Archive for June, 2009

Mike Needs a Life Blog Reposts – Part 18

June 6, 2009
The Madness Ensues

So there we were, Christina finally had a great job… in Key West. And she started on June 8th… less than 3 weeks away. BREATHE.

Things to do within that time:

• find an apartment
• rent the house
• get rid of 2/3 of our possessions
• find a home for the cat
• finish the fence gate
• repaint the bathrooms, replace toilet seats, fix the ceiling in the hall bath, finish caulking the baseboards, etc, etc, etc…
• have a garage sale
• figure out what to do with my car – sell it, get new tires so it could make the drive, ship it to Connor??
• and oh yeah, go to the Walters’ family reunion in Savannah on the 3-day memorial day weekend

We were living in a 3 bedroom house with a shed full of tools, and a yard full of yard stuff.. a 500 lb smoker, bbq grill, chairs, tables, etc.. what the hell were we gonna do with all this stuff??? The biggest apartment we could afford in Key West was a one-bedroom, and even then the average rent for a one br is 1250 a month… and while the ultimate dream of a sailboat meant not getting too attached to stuff, practicing is harder than preaching, and we had some serious decisions to make. That and I had just gotten my porch and yard to a place where it was really, really nice.. we had spent a small fortune on that back porch and all the remodeling we did inside the house.. it was very hard to let those things go mentally. But it had to be done.

Christina found out about the job and her start date on may 18th, that gave us 3 calendar weeks to prepare, but labor day weekend was already a bust because we had to go to georgia for her family reunion, and that was a solid 3 days, so we had two weekends left. We knew that we had to go find an apartment the weekend after labor day, and that meant a whole weekend in key west.. the following weekend Christina would have to leave on Sunday at noon to get to the new place in time to get the key so she could set up the air mattress and pass out early so she could be at work bright and early Monday. That left ONE Saturday we would be at the house without interruptions, so what else to do? Have a garage sale!

Oh, and we were both still working full time until we left.. so nights were long and the days at work were spent biting fingernails and having cold-sweats. Of course our friends and families were happy for us, but also as sad for us to go as we were sad to leave them.. and they all wanted to get together, drink, have dinner, etc, etc.. time was beginning to run out faster than we could imagine. It’s a testament to our relationship that we didn’t kill each other during those 3 weeks, we had no idea what we were doing, and most decisions were made on the fly without much thought or communication.

We went down to KW the weekend after Memorial Day and looked at a few apartments, they were SMALL and had quite a bit of Key West um… flavor. One that we had seen on craigs list the week before that we really really liked apparently had someone who was going to come sign a lease that saturday so it was out. As fate would have it though, that person never showed up to sign the lease so we were able to look at it. It was by far the nicest one we looked at, and right in the part of town we’d wanted to be in.. the corner of Simonton and Flemming. One block from Duvall in the heart of ‘old town’. It became a toss up between that one and one we’d looked at earlier that was a bit larger but in a not as nice part of town.. Location won out and we signed the lease. Also fortuitously my friend Rick and his family happened to be there for some work he was doing, so we were able to hook up with them for a nice dinner and a few buckets of beer at Schooner Wharf. A great time was had by all…

We were able to rent the house amazingly enough, after only a week and a half. We had an ad on craigs list, and a sign in front of the house, the drive by people all wanted to rent for 900 bucks or so, and gawked at the 1300.00 rent, but the people from craigs list who knew what the yard and kitchen were like were much less aghast at the price. We wound up renting to a group of college girls for 1250, that covers the mortgage and taxes, so we were happy.. let’s hope they don’t have a 5-kegger and burn the place down. Luckily we are in good with most of the neighbors, and they are watching out for us.. “fingers crossed”. It is hard to imagine someone else living in a house that you’ve put so much personal and emotional energy into, but once again, I have to tell myself to let it go, it’s not something that really matters.

The garage sale itself was amazing.. we threw up a sign at 8 am, and we started carting crap out of the house, we weren’t even packed completely yet, and hadn’t decided what all we were going to try to sell. People started swarming almost immediately, Christina handled all the sales, and I was in the house taking bookshelves apart and dragging everything I could think of out to the carport. I couldn’t cart stuff out fast enough, as soon as I’d bring it out, someone would buy it.. it was unreal, and as I kept carting junk out of the house, I got a tremendous sense of liberation.. liberation from JUNK, from all the crap we hold onto that we really don’t need, stuff I hadn’t seen in years, stuff that was still in boxes from when I had moved the last time. What a great time.. and we made a pretty good profit too.. over 500 bucks. For JUNK. I love it.

I finally was able to make a decision about my car, the choices were bring it with, sell it, or store it at my moms house until Connor could use it. Blue book was 500 dollars, so it wasn’t worth a whole lot, the tires were shot, and if I was gonna take it with me, it would need 700 dollars invested for that. I checked into shipping it to Connor.. that would be at least 800 dollars.. way more than it was worth, so finally.. two days before I left I decided to sell the thing.. I love that car and I will sorely miss it, but the combined hassle and monetary input to get it to, and keep it in Key West was just too great. One more thing to try to do before I go!!

Christina spent Sunday morning packing her car with whatever we had ready to go in boxes, and left around noon. I stayed behind to finish the packing, cleaning, and so forth. I was getting the moving truck Tuesday afternoon, Christina’s Brother Josh and I would pack the truck tuesday night, and leave Wednesday morning. Seemed easy enough.

Mike Needs a Life Blog Reposts – Part 17

June 5, 2009
Christina lands the Big One!

Well, OK.. maybe not the BIG ONE, but big enough.

After coming back from St Thomas life pretty much went on as usual.. work, come home, eat, go to bed, rinse and repeat. Christina took up a weekend job at Macey’s at the fashion square to get a little bit more money coming in. I don’t know how she does it, I’d have been killing people and drinking more than I already do if I’d been working 7 days a week, at two jobs that out of the both of them I liked neither. I guess she and I are wired differently, either that or I’m just plain lazy, which is a distinct possibility. Anyways, she worked all the time, and I stayed at home on the weekends and worked on the yard, or on sculpture stuff, or just hung out with friends and drank, nothing too exciting. The work at the gallery was steady enough to get me an average of 40 hours a week, so I casually perused the want ads and such looking for a glimmer of sunshine. No such glimmer appeared for me, but Christina found one!

She had been practicing the power of positive visualization at her day job. She had a little bulletin board next to her desk with photos pinned up of the things she wanted out of life; a sailboat, the beach at water island, an Electra ‘Betty’ bicycle, that kind of stuff. She religiously dug around on the internet looking for jobs, but hadn’t found anything decent in orlando, so she thought.. hey, why not look in the places I’d rather be living? Well wouldn’t you know, there was a job right up her alley working for South Florida Workforce in KEY WEST. Well, not one to be discouraged by a little obstacle like geography, she applied for the job by sending her resume online. She got an email the very next day, could she come in for an interview… it was at this point she began to realize that maybe her visualization might be paying off.

That evening at home, she asked me if it was OK that she was applying for jobs in Key West, I laughed and said, why not! Thinking to myself that it would be a cold day in hell before anything like that ever happened.. so then she said that it was good I thought it was OK, because she had an interview for one next week..

She drove down to Key Largo for the interview and met with the director of the Largo branch of work force, then turned around and drove back.. all in one day. He told her that the position was for the director of the Key West offices, and the job involved (among other things) trying to interface the Miami head office people with the Key West people, since they were so different they couldn’t see eye to eye on much.. apparently he liked her experience with corporate sales offices and such.

Well we spent the next few days kind of in shock, what if this actually happens?? What do we do with the house? What about my job at the gallery?? So many things to think about. We decided to not even think about the consequences until we had to, if ever. She got a call probably a week later. He wanted to see her for a second interview! Now the freak-out really started happening. I was pretty sure the way things were slowing down at the gallery that I’d be out on the streets looking for a job soon anyways, so it might be perfect timing for me. There would still be the house to deal with, but once again we decided not to sweat the small stuff unless we had to.

Once again, she got up at 4 am to drive to Largo. I went to work as usual. I got the call around 11 AM.. ‘WE’RE MOVING TO KEY WEST!” was all I heard.. holy shit, the five year plan was coming faster than I’d ever expected it to! I got off the phone, and I guess the big-ass smile on my face gave it away, because Jeff knew what was up.. I was OUTTA THERE!

Mike Needs a Life Blog Reposts – Part 16

June 3, 2009
The Porch, The Glass Endeavor.

The back porch was finished in October, the tin roof was on it, and it was fabulous. We spent many an evening out there cooking out, chilling, and generally just enjoying it.. the back yard had undergone a huge transformation from unruly grass lot to a small slice of paradise. I’d installed enough electricity out there to run a small factory, but as it turned out, Jeff’s plan to buy a glass kiln had been sidetracked by the failing economy, so all that juice was for naught. But if there is ever a need for enough juice to power a small rock concert in the back yard, I have it.. haha. Jeff has since bought his kiln, and also has gotten himself into a much larger studio space for his art, so he’s installed the kiln there.

I started doing some metal sculpture using the steampunk world for inspiration, I have a few pieces almost finished, and one that is finished at the time of this writing. I have many more ideas in my head that I want to get out, but they will have to wait until I get a job so I can afford to buy some materials, copper is pretty expensive for someone with no income. I definitely enjoy the process of creating artsy things, even if at times it’s painful, and I lack inspiration to work on them. It’s nice to have an outlet for all the creative energy I have.. maybe someday it’ll become something I can make some money at.. who knows.

Jeff and I still have plans for collaboration, and they are as of yet unrealized, but I’m sure we’ll work all that out.

Mike Needs a Life Blog Reposts – Part 15

June 2, 2009
St Thomas

You’re laid off, living off your severance pay, and working a crap-pay job at an art gallery schlepping frames, so what do you do?? Take a trip to the Virgin Islands! It’s hard to pass up 2 seven dollar tickets to paradise.. Eddie Money would be proud.

What can I say except wow.. this was our second trip to Water Island, and it was just as cool as I remember from the first time. Our friend Ray owns a home there, and last time we went, he wasn’t yet living there full time, but this time he was, and he took us all over the place showing us the cool places to go and drink. We spent a day on St John snorkeling and playing horseshoes at the Skinny Legs bar up on the hillside. I’ll tell you that the Caribbean has a profound effect on me. The laid back attitudes of the locals is infectious. They have no money, and live practically in a third-world country, but they are for the most part far happier than the people I’ve encountered elsewhere.

I don’t consider myself a beach person, probably because the beaches near central Florida are over-crowded, lined with ugly-as-shit condos, and populated by some of the scariest people you’d care to meet. Not so much in the Caribbean, the beaches are clean and far more beautiful, and what people there are, are considerably less scary than those you’d find at say, Cocoa beach. I spent two full days on the beach at honeymoon bay on ray’s island, sipping rum, and reading in a beach chair under a coconut palm, and saw probably 30 people, the greater part of them people who lived there on the island, or on the sailboats anchored to buoys in the bay. Now, I know… Water Island is a residential island with 45 homes on it, so this probably isn’t a fair assessment of ALL the beaches in the Caribbean, but I’ve decided to use this place as the model for my ultimate destination in my journey. If I could live on or near such a place, I would consider myself one of the luckiest people alive. Others need big cities to feel happiness; I need things on a much smaller scale, a much slower pace, and far fewer people definitely.

We came back from that trip with a renewed passion for becoming island people. We had originally talked of a ten-year plan to live on a sailboat, now we felt pressed to make that plan happen sooner, neither of us were working anything remotely resembling secure jobs, and the economy didn’t seem like it was picking up at all, so we started dreaming, and scheming…

Mike Needs a Life Blog Reposts – Part 14

June 1, 2009
Woah, alot has happened.. let me fill you in.

OK.. where to start. My last post I talked about halloween coming up, the back porch, an impending trip to St Thomas, lack of job opportunities, and fixing my clutch. I don’t know how I managed to come so far without adding stuff to this blog, I guess I just got caught up in the daily grind again. I’ll start from the beginning…

I find Work:

Jeff League was over one night some time in early November, and we were sitting around the back porch drinking a bit and burning some wood in the firepit. He mentioned that he was having a hard time finding reliable people to help him out at the art gallery he works at. I of course was like.. “dude.. I have no job!” So the next week, I started going in to help him out with framing, building boxes and crates, and just generally being the guy who would do anything. It was contract work, and not very much pay, but it was money coming in. I guess that’s about the time I stopped writing this blog. I think I just slipped back into that routine of getting up, going to work, coming home, and wishing for something more. In the beginning it was only supposed to be a temporary thing.. a few weeks tops, but I wound up being there six months. Now oddly enough, I’m no longer there and feel the need to write again.. Coincidence?? Who knows.

Anyway, it was nice to be the cheap labor in the back after 15 years of being in a ‘professional’ office. I enjoyed the mindlessness of the work.. building frames, framing art, lighting the gallery, moving art around.. you know, monkeys could do it. After a while though, the old familiar annoyances began creeping in.. annoying co-workers who would stand around and watch Jeff and I work all day, because they themselves had nothing to do, and super-time crunch emergencies: “Crate this 500 lb Albert Paley Sculpture by this afternoon! It has to ship TOOOODAY!!!” “Frame these 50 pieces by tomorrow morning!, they have to be in New York by Tuesday Morning!!!!” OY, I mean really… it’s ART people, let’s get some perspective here, we’re not shipping the polio vaccine to Botswana or Finding a new heart for little Timmy.

I had a bit of a revelation at some point along this journey, that no matter what kind of work you’re doing, and no matter what type of office you’re in, there are all the same issues. Someone is bangin’ that chick in accounting, and everyone knows it, but no one talks about it.. and of course they are both married. The boss is an emotionally distant, dysfunctional workaholic who never stops workin’ the deal long enough to realize his employees (and his family) need him to pay attention to them. The middle-management wanna-bees don’t really actually DO ANYTHING but sit behind their desks and conceive ways to look busy. And everyone on down the line looks the other way as long as his or her paycheck keeps coming in. I was really kind of blown away by all this. I mean, going into this I was thinking.. wow, cool… art… should be a nice calm diversion from all the corporate sycophantry. Is sycophantry even a word? Well, I was disillusioned. People are people everywhere you go, and most of them are lazy.

I won’t say everyone there was bad, there were a couple folks that really were good, honest art people. At some point in the last few years though, someone left the door open at night, and the infidels slithered in and took hold. I don’t think they will be around much longer, but then what do I know about such things. I’m just the dude in the back.

I really don’t want to sound like the guy who automatically despises the people he works for, because I honestly don’t think that’s true. What I expect though, is that people be honest and hard-working. Maybe that’s too much to ask in this day and age. It just eventually begins to eat away at my patience to be working for and with people I don’t trust. I’ve definitely made my mistakes in my day and probably treated people unfairly for my own personal agenda, but I try to grow as a person and not do things that are unfair or ethically wrong, and I do always try to give people the benefit of the doubt and understand that they are fallible and sometimes scared, so they make mistakes. But good grief… ok.. enough of that. Off the soap-box, Mike.

The work at the gallery dried up pretty quickly in May, and there wasn’t anything left for me to do there, so I said my adieus and bowed out. Jeff is still there, although he doesn’t seem to have much to do either, so who knows how long that will last before he finds himself something more stimulating. A sign of the times I suppose. Or maybe just bad business. Probably both. At any rate, I hope it picks up for them, and they straighten things out, because it really is a cool place, and they have a lot of cool art there.