This website is needing a face-lift. And a blog update.

I'm now working full-time at ALA, managing the office, re-working the website and taking on a few additional roles and responsibilities. It's a welcome change.

I will be wrapping up my current freelance projects as soon as possible. This mostly pertains to websites, which I've been doing to serve a financial means. I will continue doing projects on a very select basis and will try and be available for my existing friends and clients who want work done.

My life just got a little bit more simple.

My employment at ALA has been extended, definitely for a month and quite possibly longer. This will make searching for a new place easier next month and also gives me more time for the website/identity update that is underway at ALA.

I'm going to take some steps to improve my freelancing to keep bringing in that extra cash. Stay tuned for embedded forms, a client page and all sorts of goodies.

I was getting frustrated with the long load-time of my site, and need to get back on the grind with finding a job, so a redesign was in order. Now it even matches my resume!

My position with ALA ends in just under a month, which means I need to line up a new, wonderful and hopefully lucrative gig! As I told a friend upon quitting the restaurant: 'I will never work in food service again' and I intend to stay true to that.

Ideally, September will arrive with a new job lined up and a new apartment found. The journey continues and I'm just glad that everything has worked out thus far. Big thanks to all of my clients, you people who pay me to do what I love are amazing and I don't think I can thank you enough.

Onward!

I've found a job for the summer!

I'll be answering phones and doing other miscellaneous work for my mother's company, Adult Living Alternatives, I had been doing some graphics work for them as a freelancer but was getting screwed at tax time. Working on the clock for ALA will work out better for all parties: I can collect a good wage while taking my time on updating their page and tightening up their identity system.

I'm still going to do two days a week at the restaurant, but hopefully by the time my position ends with ALA I will have found a full time, worthwhile job.

Welcome to my new website.

A new style, better architecture and new work to look at! I've started adding my photography and I'll be adding illustrations and other 'fine art' as I have time.

This blog, embedded via an i-frame, will be my soapbox, podium and pulpit. I'll try and post as often as I can and try and keep the antidotes about my day job tasteful.

Leave me feedback!

Its a strange world.

This happened a few months back but is still one of my favorites:

Everything looks perfect. Each nasty, walk-in special salad is stocked, the shiny spoons and tonges are all aligned like soldiers' bayonets, the rolls are damn near geometric in their pans, even the hot, nasty, bland soups are looking edible, not even a cup taken yet from all four liners. Plates, bowls, cups, forks and spoons are stocked up. My back ups are ready for battle, this salad bar is ready for a dinner rush.

It looks like, for the first time in weeks, I'll win today's round. Everyday before leaving work, the owner of the restaurants tears through the kitchen, through the walk-ins, cooks' line, low-boys and out on to the floor in search of something, anything wrong to berate the perpetrator about. She stops and looks at everything on my salad bar as I wait, standing practically at attention.

I can see the crazed look in her opaque eyes. She needs blood.

She grabs a service spoon from the 6 pan of sunflower seeds.

"this spoon is too dramatically placed into the seeds, just put it in normally."

She walks out the back door without saying a word to anyone else.

I smile and count the victory as mine.

Orientation

I was thinking the other day, as I was finishing a shift at Old Wive’s, crouched down and using a hose to clear a day’s worth of foodwaste from beneath an oven, that I need to shift gears in my life.
It has been not yet a year since I received my B.S. in Art, and it has been almost exactly six months since I started working the nighttime dish/pantry shift at Old Wive’s. It is almost needless to say that this is not where I anticipated being when I crossed the stage on June 30th, 2007.
So I have devised a plan: If I have not found a decent, respectable job as a graphic artist by June 30th of this year, I am going to get another degree. An MFA (Master’s of Fine Arts) from the best design school that will have me.

The average human spends their first 30 years on earth learning the rules, finding their place and paying dues so that they can spend the next 30 years working arduously in whatever field they have chosen. The remaining 30+ years on earth are spent reaping what has been sown by 60 years of learning and working.

Thinking about my own life in this way has allowed me to recognize the futility of my current situation and once again ignited the proverbial fire beneath my ass.

By this time next year, I will be either working in a design firm / in-house or be well on my way to choosing a school to attend in the fall of 2009.