Another New Gig

I started a new gig this week.  I don't want to say with whom, in case they have a google alert set up for their name, but let's just say I never thought in a million years I'd be working for the corp de Fox.  

It's a contract role but it pays well and might lead to a full-time with benefits position.  Even if it doesn't, it should provide me with the missing experience that hiring managers have claimed has caused them to pass on me in the past.  

I almost didn't move forward because the First Contact was a person with an Indian name and those usually are call center recruiters who are just trying to hit numbers with cattle calls.  But I took a chance and he and his Manager got me an interview.  

There were 3 rounds which seemed like overkill for a 6-month contract position. Still, the nice thing was the interviews were about introducing me to the teams and seeing how we gel, as opposed to trying to score cheap points by asking questions that have no bearing on my skills and capabilities.  

I Wanna Quit the Gym!

The following is a re-post of something I wrote on Facebook Note circa 2009.  I think Note was Facebook's attempt to dip its toe into the blogging world before it realized it does better as a Micro-blogging platform.  It's hard to find Notes on Facebook, this one came up in my Memories and I am not allowed to edit it, which tells me these will soon be deprecated even further.  

I Wanna Quit the Gym!

(2009)  I've been a member of the Ray Meyer Fitness Center at DePaul Unversity's Lincoln Park campus since 2004.  It was a great deal at the time: a discounted alumni rate and it was on the way home.  All I had to do was pack my workout bag in the morning and after work, get off at Fullerton Brown line stop, go work out, and get back on.  

At first, I was even able to complete a workout and get back on the EL within the same 2-hour transfer window.  But the workouts got longer as I'd include a spin class.  That prompted me to switch to a monthly CTA pass.

Over the years, things have changed.  Though my office is located near all of the major El lines, I don't take the brown line to work anymore, so it's not as convenient to take it home and stop at the gym -- especially if I leave my car at the blue line station in Irving Park.  Also, the gym mostly caters to students, not alumni or other non-student members.  This is evident by the elimination of many of the late evening spin classes.  

So after realizing that I hadn't been to the gym since February, I called and asked about canceling my membership.  You can't just do it over the phone, you have to fill out a Membership Cancelation Form (MCF).  The lady who took my call offered to fax me the form.  About a day or two went by when I realized I didn't receive the fax.  I called back and asked for someone to fax me the MCF.  This went on for a couple of months.  I'd periodically remember that I wanted to quit the gym and would call and never receive the fax.

I decided to drop in one Sunday afternoon before going to mass since my church, also DePaul is across the street.  Alias, the Membership Relations part of the gym was closed at the time I got there (about 90 minutes too late).  No one could find the MCF form although a nice polish kid did try to help.  I started to count this as one of those times when it would be helpful to speak the language of my ancestors, but it turns out it wouldn't have made a difference because he couldn't find the form.  

I politely suggested that putting the form on the website might be 1) useful, 2) 21st century and 3) a FUCKTACULAR idea. His response indicated that he had drunk a full gallon of the corporate cool-aid when he said "oh the reason we don't is because we have it right here where you need it when you want it". 

"But you don't have it here," I pointed out.  he smiles and shrugs his shoulders while checking the same file cabinet for the fourth time to see if the MCF had magically appeared.

Flash forward to Monday.  I called the gym again for the MCF.  This time it actually arrived at my fax machine!  I filled out the form and tried to fax it back.  I'd hear the busy signal and the report sheet would come back busy/no response.  The thing about cancelation is that if you don't do it by the 15th of 

the current month, you are charged for the next month.  I'd be able to use the gym but since I'm not using it now, it's kinda a moot point.  I was determined to get this resolved, so I called and asked if their fax machine was, in fact, working.

The lady who answered -- same voice as the one who promised to always send me the fax -- said it was working.  Let's call her name is Trudy.  I explained my issue and Trudy suggested I try it again, and added, if it doesn't work I can email it to you.  I know what she meant, at least I hope she meant that I could email her a scanned document, but if not, I'm not sure how her emailing me something would help. 

After trying to send the fax several times over the next couple of days, I called back and got the same lady and asked if I could scan the MCF and email it to someone.  She said sure and gave me an email address.  This is on a Friday afternoon and With the 15th of the month deadline drawing near, I could just see my email sitting in someone's junk/spam folder.

Finally, at the end of the day, I get an email that say:

Icarus

I am out of town until Tuesday, I will have Trudy follow up with you regarding your cancellation.

Thanks for letting us know.

Nancy

Now I'm thinking that the fate of membership, whether or not I will be charged another month's dues, depends on the skillset of Trudy, the lady who couldn't or wouldn't fax me the MCF all these months.  The lady who thought the problem with her fax machine could be solved by emailing me.  I'll be lucky if I don't get charged twice each month from here on in!

While heading home I entertain a wild thought:  there's a scene in the movie Reality Bites where Winona Ryder sets camp at a gas station and offers to pay for everyone's gas in exchange for cash.  I start to figure out if there is a way I can do this with my gym membership.  Maybe just send homeless person after homeless person into the gym to use the shower and take advantage of the complimentary towels!  Alas, I recall that they check my gym card against a photo they have on file.

The good news is that Monday I did receive an automated email from Campus Recreation:  "We received your request for cancellation. Your membership will expire on 7/31/09. "  The bad news is I've gained some extra pounds and could really use a gym to work out right about now.  

Last Day of August

 So we have lived here for, more or less, one entire year.  While it is still Hell's Porch Hot, it's the time of year when some days it isn't too bad in the early morning or after 5 pm.  It will still be hot in another month or so but not "cannot do anything outside" hot.

On the last weekend of July 2021, we loaded up a U-Haul and brought our kids and my Honda Element down to Olive Branch, MS.  We got the kids enrolled in school which started that Thursday and Nightingale headed back to Chicago that weekend.  

After things were settled and we realized that I needed to be back there as well to help with packing, purging, and selling whatever I could, I joined her.  

To say we made the move on the Highest Difficulty Setting is an understatement.  The crazy idea was conceived on a visit down here in June.  We would pretend to rent from our in-laws so our kids could register while we waited for our house to sell and then buy the in-laws' house.  Somehow that morphed into buying their house without the renting option.

Because it was so bleeding hot, we didn't really unload the U-Haul in a logical fashion.  It was more just getting it done and getting out of the heat.  We put things in storage but there were a few boxes I would have liked to work on while Nightingale was up north and I had nothing else to do while the kids were at school.

I'm pretty isolated down here.  Working from Home doesn't afford me the opportunity to meet anyone and since I'm not running anymore, that avenue isn't there either.  The only "friend" I've made is the grandmother of one of my daughter's friends.  We meet at the Red Park and we all went to the Zoo once.  

The good news is my kids, especially Boris, are thriving at school.  They both got into SpotLight, and love it.  

Edit from the Future:  I didn't get to finish this post back in August, but I'm publishing it just to get it out of the draft queue.

Avocado Toast with runny eggs

I saw this on Twitter but cannot find the tweet because I forgot to like it.  Or maybe I did but the poster took it down.  Anyway, the joke is:

Made me some Avocado toast. I guess I’m not buying a home anytime soon

These turned out to be delicious.  Now i just have to figure out how to flip them over without breaking the yokes.

Good Bye ChicagoNow, it's been a slice

 I started blogging at ChicagoNow on October 1, 2012, although I haven’t really published much since Boris and Natasha were born. Anyway, the Powers-That-Be at the Chicago Tribune and Alden Global Capital closed the site down today.

No one communicated anything to us either by email or on our Facebook Group. We knew it was coming when our last community manager resigned at the end of June and said we’d heard something in a few days.  And honestly, I suspected the end was coming when our first and best community manager Jimmy Greenfeld took the trib buyout and left.  Then the annoying ads in the middle of our posts came.  

Some bloggers continued to post even though the Front Page (landing page, home page whatever term you prefer) wasn’t updating. A few bloggers wrote goodbye posts that apparently caught the higher-ups’ attention because those were taken down.

It’s kinda crappy the way they chose to go about it. Some of those blogs brought in large audiences which I’m sure led to decent passive revenue. I suspect our site didn’t cost them much especially once they cut the monetary rewards for Best Post and Best Gallery (which I won a few times).

No skin off my nose as I wasn’t one of the paid talents (they use to pay some of the heavy hitters but stopped that years ago and the heavy hitters went elsewhere). But I was hoping to post a Last Post on my blogoversary in October and was also hoping to link to a podcast I might be on; the ChicagoNow traffic would have helped.

When I  joined CN, if you wanted to get a space there,  you needed a pitch.  My wife and I were house hunting and so Adventures in House Hunting was created.  Ironically, sometime after my first or second post, we made an offer on a house.  That house would be the home my kids were born in and filled with treasured memories.

At some point, our Editor announced that you could blog about anything you wanted.  Spoiler alert: you always could, but this just made it official.  

It was like Hogwarts for Bloggers.  I know with Rowling's TERF issues that reference is not as pure as it once was.  I said what I said.

I made many virtual and even real friendships with many bloggers here.  I also pissed off a few and we are no longer FB friends.  boo hoo.  

Some people were really cool, including the heavy hitters.  They gave my Fan Page a like when that thing had more currency than it does today.  Others felt it was a zero-sum game and wouldn't click the button, which is fine.  Except for the one person who kept asking me for tech support but couldn't click like.  WTF.

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Our visit to Gulf Port.

While this is still fresh in my head, I should write about our trip down to the gulf last week.  We went to Gulfport, which has got to be one of the laziest names for a place.  I guess ShipDock was already taken.  This was actually the first family vacation that didn't involve going to visit family.  Instead, Katness came down with her kids and sans husband and we caravaned together.

It was a 5 hour drive and with 3 drivers and two cars, one person just doesn't get a break.  One of our only local friends said that 3 days at the gulf is plenty.  We went down on Tuesday and were going to leave Friday morning but we were expecting to have bad weather late Thursday evening through Friday.  I'm not sure why that would be a problem other than packing the car in the rain.  I'm also not sure why we still left once the weather report showed the rain would pass us.  

But mostly, I'm pissed that we couldn't leave until 6 pm because Katness wanted to take the kids to a water park and get them the snowcones they were promised.  That meant driving 5 and half hours in the dark.

Most of this trip was reliving her last visit here just in her husband's place.  We went to most of the same restaurants as she did last time.  

Edit from the Future:  I was going to write more about this trip last July but life got busy and I had other things that took my time.  The main thing is when we got home, I pretty much ignored Katness and didn't do anything during the remaining days of her visit.  Nightingale went with her to various places of course, but I stayed home.

We got together again in St Loius the weekend of Columbus Day because our kids were off, and by then I was over it.  

2022 is half over

Depending on how you look at it, 2022 is half over, or 50% complete.  So on that note, let's talk about my Steps stats.

I was doing really well at first.  Between NG and I going for walks and my being able to eck out a 1-mile run, I was able to hit the 10K steps usually before dinner time.  Then one day, I did something during a run and my knee had inflammation.  It didn't go away with rest, so I iced and ibuprofen and it eventually subsided but didn't completely disappear.

Since we are on cheap insurance, we tried to wait it out, but finally, I went to a doctor to evaluate.  She gave me a steroid shot and all has been great since then.  Unfortunately, based on our experience with knee injuries, we suspect that there are underlying issues.  Perhaps another lacerated meniscus.  

So I have to do Physical Therapy for a few weeks and if things don't get better, I can get an MRI.  Not sure if our insurance will cover any of it because no one can ever tell you what something will cost.  And half of America is scared of Universal Healthcare because, socialism.

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