it seems mother nature got the calendar change just right - October has started, and the weather is now overcast out, after weeks of hot sun.

i had an interview earlier this week, and i felt pretty good about it. but then again, i've generally felt pretty good about every interview i've ever had, but they all didn't lead to job offers.

this weekend promises to be busy - Pastoral Council formation day tomorrow, and a kid's birthday on sunday afternoon, with some other stuff going on as well.

coming back from our road trip, i decided that after a week of ant-free life on the road, it was time to go full tilt against the ants at home and i bought a new thing of Terro and have been liberally leaving it out for the ants in the sunroom, in our bathroom, and around the perimeter of the house. a few places their numbers have dwindled.

in other news, i narrowly lost re-election for the presidency of San Diego FanForce to miana_dude after a tie vote and trying to dredge up more members to vote. but i ended up as vice-president (since we were both running for both positions). i've been VP or president for the past 2 years... i do sort of wish that more people would step up to take on leadership roles, but i know that in our club we have quite a few members where FanForce comes second after their 501st or Rebel Legion stuff.

haven't finished uploading the trip photos or yelping the places we went yet.

stupid thing of the day: my printer is very low on black ink (so much that the printer was asking me to use the colors to approximate black to conserve black). i get an online coupon from staples to print out to save 10% next week. but i can't print it out since my printer now has officially declared it is empty on black, and won't let me print at all until i change cartridges. chicken, meet egg.

catching up on the life of me:

1. getting San Diego FanForce stuff organized for Comic-Con. we are having a prize giveaway based on "Guess how many jelly beans.." - only they are guessing how many LEGO Star Wars pieces instead.

2. been trying to sell some furniture and other items on craigslist:
* IKEA bed frame - white Oslo design, full size.
* Full size Simmons BackGuard Roma mattress
* Canon C5500 Color BubbleJet Printer/Copier/Scanner/Fax
* 9-drawer Dresser - wood

3. Moderating the Rock Legends! community. banned my first cheaters.

4. Last weekend was the Pastoral Council barbecue at La Jolla Shores on saturday afternoon. getting down there was a pain. getting parking was an even worse pain. but we managed to get there fairly early compared to the rest of the crowd. had fun, and food ( i ended up doing some grilling). Poor andrew had gotten there at 7 am to secure a picnic table for us.

See some photos here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jawajames/sets/72157621371674780/

5. on sunday, we got some food from Dumpling Inn and had Jennifer and Darren over for dinner and a game of Starfarers of Catan. whitney found some revised rules that help speed up the beginning of the game, which help a lot.

6. also, Joseph was in town all of last week and the early part of this week, for his friend's bachelor party, which he helped plan. so we went to costco last week for stuff for his party (beer), and then went back this week when we went to pick up some stuff from the new batch of coupons.

7. Finished "Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings" on Darren's Wii. The game locks up periodically, which was annoying, and i even called Nintendo Support when it seemed that i couldn't turn the wii back on. the story was fun, but the gameplay seemed a little limited. No jumping?

8. related to that, I've been also updating the Indiana Jones wikia with content from the game and some other sources.

9. repaired the shower curtain, where the rings had ripped through the holes again. Shoo Goo + flat bits of plastic for the rescue.

10. trying to help joseph help my parents with getting their van smog checked. has ended up in chaos. the van failed smog test, so i took it to the service station today. in the afternoon, they called up to report that they had made some repairs but needed to drop the gas tank, which they can't do unless it is less than half full (and the tank is full right now), so they wanted me to pick it up and drive it around until it was only half full before returning it to repair. so it won't go back to the shop until next week. used the scooter to get back and forth to the shop when not driving the van.

11. admired the pepper growing on the plant in the backyard, and remembered to keep it watered.

every year it comes... the ol' Labor Dabor.
and it came this year... and there was food!

saturday evening, we went to Marisa's for a party. we brought a berry cobbler that whitney made, and marisa had bacon-wrapped dates. tasty!

sunday, we went out to dinner with Martha to Panda Country. even though it is not too far away, we hadn't been there in a while.

and monday, we had a barbecue (the Ol' Labor Dabor), with some random friends invited, and we got to see Justin and Alex's newborn (finally!). we grilled up some pollo asado and tritip and warren's tandoori chicken. played some taboo and trivial pursuit (pop culture edition).

last night, i went down with some YAG members to discuss the Workout/Outsource Campaign (the YAG campaign to raise money by doing odd jobs for community members) at Sherman's place, and he cooked up two curries, which left me rather full.

this week, i'm temping at my mother's office, filling in until she can hire a new office person. no word yet from the pollworker job at the registrar of voters, which to me means that i'll be getting a letter of "not hired" and not the phone call of "hired". sigh.

last week i threw some stuff onto ebay and craigslist. craigslist freebie people are such flakes. no, i'm not going to deliver stuff that i am giving away for free. if you want free stuff, come get it yourself. speaking of which, someone is supposed to show up to pick up some free wedding stationery that we somehow ended up with and i re-discovered. as for the ebay stuff, only one day left on the 7 auctions and only 1 bid (and on the cheapest item too) -- but 4 auctions being "watched". hopefully there will be some action.

edit: 2 minutes later, the one guy that was to pick up the wedding stationery calls and can't make it tonight. par for the course.

yesterday, i was downtown around lunch time (dropping off my sister and Darren at the cruise ship terminal), and so called up some old co-workers to see if they had lunch plans. it turned out that the Caltrans division i worked in was having their annual "teambuilding" picnic at mission bay, so they invited me to come out and have a bite. it's been maybe 3+ years since i've worked there, but still a lot of familiar faces, and several new ones. got to play some volleyball, which was fun.

in the afternoon, i picked up a chinese newspaper for Booboo, who is visiting my parents. and when i delivered it, i hung out talking with her for more than an hour. i got out the atlas to show her where Jennifer's cruise was going, and then we flipped through the maps, and pointed out places that we each had been to, and where different family members had lived or had visited and learning more about my family history. when my grandfather worked for TWA, the family took advantage of standby flights for family members to travel the world - i had known that my mom and my aunt had gone to Europe in this way, but i didn't know that Booboo had also traveled to Europe back then as well, or had gone to Yellowstone with my aunt a few years ago. we had a grand time. having the speech therapy after her stroke and moving to her new place have really encouraged Booboo's English skills to a point where they are quite stronger than they were before the stroke. but she also misses her old place, and her friends in LA.

still no word from the Registrar of Voters. i'm thinking i didn't get the job. :(

so yesterday, I had a job interview which I think went well. It's for a temporary contract job at the Registrar of Voters, as a trainer for pollworkers. It would only be for six weeks, starting in late September and going through Election Day, with some weekend work, but it would give me a chance to see if being a trainer is something I might like to do.

I had to give a 15-minute presentation to them as part of the interview, and I used a training presentation that I had made and used in the past. I think they were impressed. So hopefully they will get back to me next week. I had a bit of an "in" -- one of the ROV staff that had been assigned to provide extra help at the June election where i worked at a poll at UCSD was the one helping to set up the interviews and she remembered me as hopefully being a good precinct inspector.

and in other sports, whitney and i are looking for a housemate - we have a bedroom with its own bathroom and closet for rent, in the University City area:
Because Craigslist is so cool at producing high-quality candidates

this has been a busy week as the summer of james winds to a close...
after returning from DC, i stayed home monday and puttered around.
tuesday, wednesday, and thursday i went to carta's company to work - installing stuff on laptops, tracking down and ordering supplies, making tiny jumper wires for the boards that go into the control carts, etc. not a lot of time to catch up on LJ or any of the message boards i post on. but it's work, and i'm getting paid.
happy belated birthday to rejectcookie! congrats to kmkillian on the new job!

tuesday after work, i went over to ckillian for some Dance Dance Revolution workout. i seem to be getting better. we may need to kick it up from "beginner" to "light"

wednesday evening i got to play in a sealed draft tournament of the new Star Trek CCG set, Dangerous Missions. there are 3 different deck types - Starfleet (from Enterprise), Federation (from TNG), and Bajoran. whitney and i ended up with the same pack (TNG) and fared poorly in the tournament.
wednesday night i stayed up late uploading photos from DC and captioning them. still not done yet.
also started hand addressing the save the date cards until i go buy some labels.

thursday i ended up staying at work until after 7:30, typing up instructions for my replacement today (i needed to get some stuff done around the house today, so they found someone else to come in and work on what i was working on). i came home and made peas for dinner. mmm.. a bowl of peas.

today i paid bills, called up some hotels regarding rehearsal dinner arrangements and such, tried to get new health insurance, scrubbed the shower in the room that our new roommate david is moving into this weekend, wrote up an article on the SDSWS site for the new affiliate program with Mysterious Galaxy books, did some laundry, and still managed to get in 1.5 episodes of Deep Space Nine, and cranked out the latest story for starwars.com's "What's the Story?" contest.

we had no food in the house since we kinda finished up all our consumables before going to washington dc... until this evening when we went shopping and actually cooked dinner at home.

then whitney started playing kingdom hearts, and i came here to continue captioning the DC photos. once they are up, i'll talk about the trip...

and here's my "What's the Story?" entry:
( The Rolo Droid )

after a late lunch i discovered (from a tip from kmkillian that Spike has afternoons o' Star Trek. some DS9 followed by 3 episodes of TNG. since my next generation education is somewhat minimal, i caught 3 episodes that i had never seen in their entireties -- "Imaginary Friend" (where an alien life form manifests itself as a young girl's imaginary friend and threatens the Enterprise), "I, Borg" where the adolescent Borg Hugh is rescued and becomes Geordi's friend, and "The Next Phase", where Geordi and Ro are phased out of normal reality and presumed dead..
2 hours of DS9 and 3 of TNG.. aiieee!

i also finished reading "Finding Serenity" a collection of essays about Firefly, including allaboutm_e's favorite essay - mashing Firefly with Enterprise. i also read about the Chinese they use on the show, musical pieces, Jewel Staite's favorite bits of each episode, and how Firefly fails as a western because it doesn't follow the "Code of the West", based on chivalric norms. i think the author of the last piece limited his sense of Westerns-chivalric norms too narrowly - rather than saying that Firefly missed the mark because his focus mostly on the gender division in chivalry - needin' strong menfolk to defend the womenfolk/children/old folk and puttin' the women all up on a pedestal of respect (which the show does to a certain degree) but if he simply had stripped away gender from his analysis - we see chivalric norms and the code of the west much more stronger -- strong men and strong women using their might to defend the more vulnerable from wrongdoers, and yet treating all with respect.

accomplishments of yesterday:
-waking up early to take some friends to the airport
-in Battlefront II, finally earned my first Demolition medal (meanwhile i have more than a 1,000 medals of another type).. finally figured out how to make 4 critical vehicle hits with one life of a rocket-toting trooper... take down AT-ATs on Hoth!
- went to the beach with Jennifer and Darren. some swimming, some sun, some reading. i'm reading a book of essays about Firefly, "Finding Serenity" - there's an interesting essay on how Zoe is different from other TV warrior women (Wonder Woman, Buffy, Xena), and the role of Inara as a return to the Great Goddess, which apparently the author assumes all human cultures had, before having male gods forced upon them by invading cultures. while it is true that the proto-Greeks (and also many of the cultures of the near and mid East) started off as female-divine worshippers before establishing the paternalistic pantheon, i think it is a bit of a generalization to say that all cultures developed a cult of the sacred whore/creator/mother. and also an interesting view on what it means that the Firefly universe has such strong influences of Asian culture, but yet no real Asian characters.
- 30 crunches, thanks to Diana's insistence.
- and carnitas salad for dinner, from Chipotle.

and check this out - one man's attempt to list the 10 best and 10 worst genre TV show openings...
Read it here!
the best TV show opening sequence - Firefly.
the worst TV show opening sequence - Enterprise (it's the song that kills it)

this is the ninth monday of unemployment.
how many job applications have i turned in? 1.
how many days spent working on the side project of catalogueing records for my dad? 2.
how many days spent doing something to make money? 1 (election day pollsitting)
all other days are more or less vacation or sitting on my butt or such.
(ok, factor out one or two days for going to the doctor, etc.)
hmmm....

i had a dream this morning between the alarm going off the first time and some point when whitney actually got up. - i dreamt that i woke up in bed with weird red dots on my stomach, in an even pattern like the holes in a colander, and that whitney was already gone. were they pox marks or bites? it was a bit freaky.

so what did i do this weekend?
friday i putzed around and then started working on the "save the date" postcard for our wedding. sadly it's not going to be this fine piece:
( Stephen Colbert has us on notice )
friday night we had dinner at Quizno's (the slowest Quizno's in the world) with ckillian and kmkillian before going over to their place to play some games - Niagara, Loot, euchre, and Acquire. we also had brownies :) i really suck at euchre. but then again, it was my first time. and of course, i didn't take my allergy medicine before going over to their place (they got a cat). i managed to make it through without sneezing, but not by much.

saturday, we went online to sort out our travel plans for september - going to DC for Whitney's brother's wedding. we wanted to also hit up colonial williamsburg, but it was going to get a little more expensive and hard to schedule. so basically we won't get to see much. saturday night, we drove up with Janet and Diana to Bellflower for Todd's birthday. it was a fun drive up and a great party - Todd and Louise have been taking a class in making tapas and so prepared quite a delicious spread. Todd's co-workers were pretty fun people - we talked about Mike the headless chicken, and gross things we had eaten, and whether sea turtles have fins or flippers (flippers seems to be used by experts), and trying to get into Comic-Con. the drive home was tired but fun as well. diana had brought her book of "if" questions.

sunday, i continued work on the 'save the date' postcard - and hopefully it is done. then, while whitney went with her bridesmaids to go dress shopping, i went off to play in a sealed draft tournament of Battlestar Galactica CCG. it was my first time playing in a tournament, and so i ended up so-so. but i got some cool cards. then i went off to church, and sat with the kids. then i came home and made dinner for Whitney and we watched the last bit of the Godfather, and Van Wilder, and then adult swim.

an exciting new Venture Bros episode last night - "Twenty Years to Midnight"
"Hey - it's that ghost pirate again."
"Who isn't a ghost.. or a pirate, even really.."
i stayed up to watch Metalocalypse.. and i found it less entertaining than the mountain dew ad which came on after it.

bruce clued me in on this one:

http://thebestofyoutube.com/archives/46
Star Wars theme played on a banjo.

Tonight is preview night!
and crap.. someone tipped off theforce.net about that job listing at lucasfilm. grrr.....

so this week has had a few flashback flashback flashbacks (GTA3 reference?)...

on wednesday, i went to lunch with Matt and Tona, two friends from high school.
on thursday, i get an email inviting me to a reunion of Stac/Previo employees (the software company i worked at as a web marketing part-timer while i was at UCSD) next monday... which makes me look up someone who wasn't on their list to see where she is...
and today, i got to the allergist for my respiratory problems at night, and see photos of his kids - who went to high school with me. but he was too busy to actually talk about them. and some fun hijinks with the clinic pharmacy due to fact that i didn't have my most current insurance cards, but the ones from when i worked at caltrans. but that's all sorted out.

and then i stopped by sandag and said hi to some folk, and then had a barbecue picnic lunch put on by some friends at caltrans to celebrate the close of a major project that required a lot of excess hours. mmm.. some really good ribs.

- so tomorrow, whitney and i are off to chicago for a week to visit her folks and celebrate her birthday. we'll also get to play a little Trek with some chicago trek players, and see our friend Roummel, who will come down from Madison to hang with us, and go to a Cubs game, and Taste of Chicago.


unemployment is grand sometimes.

and happy early birthday to kmkillian and gryferin

or is it day 2? because i had a job yesterday. yesterday was election day and i was Precinct Inspector for a polling location in Pacific Beach. say what you will about having election day on 6/6/06. at any rate, i very nearly was late. i had set the alarm to wake me up at 4:45 am (so i could get to the poll site at 5:45 am to set up)... but forgot to turn it on. luckily whitney woke up with a start at 5:25 and got me on my way. no shower, but a quick bowl of cereal, and packed up all the gear and out the door

i get to the polling site, which is the hall of a church. yay for being indoors fully, and not in a garage, on such a chilly day. and my team all arrives and we start setting up. we're at a dual polling site, which means half the room is our poll, and the other half of the room is the poll site for another precinct. our precinct is about 10 blocks. we get set up, and open on time, although we have a little glitch with our touch-screen system (which is only to be used by the visually impaired). the poll has a fairly light turnout.. the most people we had at any one time was 4 (which matches the number of booths we have), and the overall turnout was 70, out of about 600 voters registered for this area. (another 130 are absentee voters, so if they all voted, we might have a total voting turnout of 33%) because this area wasn't part of the 50th congressional district (Busby vs Bilbray) it wasn't expected to have a high turnout for things. i got off at lunch to come home at vote in my precinct, and eat lunch. my team was lots of fun, and the other team had a book of sudokus, and so i did a few, and read more of "The Diamond Age".

we closed up, and at the end of the day, not one voter came to use the touch-screen system. i guess if they could see well enough to get in the door, they could see well enough to use a paper ballot that gets optically scanned. polls closed at 8 pm, we were out of there dropping off the equipment and ballots by 9:15. i had a good team and learned a lot about pacific beach history and the politics of san diego before my time.

came home watched some episodes of The 4400 on sci-fi and went to bed.
whitney wakes up at 5 am when her phone starts beeping 'low battery'. frak.
i was actually sleeping hard then.

spent the morning on answers.yahoo.com
and registered for Comic-Con. Today is the last day to register at slightly cheaper prices ($55 for the four-day badge, instead of $65). also wrote up some summaries of the more recent star wars comics (Rebellion #2, Knights of the Old Republic #5) for the SDSWS boards.

Yahoo! Answers
Points: 1,526
You're at level: 3
(974 points to get to level 4)
Points this week: 229

whitney got lazy and didn't vote, which bummed me out. it probably also bummed Busby out, since she ended up with only 46% of the vote to Bilbray's 49% of the vote.

so much for sleeping in - i get a phone call at 7:30 am from the Registrar of Voters - they have my precinct assignment for election day - I'm gonna be the precinct inspector for a poll in Pacific Beach. so once they get the stuff back from the precinct inspector who is dropping out, i gotta go pick it up later today, and see if i can set up the polling booths tonight.

and answers.yahoo.com is down for maintenance right now. boo!

so here's the weekend update.
Thursday night - farewell happy hour at the Local with co-workers and a few friends
Friday - last day, lunch out, got Josh his sunglasses that he left behind at happy hour. watched Doctor Who.
Saturday - a few errands, went to Whitney's choir party at Tom and Nancy's.
Sunday - went to Precinct Inspector Training, the Pastoral Council discernment process, some game playing over at Chip and Kristina's (Robo Rally and Blokus), back to church for the first ever Hip Hop Mass, which i enjoyed thoroughly. the choir wasn't involved in it, so whitney and the Killians and Tom and Nancy sat in the pews. ok tom always sits in the pews since only Nancy is in the choir. at any rate it was good, although the episcopals were doing a special service over in the hall and slipped in during our mass to loot the sacristy and the pentecost streamers. aiee!

out to dinner with Justin and Alex and Martha, back home for some [adult swim]. they premiered a new show Korgoth of Barbaria - some funny bits, but not overall great. although the family guy episode has two random things in it that totally cracked me up -- Peter singing the "Ding! Fries are done" song, and Stewie shouting the theme song to Mr. Belvedere (oddly enough both of those songs are on my mind more often than probably most people would guess. robot chicken was one we hadn't seen, and was good.

and now a meme from kay_dee70

You Belong in San Francisco

You crave an eclectic, urban environment. You're half California, half NYC. You're open minded, tolerant, and secretly think you're the best. People may dismiss you as a hippie, but you're also progressive, interesting, and rich!