Joe Mayer

is unemployed again. :-(



I'm doing 37 things
 

Joe Mayer's Life List

  1. 1. play in a band again
    13 entries . 106 cheers
    63 people
  2. 2. Get out of the house and do something every weekend
    20 entries . 144 cheers
    10 people
  3. 3. get rid of all my clutter
    2 entries . 45 cheers
    1,141 people
  4. 4. Organize my storage unit better
    2 entries . 11 cheers
    1 person
  5. 5. Sell stuff on Craigslist
    2 entries . 32 cheers
    15 people
  6. 6. re-design my website
    8 entries . 11 cheers
    539 people
  7. 7. Go bowling more often
    4 entries . 44 cheers
    38 people
  8. 8. Actually meet face-to-face with someone from 43 Things
    1 entry . 22 cheers
    101 people
  9. 9. Record a song and upload it to Garageband.com
    5 entries . 76 cheers
    32 people
  10. 10. Learn to play clawhammer-style banjo
    5 entries . 48 cheers
    2 people
  11. 11. Save $1000
    1 entry . 46 cheers
    462 people
  12. 12. grow my own herbs
    2 entries . 83 cheers
    173 people
  13. 13. Try a new recipe each week
    4 entries . 31 cheers
    162 people
  14. 14. read every book on the Modern Libraries top 100 books of the 20th century
    2 entries . 13 cheers
    113 people
  15. 15. Learn Spanish
    2 entries . 64 cheers
    15,444 people
  16. 16. Actually finish one of my programs and post it to the Web
    1 entry . 7 cheers
    1 person
  17. 17. Learn vb.net
    2 entries . 5 cheers
    107 people
  18. 18. Go back to college
    4 entries . 110 cheers
    901 people
  19. 19. Train my cat to walk on a leash.
    1 entry . 25 cheers
    7 people
  20. 20. make people understand that declawing a cat is a painful unnecessary surgery and there are better ways to deal with cat's scratching
    1 entry . 43 cheers
    214 people
  21. 21. Go camping more often.
    3 entries . 66 cheers
    271 people
  22. 22. visit all 50 states
    3 entries . 26 cheers
    7,111 people
  23. 23. go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
    1 entry . 45 cheers
    9 people
  24. 24. Get a digital SLR camera
    1 entry . 35 cheers
    760 people
  25. 25. Get a wind synthesizer
    1 entry . 9 cheers
    1 person
  26. 26. Get a pedal MIDI controller
    1 entry . 5 cheers
    1 person
  27. 27. re-learn german
    1 entry . 17 cheers
    135 people
  28. 28. re-learn french
    1 entry . 18 cheers
    428 people
  29. 29. learn arabic
    1 entry . 15 cheers
    2,099 people
  30. 30. learn Latin
    1 entry . 19 cheers
    1,880 people
  31. 31. Get my home studio fully functioning
    9 entries . 112 cheers
    1 person
  32. 32. Bake my way through the BH&G New Baking Book, one recipe at a time
    2 entries . 11 cheers
    1 person
  33. 33. Copy my records on to CD
    1 entry . 17 cheers
    3 people
  34. 34. Scan all my family photos and burn them to CD/DVD
    1 entry . 37 cheers
    12 people
  35. 35. Get all of my computer CDs transferred to DVDs
    1 entry . 4 cheers
    1 person
  36. 36. Make DVDs from old videos
    1 entry . 12 cheers
    30 people
  37. 37. Get my mandola working
    1 entry . 16 cheers
    1 person
Recent entries
visit all 50 states (read all 3 entries…)
Ticked off a bunch more last month... 7 months ago

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.

Here’s the updated map:

create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out ourCalifornia travel guide



get a job (read all 3 entries…)
Finally! 15 months ago

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!



play in a band again (read all 13 entries…)
Now that I'm here, I just need to get out and mingle... 18 months ago

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…



See all entries ...


 

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