Month: September 2003

So, I have reached the point in my job hunt where I’ve got a job (a great one), that I would have started a week ago if it weren’t for paperwork. So, I’m waiting now for all the paperwork to go through. I’m not 100% sure (maybe we’ll say 93.4%) that everything will work out, so I’m resisting the urge to post all the details.

In the meantime, I still have a lot of time to kill, except I can’t really kill it with job hunting anymore. So, I’ve been whiling the hours away reading news, books, websites, practicing piano, guitar, running, reading the same websites again, and so forth. I know this kind of activity must sound like bliss to pretty much everyone else, but its really starting to drive me insane.

Does anyone have any great books or websites or drug addictions that they’d like to share? I just need something to pass a bit more time, then I’m sure my normal leisure inclinations will be plenty to fill all the extra minutes I have outside of work.

One of the ideas I toyed with when I was thinking about what to do with myself after I graduated was to move to the Bay with Leslie, and to work for some cool Silicon Valley company. Well, a lot has happened in the last few months, and here I am: in Silicon Valley. I have an apartment (the best apartment in the world; you should come visit and bask in its glory). Leslie is a teacher. The only lacking component is a job for me.

Well, it’s probably an understatement to say that the Valley is not the best place to be looking for a job these days. So I spent my first couple of weeks here spewing out resumes to all kinds of companies and jobs (23 companies, over 60 jobs was my last count). I forced myself everyday to spend at least a few hours looking for listings and companies and trying to contact anyone in any way I could.

As most of you may know, I’m not a very patient person, especially when I’m idle. So the waiting was very hard for me, but eventually I got lucky. I got a call from, all told, three managers who wanted to talk to me about jobs.

I spent the next couple of weeks in interviews (lots of them), trying to juggle all the different positions. The last week has been soaked up just trying to get the timing together on offers. But it seems like at last, I will be getting an offer for a job that I’d love to take. I don’t have it in my hands yet, so I should probably still avoid from talking about job specifics, but I’m feeling very confident about it. Hopefully in the next few days everything will be settled.

When we first moved into our apartment, I had a lot of empty time to fill in the days while the job search was warming up (okay, let’s be honest, I still have a lot of free time, but at least I occasionally go out for an interview now). Anyway, because I’m not a very patient guy, and I probably had at least a few weeks of waiting around doing basically nothing while trying to get a job, I decided to try to grow a bansai tree from this tiny little kit that Leslie had.

I opened the book, and it said the first thing that you should do is to soak the seeds in water for 24 hours. Now, for me, this is a real problem, because I don’t like to wait 24 hours for something interesting to start happening. But, in an effort to teach myself some patience I buckled down and soaked them. After a day, I looked in the book for the next step and was appalled to discover that next I was to stick them in the fridge in a damp paper towel for seven days. That is an unbelievably long time.

But I did it anyway. After seven days, I took out the seeds, soaked the peat that came with the kit in warm water, and put the seeds and the dirt in the impossibly small pot provided to grow the tree in.

More than a week passed, and there was no sign of any life in the little pot, except for the mold that grew because I dutifully kept the soil wet.

Then, finally, a few days ago a little stem thing started to push out of the dirt, and now there is a very very small pine tree that’s starting to grow:

And so this week, I think I’ll get a job.