I was really close to.

I had another strange dream last night about money and financial problems. Ive been out of work for almost 2 years and my unemployment has totally dried up. Its been a constant concern. Ive considered going off into the forrest and living as a wildman. But I dont think thats the best thing for me right now. Anyhow, in this dream I had made the choice to go into a type of suspended animation /frozen in carbonite kinda thing. I intended to stay there untill the economy got better. I was in a room with a bunch of strangers who had made a similar choice and we were all getting ready to go under. They gave us these pills and it was kinda psychadelic and there were a ton of hoops to jump through, forms to fill out etc beforehand. I kept having these visions of money with fairly evil satanic designs on it and somehow I realized that I was in some degree of control over my vision of reality. I kept telling myself to manifest something nice. Eventually I started to have second thoughts about skipping out on the next decade. I got a phone call from a wise old man (somehow I knew that he was someone who had died a long time ago and he was calling me from heaven or wherever) Now if that wasn't odd enough I knew that all the world was a stage and that we were all actors in a grand old story, and that the guy whod been cast to play the wise old mentor was in fact Donald Sutherland. I knew this but carried on in my role as Chris Chanaud. I talked to the guy and took his sage advice. At a certain point I went out of the clinic I was in and there was a sort of waiting room and I saw the guy and spoke to him face to face. I went back in the clinic to fill out some more forms. I got another call from him and as our conversation puttered out I finished by saying something like this... " You know instead of being a sage, you coulda gone into broadcasting...Yeah you got a great voice. You sound just like Donald Sutherland" and then I hung up.