My Working Life

So I'll start with my job. Employment. Work.

First off, I have to say that I am very, very grateful to be working. Even better, I am in a field I feel passionate about and ideally, my job can have a real impact on improving people's lives. However, I frequently find myself frustrated by ... well .... by reality. It's a government job and a tendency towards bureaucracy can slow things down to a crawl. I feel like I have to exert enormous amounts of energy to move my projects even slightly forward. Or, in a similar manner, I will dash ahead make all sorts of progress only to find that the nature of the project has completely shifted beneath me. As you can imagine, I find it hard to be productive. I don't like being less productive than I know I can be. I get frustrated. I get depressed. And I want to do my work even less. I feel like I will be wasting my time, energy and talents. I find it especially sad because the work itself is fascinating.

I realize that in this day and age, more people have access to more jobs than ever before. People do have the ability to choose so many things. So far I have chosen three different jobs and have yet to love any of them. Each one I have been passionate about, from geology, to GIS, to planning. I started off incredibly passionate about each field, but the passion quickly cooled. Don't get me wrong: I have loved and appreciated the things I learned, but ultimately I feel unsatisfied.

Is this a pattern? If I move into a new field, will I love it at first, and then feel unfulfilled? It makes me afraid to seriously consider doing something different. As seen from my last post, I have many different passions. But if I take the leap to a new field, will I just wind up unhappy again?

"Chose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life." - Confucius

I don't know Confucius. I hear you, but I just don't know.

Life Review

So it's been a while since I wrote here. I've noticed that there is a definite positive feedback loop regarding blogging. When I blog, I tend to blog more often. When I don't blog, I tend to blog less. Clearly the latter has been the case this summer. To this end, I am going to go through my wardrobe of metaphoric hats and review my life at the moment. Instead of write one super long blog, I aim to post a bunch in the coming week about all of the different hats I wear. Here is a list of all my hats off the top of my head. More will probably appear:

• Employee
  
• Family Member
  
• Local Foods Activist (includes a bunch of hats: Slow Food CNY Chair, Syracuse Grows Steering Committee Member, CSA Planning Group Member, CNY Food Policy Council Organizer)
  
• Neighborhood Resident
• Home Owner
  
• Engaged Citizen
• Beekeeper-In-Training
• Married Man
• Gay / Queer Man
• Physical Human Being
  
• Gardener / Wanna-Be Hobby Farmer
  
• Writer / Artist
• Musician / Singer
  
• Dungeon Master and Gamer
  
• Pagan
• Twenty-Something
• 40Below Member
  
• Delta Lambda Phi Fraternity Brother

Ugh. I could keep going but I'm going to stop. I'm getting disgusted with the number of various hats I wear. Needless to say, this outline should give me plenty of fodder for future postings.

Multiple Magazines

Below is an email I just recently sent out. Life is ridiculous sometimes:

to subscriptions@asla.org date Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 2:49 PM subject Multiple Magazine Copies mailed-by gmail.com

Hello,

I called earlier this year and complained that I am getting sent two copies of Landscape Architecture Magazine every month. While it is nice to have a second copy for scrapbooking purposes, I find it an incredible waste of ink, paper and natural resources in general. The double issues, however, kept coming. And now, the July edition just landed on my desk. All four copies of it. I don't know what is going on with my subscription, but can someone please sort this out for me? I fear for an exponential doubling of issues getting sent to me, and imagine years from now, that my friends will find my body suffocated under a pile of LAMs. Clearly, I am trying to make light of this, but it does bother me regardless. Someone please clear this up for me. My member number is 1084011 (on all four copies, yes).

PSM

June

Poor month of June. We barely knew ye.

... or at least this blog barely knew ye.

Danburite

I love geology. I love rocks. And I definitely love crystals. Something about the purity of the molecular structure is just so beautiful. This is not me-as-a-New-Age-hippy talking.... this is also me-as-a-trained-geologist.

So I want to talk about one type of crystal that has been "speaking" to me recently: Danburite.

Danburite was first found in Danbury, Connecticut not far from where I grew up. While it looks a lot like quartz (in that both are perfectly clear), Danburite has a beautiful shovel / spade shape to the crystal. And the cross section, instead of a quartz's hexagon, a flattened diamond is found.

I just find the clarity of the crystal to be so calming. I like how it's a bit of an underdog compared to the ubiquity of quartz. In all, it is beautiful, soothing, and calming. And heck, those are definitely qualities I want in my life.

Half Bath: Remodeled!

The house is a never ending source of things to do. Right now I've been focusing on a lot on the outside property. Especially weeding. I have realized that by removing the lawn and making every part of my property programmed for something.... I give weeds a much greater opportunity to thrive. But I digress.

To keep sane, I need to take a moment and look at accomplishments. I tend to focus on what needs to be done without allowing myself recognition for the work I have already done. So it is with great pleasure that I share the following photo with everyone:

Behold my half bath. Located under the stairs, about everything you see in that picture is brand new. First let me list off the problem of the old bathroom:

1. The old sink was 17 inches out from the wall and took up nearly half of the width of the space.
2. The shut off valves on the old sink did not work.
3. The water flow in the sink was low.
4. The toilet would take at least 5 minutes to stop refilling.
5. The water flow in the toilet was low (see item 4).
6. The toilet itself was from 1981 and had a huge, water-wasting tank (see item 4).
7. There was no shelf space.
8. The light fixture was too large.
9. The mirror was too small.
10. There was no storage space.

Phew. That old half-bath SUCKED. So we rounded up our friend J_Ro, an expert at these things, and got to work. We ordered a cute 9" deep sink and new toilet. J_Ro helped replace a lot of the old, corroded piping with shiny new copper pipes, and also helped re-set the new toilet. What a guy!

The old lights were removed and a new light fixture was installed (again thanks to J_Ro). The new lights were from Edward Joy Electric, a local lighting store and "a wonderland of lighting."

The mirror was found at ReStore on the Near Westide (or Salt District, if you prefer). It was a salvage mirror and has one tiny nick in it.

I picked up some plywood and cut the shelf. It's only a few inches wide under the mirror wall, but I've found it to be incredibly useful.

(Not shown: above the door, M and I built a new shelf for long term storage for paper towels, TP, and cleaning supplies.)

Finally, the repainting and original artwork courtesy of Hypersteve. That's right. I own the original artwork for the Magic Card "Merrow Commerce." Be jealous.

Housing Trends

Syracuse Real Estate

I think that graph says it all.

Back in 2006, when I bought my house, I knew Syracuse was a good place to buy a house. Why? The simple reason that there never was a housing bubble here to burst. This past year has seen the prediction come true. As housing prices tumble around the country, Syracuse remains.... well... not "strong" per se.... but stable. Syracuse remains stable, and slowly rising. The trend especially becomes visible when you click on the "10yr" button above.

(Thanks goes to Zillow for their handy graph.)