Joe Mayer

My girlfriend and I went on a road trip vacation to Boston to visit one of her friends toward the tail end of March, and we wound up seeing a lot of states that neither of us had seen before. For me, the new states visited were Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, DC (although I know that it’s technically not a state…), Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont. We had a great time, although there was a whole lot more driving per day than we expected. We left Denton, TX, Saturday morning, spent most of Monday walking around Washington, DC, and arrived in Boston Wednesday afternoon. We left the car parked on Thursday and Friday, taking the subway down to Fenway Park and walking around the Freedom Trail in Boston on those days. Saturday, we drove up to Maine for a day trip, which took us longer than expected. Then we left for home Sunday morning, driving back through New York, the little Erie point of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Oklahoma. We got back home around midnight on Tuesday. Overall, something like 4250 miles on the car in 9 days of actual driving. Next time, we’re thinking of flying to our destination and just renting a car for a day trip. We’ll see, though.

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After a couple of months of cherry-picking, just trying to find a perfect job match for my skills and what I wanted to do, I started applying to pretty much anything that I thought I might be able to do with any kind of competence. Oddly, while browsing through all of the clerical and admin assistant jobs in all the local papers, I ran across a programming job right here in Denton. I went ahead and filled out the application and such, and upon getting the interview, I found out that basically most of what they were looking for was exactly the sort of stuff that I’ve been doing for the past ten years: Access and SQL programming, the boring kind of stuff that runs behind the scenes and doesn’t really make anyone stand up and take notice until it isn’t working right. I guess I did all right on the interview, because I got the job, and yesterday (Monday) was my first day of training. Haven’t really done any of the actual work yet, so I have yet to see how that’s going to be. And the one thing they also want me to do is revamp their website, which is currently pretty pathetic. So now I’m spending most of my spare time reading up on ASP.Net programming. We’ll see how that goes. But at least I’m employed again!

I wrote to about a dozen different musicians in the D/FW area who had advertised for bass players on Craigslist in the month or so before I moved here. I got responses back from about four of them, saying that I should get in touch when I got down here. Unfortunately, I’ve been so busy trying to find work and just getting my bearings straight and such that I’ve only been in contact with one of them, and that was actually because he sent me a message asking if I’d made it yet.

So, I really need to get back in touch with people, and then I need to get my act together and get myself playing again and start looking for some folks to play with. It’s prime area for it, so the only thing keeping me from it is my own laziness…