Hipster Party??

An entertaining weekend was had by all.

This last weekend, the family and I went to the home of a friendly couple for a "Tacky Hipster" party. Most of us dressed up in various clothing setups that might be labeled Hipster, and just hung out for a few hours - letting children run about and listening to a selection of "Nerdcore Rap" that I dug up.

I also reinstalled the front wheel of my motorcycle (Took it in to a local shop in Philomath to get the tire replaced), changed the spark plugs, and did an oil and filter change. The BMW is having overheating problems, and it's cheaper to tool around on the Yamaha anyway.

Little stressed with 10+ months of job searching, especially since we're looking at a potential drop in income in the next couple of months that will put us negative each month. The wife is headed back to school this fall though, which will allow us to take out some student loans to cover the difference, but I really need a new job. I did have a great interview last week with the college of oceanic and atmospheric science for a position as a faculty research assistant.

I'm really excited about it, and I'm really hoping that they'll call me back. There are all sorts of benefits to the position that I feel like I and my family deserve after all the time I spent fighting to get through school and working, but the thing that really makes me want the job is that I felt like I more or less instantly got along with the crew there, and I'm enamored of the idea of working somewhere that I don't have to listen to the constant nattering of accountants worried about bottom lines and account balances.

I'm sure there's some of that, of course, but I would expect it to be a much different environment as compared to the place I work now.

Blog Reborn

It's been quite a while since I've written anything on my blogs - either this one or the other one that I've been paying for. I got the renewal notice today for my other blog, and decided that it wasn't worth over $100 to host a website that I hardly ever used. It was always so slow to navigate through the administration of that website (I think the host was on the other side of the country!) and anything I could do on that site I can do here, more or less.

If I have any regular readers, then it may be noticed that I deleted all my old posts. I started reading through them and thought they were really kind of pretentious, and I wanted to start over with a clean slate (more or less).

So let me reintroduce myself.

My online monikers tend to either be Platinumwolf or The Surly Pirate. I'm an ex-Navy nuke, having been honorably discharged at the end of my first term - I have kids and didn't want the military life for them. I moved back home, got a job working with my cousin, and went back to University to get my degree. I graduated in December (2011) with a BS in mechanical engineering, and a minor in mathematics.

I'm kind of a nerd/geek.

Since I've been back from the Navy, I've bought a house, bought my first non-hand-me-down car, learned to ride motorcycles, and developed a love of SCUBA. I have three kids of my own, and one niece living with me for the moment. My wife and I have been married for twelve years, and been together for fifteen. She's put her education on hold a few times for various reasons, and is this fall going back to pick up where she left off last time. She's looking to become a sci-fi writer, but most of what she ends up doing is technical writing. There's an irony there...

We've also gotten involved with a local parenting group based around collaborative problem solving (CPS), which as far as I know is primarily based on the book, The Explosive Child.

Right now I've been job hunting for nine months, as my current employer doesn't have the budget for another engineer, plus they need to keep me on in IT for a little while because my old supervisor had to leave a couple months ago, and the new guy they brought on to replace him doesn't have all the institutional knowledge that I do.

I have a few nice prospects. Then again, I had a few nice prospects back in the first quarter of the year, and of a half dozen interviews then - well, I'm still looking, let's leave it at that.

Other than all that, I don't have anything pressing to write, and I rarely do, so I don't expect to post on here all that often. However if I start getting readers, I just might start posting stuff. I might even post some of the articles I've written in the past for the parenting group newsletter, we'll see.