Ah-la-la-la-la-le-lu-ah and the phone story

Two weekends now I went to Oregon/Washington for Kim's wedding. It was a good time. I got to stay in a hotel and got a good amount of work done on my thesis. I think this is a useful thing for me to know- I get a lot of writing done in a hotel room. Expensive way to get writing done, but I will store that knowledge for later. I also got to see Amanda and her boyfriend, Scott, while there and that was good as well. What I did not do, and will pay for a while for, is call another friend I have who lives in Seattle- only a two hour drive away. He is not very happy with me as a result of my failure to call. This is because he (like me, actually) is the kind of person who will drive two hours to and from a place to meet someone and hang out for 15 minutes. I did feel bad about not making the call as I had previously mentioned him possibly coming to the wedding with me. But as it turned out I flew in Friday night and out Sunday morning and I had a thesis that needed to be done by the next Tuesday. Knowing if I called he would certainly come down and that I would feel bad cutting the visit short I didn't call. Unfortunately this did not go undetected as Amanda then went up to Seattle and visited with him and there was no hiding that I had been in the region. I got a phone call the next Sunday while I was at Kilties that totally called me out. I apologized but I don't think I am back in the good. Meanwhile, when I got back I had to deal with Ryan who was not at all happy to drive down to get me from O'Hare. Pretty sure my friend from Seattle would have picked me up from O'Hare if he could.

I guess I can say this: my thesis defense is scheduled for Tuesday. I would like to say that my thesis is done, but I don't know if this is the case as it is likely to see revision before it is signed and submitted to the department. My committee has a copy of the monster but I have made some changes since that copy. I am looking at family structure and I defined it as single parent, two biological parent, or other. In my initial analysis I used other as the comparison category but that doesn't actually tell us much. It didn't occur to me until I was talking to Eric two Thursdays ago while folding clothes that I could use single or two parent families as the comparison category and be able to say something. But this change meant a bit of work to revise the table and the text of my paper so I did that yesterday and will have to present revisions to my committee at my defense. I don't know if such a thing is typical, but it is what my adviser suggested and at this point my adviser is God of the situation- what he says goes. So it seems that this is good. I have been taking on an attitude of "don't count the eggs before they are hatched" in all things related to my thesis. I am fully aware that my committee could decide I am not done and give me a list of things that must be done which will delay my official completion. This could mean I don't actually graduate.... they are collectively God of that (hmmm.... how polytheistic of me). But I got my graduation regalia yesterday in the mail and the parents are coming to town for graduation so it appears that I am walking if nothing else.

The job search is sucking. I am frustrated by the bad application formatting and the repetition in the process. It is so hard to put effort into the applications when my experience is that few of them will even be considered. Eric applied for a job in Madison and a few days later received an email from a staffing company in Philadelphia saying that while he was qualified for the job they decided not to forward his application. Not an encouraging message to get. But of course we have no choice but to press on.

Amanda came to visit Wisconsin this week. I picked her up from the airport on Monday night. We went to lunch at Ryan's shop on Tuesday then to the Milwaukee Art Museum- I really like that place. Then her friends came and picked her up and took her to town in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin that I will not name. I guess it was not quite to her liking so she escaped and came back to Milwaukee last evening and Eric joined us for a trip to Lakefront Brewery for the tour and fish fry complete with Polka music. It was great! My second time on the tour, this one was more entertaining, and my first time at the fish fry which was yummy and fun. Will have to see about going in the summer to see the crowds. Today we got up, I made breakfast, Eric finally showed up, Amanda packed up, we went to the Public Market for a quick lap, and took Amanda to Amtrak and off she went to Chicago to meet Scott at his aunt's house in Evanston.

Aha! The phone story. This is a funny one, I think. So I have been sick this week: coughing, sneezing, nose stuffy. Went to see the doctor on Monday- no Swine Flu for me, but I was on anti-biotics that did not improve my health as quickly as they usually do. Point is I had not been sleeping as well as I might due to waking up for various reasons chief among them coughing. Well Wednesday night I settled in for some better, cough-less sleep and kept sleeping through my alarm. I didn't wake until 8:30 and needed to be in class by 9:00. I quick got up and dressed, it wasn't until I was putting on my shoes that I realized that it was raining outside. Well, at this point my only hope of making it to class on time was to ride my bike so I did that and ended up with soaked jeans by the time I arrived at school. So, being sick, I was unhappy with this (unavoidable, given my mode of transportation) outcome and I was locking up my bike which of course did not want to cooperate and I ruched to class. Well after class I was meeting with my advisor to discuss the above issue with my thesis. I returned to my office to hear that one of the department secretaries had called for me. That is odd since she would normally just walk down the hall instead of calling. So I headed back down the hall to see what she wanted and here she came down the hall. "The police called, they have your cell phone," she said. Hmmm. That's interesting I had not noticed that it was gone. So I head back into the office and call the police department as instructed. So I get on the phone with the officer who has my phone and he tells me he called my mom!!! In California!!! Immediately I am calculating what time it must have been in CA and contemplating the fact that I got tattled on. "She didn't want to talk to me at first," the officer tells me. "But when I told her who I was, who I work for, she was more willing." I bet! As it turned out it wasn't until about 10:30 Milwaukee time, 8:30 CA time that this all took place so my mom was at a school and was not happy to be on the phone because that doesn't look good. So the police officer on the phone asks me a bunch of questions: my address, office phone, office number, so forth. Then I hang up, tell my office mates the deal and resume what I was doing on the computer. The office phone rings, I answer, and it is my father!! Letting me know that the police have my phone. "Thanks, Dad," I say and hang up. My office mates are laughing, "Was that really your Dad?!" Yes, yes it was. So I got my phone back and all is back to normal-ish.... I mean as normal as my life gets.

Rant on Technology

We are all well aware that technology is expanding and in some ways taking over our lives in unpleasant ways, if we let it. Of course advances in technology can be good. GPS helps us get where we want to go and find lost hikers. Computers make finding and transferring information easier, faster, and more efficient. I am certainly happy that I do not have to calculate all the statistics that will appear in my thesis by hand, I think all statisticians are happy to have computers. This morning I was watching the Today Show and they have a correspondent at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. Last year I followed the CES pretty obsessively because I was temping for a company in Cerritos, CA that makes entertainment chairs and all of their sales people were in Las Vegas. Anyway, the segment on the Today Show featured a new innovation- wireless electricity. There are panels that send out radio waves that are then translated back into electricity in electrical devices. This made me concerned about proper cell replication, seems ripe to be a new cancer causer…. I say with my laptop perched, yep, directly on my lap. But the correspondent pointed out that it is the same as listening to the radio…. Or the fact that you can listen to the radio because there are radio waves flying around. Okay, I guess. Also I am wondering if you have to get all new electric devices or if there will be adapters. Probably both. The examples they showed didn’t work very far away from the panel that was sending out the waves and it was mentioned that maybe you would get these panels installed under your floor or in your walls. Yikes, a lot of renovation! But it could lead to the resurrection of the floor lamp which I feel is being neglected in favor of sconces and other lighting. The more practical thing they showed was charging stations that are being used or will soon be used in vehicles like police cars and fire trucks that charge cell phones, radios, and other devices without cords.

That really wasn’t where I was going with this! What I am annoyed with is the proliferation of communication avenues, our reliance on them, and their varied effectiveness and reliability. So I have a few examples. When I was in CA for my ten day tour (1400+ miles in a car after an 1800+/17 flying adventure) I knew I was going to be in Fresno to see my grandmother for a period of time. My friend Darryl, who I met at the Long Beach Press-Telegram when I was a freshman in high school and he was a junior or senior at Los Alamitos/Orange County High School of the Arts, lives in Clovis these days and I have not seen him in a looooong time. He is my friend on Facebook so I asked him if he wanted to get together, he did, great. Except that my grandma doesn’t have Internet access nor does anyone near her have wireless and I didn’t have Darryl’s phone number. My mistake, of course, and the amount of time I was there was not such that I could meet up with him. But how easily I forgot about such a ubiquitous luxury as the Internet. Second example, Monday afternoon I was at school and knew that my friend Ryan was working at his coffee shop, The Last Drop. If you live around Milwaukee and you haven’t been there you should stop by try some of his delicious sandwiches, and wonderful beverages. You might even drop in when my baked goods are on sale. He recently introduced breakfast sandwiches and one is named after me- it’s the most boring one ;). Okay, okay enough of that – it is my blog and I can plug who I want to. So Ryan was at work, and I text messaged him to find out if he wanted to do something after he was done with work. I sent the message at 4:57, at 6:15 he messaged me back to say that he would have if he had gotten my message before he left. Hrm. What’s with that? Why did it take more than an hour for the message to get to him? Stupid cell phone companies ruined the potential for some great conversation. Oh wait; I had an interesting, though not great, conversation that evening anyway (see previous post). Okay, I have a third example. It is kind of a meta-example as I have several friends who this example could depict. I have a friend; the evidence would support claims that she is a good friend. But she is hard to get a hold of. I know her email, her cell phone number, her address, heck I could drive myself to her home, I have done it before. I know where she works, where her significant other works. She is my friend on Facebook, and maybe elsewhere via the Internet. We have mutual friends, more than a handful of them. I have, at times, used multiple avenues to contact her with no response. Like a communication blitz. And I wonder, do I have the right email address, street address? Has she changed her cell phone number but left the message there? (Brad did that when I convinced him to switch to Verizon so we could talk to each other for free- he had two phones for a while, but used only one.) Was she getting my messages or not? Was she busy? What was going on with her? My point here is that we have grown reliant on technology: we expect it to be easy, fast, and efficient, but sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the message gets lost, it goes to the wrong place, or we can’t get to it even if it is there. In these times I get frustrated, how about you? Because sometimes you don’t know what’s going on. Did it get from point A to point B? Did I get ignored? I don’t know what it is that we can do about these communication issues. Be patient and persistent is all I can conclude.

In the future: why this blog is called Tri-coastalism and my conversations with Eric about my blog.