House painters

I have a new respect for people who paint houses. It's only 9:14pm and I'm just about whooped. Maybe I'll manage to write a post about what we've been up to at some point soon. I'm going to bed now.

Oh noes, it's teh XP-ocalypse

I have spent far more money this month than I would have liked, but I suppose it was inevitable.

I went down to Altex on Tuesday and special ordered a new computer. I had saved up some for it since late last year, but not quite enough to cover the actual cost. I have extra right now though, so it's not a problem. I guess it was wishful thinking that I could get a computer for the amount I had saved that would nicely run the software I use. Anyway, it cost less than the one I'm on right now, which is almost six years old, and the manager knocked some off the price because I had a quote for something similar from Dell. They came in $200 under what Dell was pitching. I hope it lasts as long as this one. I also decided since there's really nothing wrong with the computer I'm on, except that the OS is no longer going to be supported, and it is 32-bit and Autodesk, in their infinite wisdom, er, I mean them being in bed with Microsoft (I told that to some students and they giggled, and then I laughed at them because it was funny) not creating 32 bit versions of their software, despite all that, that I would like to keep using it, maybe as a render farm. I'm not sure how to set that up, but I might can figure it out.

At any rate, I have no space on this little rickety computer desk that I'm currently using. It came from the Wal-Mart about seven or so years ago, and is really a waste of space. The shape makes it so that you can't really put anything but a monitor on it, and it takes up a lot of floor space nevertheless. Right now, my tower is on top of my short bookcase, because you seriously cannot fit a tower on this computer table. So, I got to thinking I'd like some raw furniture that I could stain myself that might be sturdy enough to put two towers and a monitor on, but the stuff is like $300. I had the brilliant idea of looking on Craigslist yesterday, and lo and behold, I found a desk for $80 that was real wood that came from the store I was looking at. I went over and took a look at it after class this evening, and it looks great. And they knocked $5 off the price because the lower shelf was a little loose, and the guy said I'd need to reinforce it. They were very nice. This is actually the first time I've ever bought anything off Craigslist, and I gotta say, if I need furniture I should look there first. Anyway, it fit in the back of my Mazda Tribute, and so I have it out there now. Maybe I can get it set up tomorrow. I don't know when Altex will have my computer ready, but I'm looking forward to it now. When I realized that I really needed to just go ahead and get a new one, I was kinda sad about it. But maybe the VPN won't jack up my IP address when I log off of it on Windows 8.1, and maybe explorer won't randomly decide not to load when logging in.

Now, no more spending. Next up is hopefully writing a nice check to hubby's student loan servicer. 

Debt is good... o rly?

I had meant to write about this the other night, but wound up ranting about something else instead. As I was leaving the classroom on Thursday evening, some students and I were talking about student loans, and I said that I wanted mine paid off, and that I never wanted any more debt ever again, not even a mortgage.

One of the students, who is not my student by the way, but one who had stopped by with friends who were my former students, said to me something to the effect, "Well, having debt is good because it makes your credit better, so that then the bank will give you a loan that you can maybe pay back eventually."

That caused me to blink a couple of times, and I couldn't address what they had said because we were half way out the door, but I wanted to say, 'do you hear what just came out of your mouth?' People, people, people. You've been sold a bill of goods. Quit buying crap you can't afford with money you don't have so that you wind up giving all of your disposable income to the bank in the form of interest payments! I've said it before, but I'll say it again. Add up what you're paying in interest on your debt, and put that into an IRA calculator with a 8% return over forty years (the market has averaged 12%, but we can be conservative on the matter). Don't try to cry too much. It will just make your allergies worse.

The Illusion of Security

Yesterday I went down to my hunting spot at the creek and swapped the card in the game camera. I like the camera I bought, it's a Wildgame Innovations Lightsout camera. I got it in January and have had it out for three months on the same set of AA batteries. The last trail cam I had was crap and ate through D batteries like they were going out of style or something. Anyway, the pictures are very nice, and I had a lot of deer coming through and a couple of racoons, a squirrel, and a pig too. I need to go down there and clear some more branches out of my way before it gets too hot to do anything outside.

Today I had a little bit of a meltdown. I've had a good amount of work lately, I'm an artist, but it's all contract work, and I guess I'd really like to have something a little more permanent. But maybe that's just an illusion, permanence I mean. Sure, someone can say a job is permanent, but as anyone who has read anything of history knows, nothing is really and truly permanent.

I think that the goal of paying off our loans over the last few months made a little distraction for me. I'm fairly goal-oriented, and so while I was working toward paying off the car and the two small student loans we had, my mind was preoccupied on that. However, now that that's all done, and we have two very big loans left that are going to take at least a couple years to pay off, and since we got hit with a huge tax bill this April, it feels like progress has stopped and now my brain has reverted to trying to figure out something else to do with my life. I don't know what that something else is. All I know is that, as much as I love it, a career in animation is unstable and unpredictable, and that the old fall back of teaching for a living is gone forever as a career. Colleges and universities have no intention of hiring permanent faculty of any sort, and are using primarily adjuncts to teach their classes. It saves them an enormous amount of money not to have to pay out things like health insurance, holiday pay, sick pay, pensions, etc. ad infinitum. Truly, with the easy availability of student loan monies to flow into their coffers, they are really focused on quantity rather than quality. The more students they can get in the door, the more money they make. This isn't an indictment of any particular school, but rather of the system itself. This system is in danger of degrading the quality and recognition of our higher eduction degrees. As more and more public money becomes tied up in higher eduction (even in private colleges and universities) the more likely it is that we will see "standards" implemented as we have in our public high schools. And we all know how well that's worked out for us as a society /snark.

I keep thinking that maybe I'd like to start my own studio, but I don't even know where to begin on that one. I'm not sure that I could run a business. My dad has great business sense, but I've never had a chance to try running anything, so who knows how that would go? I'm also over spending money on more schooling. I've already spent more than what many people pay for a house on my BFA. You may ask me if it were worth it, and I'm gonna have to ask that I get back to you on that one, because I think it's too soon to tell even though I've been out of school for eight years. Really, what people should be after when getting a degree of any sort, is whether said degree gives them an ROI or not. Otherwise, why bother? I mean, unless of course you have a trust fund or something, then by all means, waste all the money you want. For the rest of us poor plebes, the results of spending our hard earned money ought to be measured by whether it was financially worth it or not. And let's face it, some degrees aren't worth the paper they are written on.

Security is an illusion. It is marketed and sold to us in multiple forms, from the benign idea that getting a degree gives you some kind of job security (which is a lie), to the more devious sort, that if you give up your freedom, the government will ensure your safety (an even bigger lie).

Painful things: Dropping jars on toes and paying taxes

This morning while trying to get raw coffee out of the pantry, a jar fell out and landed right on my big toe. I have a huge bruise now, and it hurt like a sonofabitch. The average person may ask, why do you have raw coffee? That's because we roast our own coffee. And if you ever tasted some of our coffee, you'd understand why. The coffee you buy in the store is stale and burnt. We don't have some expensive machine to do it for us either. We roast it in a ceramic coated cast iron pot on the stove. It takes about fifteen minutes to roast enough for a couple of days for four adults. So my toe is sore :(

Today is laundry day too. We have an old wringer washer, and the mum-in-law and husband are doing laundry. I was going to help them, but I dropped the jar on my toe, so I am sitting here instead. I did roast coffee, while sitting on a stool. I don't think my toe is broken, but it's not going to be pleasant the next time I have to put on shoes to go to school on Tuesday. If you ever do laundry in a wringer washer, you'll realize just how crappy these modern appliances are. We have a modern washer, that's not even a couple of years old, that takes an hour to do one load and then doesn't rinse clothing worth a damn. They can do all of our laundry in the wringer washer in an hour, many many loads. It would take two days for that new crap of a washer to do that many. As for the water, I'm sure it's trying to save water or some such nonsense, except for the fact that you have to run five rinse cycles to get the clothes to not have lines of dirt in them from it not putting enough water on them in the first place. It's fucking stupid. The low flow toilets are the same way. In an attempt to save water, I wind up having to flush the thing multiple times because it's not enough water. Some do-gooding idiot attempts to save the environment without thinking things through. That's society in a nutshell right now for you. The quality of our lives have been degraded by a bunch of mid-level bureaucrats.

Speaking of which, I was looking at tiny houses last night. Supposedly those things are supposed to help you save money, except of course, of the ones I looked at the price was quite a bit more than what you can get a normal house built for. $500 a square foot is a bit on the luxury end if you ask me, but again, what do I know? I'm just an artist. I mean, you can get a regular trailer house built for that much. I can't imagine that the materials would be even half that.

I would like to have a little cabin, off the grid, out in the middle of fuck-off nowhere, and be completely off the grid. Not have to go buy food, or pay for electricity or water, but instead have solar panels and a good well, and raise my own food, and not have any debt so I didn't owe anyone anything. Now wouldn't that be nice? Too bad you couldn't tell the IRS to bugger off as well.

The Strategy of Silencing those with whom you disagree

In the early Renaissance, with the invention of the printing press, making print much cheaper and easier to produce, the Catholic church, recognizing that it was easier to spread heresy by written word than by word of mouth in a time when travel was quite difficult and time consuming, came up with the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, known in modern times as the "Index of Forbidden Books." Books that made the list were destroyed by fire if found, sometimes along with the people who owned them (unless of course said people had money or friends to bribe their way out of it).

This post is not intended to be a history lesson, but rather to compare the tyranny of the medieval-minded authorities to the tyranny of modern neo-liberalism. When I was younger my dad used to go on about how all of the "Politically Correct" speech was just getting so out-of-hand, and how he could foresee a time when it might be absolutely ridiculous. Well, folks, we have arrived there. When twitter erupted with the proverbial pitchforks and torches in a cry to throw Steven Colbert out of the studio over a tweet he made, you know that society has gone too far. Look, of course there is polite conversation and not-so-polite conversation and then of course down-right-rude conversation, but whether you like it or not (and I'm of the opinion that a lot actually don't like it) we have something called freedom of speech in this country. You're supposed to be able to say whatever you like (crying fire in a crowded theater, when there is not a fire, notwithstanding), and not have to fear for losing your livelihood. But that's exactly where we've come to. Plenty of times in the last ten or fifteen years, people have said stuff that wasn't that bad in my opinion (but what do I know? I'm just an artist) who had their lives destroyed, their incomes vanish, their jobs taken away from them, because a bunch of stupid people couldn't, or wouldn't, go on about their lives without being upset over someone saying something that "offended" them. I didn't necessarily agree with what was said in those other cases, but I didn't get upset over it. But now we've all got to be righteously offended, and if we're not then we must be the bad guy (see: racist, sexist, fill-in-the-blank-ist). And when I say righteously offended, I don't mean offended over any real injustice. I just mean over fake, inconsequential, bullshit words on the page or screen. It isn't real people. Whether it's a joke, a book, a blog post, a game, a comic, or whatever, it in no way affects you unless you decide to look at it. In the meanwhile...

If you want to be offended over something, be offended that even though we live in the 21st century, that approximately thirty million people live in slavery and many more are victims of human trafficking. That fact alone kinda makes your "outrage" over Colbert, and even your "outrage" of the name of a football team pale in comparison. There's plenty of other things to be outraged about as well, and I won't deign to pretend that I could list them all here, from transgendered youth being beaten up and bullied, to people losing their jobs because of real racism (which has nothing to do with the name of a football team or what Colbert said). But what Colbert tweeted, isn't even at the bottom of the list. It ain't even on the list. Why not get off your computer if you're so outraged and go do something to help an actual person, instead of typing stupid crap on twitter? There are food banks that need volunteers, and elderly people who need help doing chores around their house, and the list goes on and on. I suppose it's easier to target inane things on the internet rather than risk your safety, or take up your actual valuable time (time that could be wasted on twitter!) doing something that might actually make the difference in someone's life. Am I minimizing your angst? Why, yes, yes I am. Because I think it's ridiculous. These little spoiled spoon-fed twenty-somethings that think they know something, going on about all of the things they see as injustice, when they haven't grown old enough to realize that the world doesn't really care what they think.

Also, I'd like to use this topic to inform you that I have come to the conclusion that the more times that the word 'privilege' is used in any manner than the traditional sense of the word, the probability that the writer is themselves a privileged jackwaggon (in the traditional sense of the word), approaches one. You can call that T's Law. Hope you're not outraged. If you are, I don't give a rip.

By the way, it was a beautiful day today. The sun was shining, we had a lovely dinner, and I have worked nearly forty hours this week. I'm serious, be thankful for what you have and get off the computer and go outside and play. What people write on twitter, is a tempest in a teacup.

Busy, Distracted & Disgusted

So, I was supposed to try to write something here everyday but I didn't. This last week was busy, busy, busy. The in-laws made it back just fine. I'm glad they're back, their dogs were about to drive me crazy. They'd like to inform the world that buying a SIM card from Wind in Italy is a rip-off. In fact, I think that most of Italy is a black market of underworld shenanigans. Is that accurate? I don't know, I'm tired and not thinking all that clearly, but I do love Italy anyway. And why am I (mentally & emotionally) tired? Some of my students this semester are thick headed, you can explain something to them that the average person ought to understand at first glance and they look at me like I have three heads. You can demonstrate something and in three seconds they don't remember where I told them to click. Are they all on Statins or something? I bring that up because on the radio this evening on the way home, the news came on, and they were announcing how great it was that more Americans could be on Statins now, since they've lowered the threshold for acceptable cholesterol. Never mind that cholesterol is important for brain function and cell wall stability, or that statins are associated with muscle degeneration and transient global amnesia, and also with Alzheimers, but never mind that! We're going to save everyone from the dreaded heart disease, even if it means turning everyone in the country into stupid, sickly people. Ever seen the movie Idiocracy? Yeah, um, when I first saw that, I thought it was absurd, but now, now I'm not so sure that that isn't where we're going.

I'm tired, teaching wears me the hell out, especially when I have to repeat myself like a broken record because people are incapable of taking notes. Don't get me wrong, I like teaching. That is, I like teaching when I have students who look like they have half their act together and pretend to care. I saw the other day something about free college tuition for community colleges, where anyone and everyone can go for free. Yeah, then community college education can be as good as our free public high school education. I'll let you take that one to it's logical conclusion. Eventually, I figure that a college degree will be about as worthwhile as a high school one, because gosh darn-it don'tchya know everyone gets a trophy and everyone can do anything they want. Bull hockey sticks. Some people shouldn't be in college, it's not for them, and they're pushed into it anyway, and then they wind up tens or even a hundred thousand dollars in debt and not even a degree to show for it because they couldn't make it through the program. And if they do make it through the program, they find that they're not cut out for whatever it was they studied, because the real world doesn't give a flying fuck what piece of paper you have, if you can't take a shower, show up for work on time, and meet deadlines. And the little darlings, starting in grade school, are lied to, and told that if only they have a piece of paper everything will work out for them. Hard work, work ethic, and responsibility are not the words du jour.

I'm going to take a shower and go to bed before I tell you how I really feel.