Full Week

The last week or so has been rather full of news. The most obvious is the death of Steve Jobs. I find all the gushing over him to be a bit creepy. Jobs was good, no doubt about that. But the equal of Einstein? Sorry; don't think so. He was a glorified Billy Mays in a black turtleneck who managed to convince 10's of millions of people that they couldn't draw their next breath without an electronic doohickey glued to their hand that didn't even exist five years ago. That was his real genius. And ripping off the Xerox Alto, but then everyone did that eventually, making it hard to find fault with Jobs simply for being the first. It will be interesting to see what happens at Apple over the next five years or so. I don't envy the guy who gets to replace him as the face of Apple.

In her last post, Debbie mentioned us trying and failing to get down to see La Nouba last weekend. Because it was dead at her work on Friday, she came home early. We jumped on line and were able to find two seats together. They weren't the best seats, but they ended up being good enough. So we made a run to Downtown Disney to wander around a bit then see the show. La Nouba was good (I put it not quite as good as O, but much better than Ka), although we saw something not normally seen in a Cirque du Soleil show: a hard crash. One of the acts was four little girls (looked to be maybe 8 at the most) doing acrobatics while working diabolos. The last trick involved one girl throwing her spool 20 feet or so in the air and a second girl jumping up onto the first girl's shoulders to catch it. On the first try, the toss was off, so they made a second attempt. That time she kinda sorta caught it but took a hard fall and was a bit slow getting up. The third try was successful with a great deal of wobbling around, but they held it together long enough to call it good. Of course, they got the biggest applause of the night.

Other big news is that I finally got a job. Sort of. Since we moved down here, I've been volunteering at the library one or two days a week as a page (shelving books, pulling holds, etc.). They had a part-time page job open up, so I went ahead and applied for it not expecting to get it. Typical for central Florida, there were over 160 applications for the part-time job including large numbers of people with freshly-minted graduate degrees in library science. Why would they hire someone who makes all sorts of grandpa-noises when he has to shelve on the bottom shelf when they could have 20-somethings with college degrees? Then I was called for an interview. I went and was my usual charming self during the interview, followed by their standard library page test, which involves alphabetizing six groups of four words, six groups of four authors, and most challenging of all, putting six groups of four Dewey decimal numbers in numeric order. I still didn't expect to get the job. I got a call on Friday just as we were leaving for Disney that I got the job. When I was at the library on Sunday, I found out I was offered the job because I was the only person that managed to get a perfect score on the test. Wow. Knowing the ABC Song and how to count pays off big time. If you can call a part-time job the big time. At least it's permanent.

So now I need to see what my schedule there is going to look like and decide what to do about the whole Tax Geek thing. I'm hoping I can do both, but we'll just have to wait and see. I don't start the library job until the last day of October, so that gives me time to get through the second section of my SEE tests. I figure I've gone this far so why not finish up the Enrolled Agent thing? I can use the library job to backstop the first few years of The Tax Geek and see which one turns into a full-time job first. Or something like that. It's all a bit squishy right now.

The bicycle riding is going much better now that I have a back wheel that turns. My average speed is way up (12.8 mph), so tomorrow I'm getting back to adding miles. Other than three straight days of rain over the weekend, the weather has been much more pleasant as well; 20 degrees cooler and about half the humidity. I may hit my 15-miles-in-an-hour-or-less goal by the end of the year after all.

Well, it's late so I should try to get some sleep. I can't keep my eyes open during the day, then I'm suddenly all perky and awake at 11pm. Grrr.