Boring Blog

I decided my blog is boring. It needs to be redesigned and re-purposed. I won't have much time to attend to this project so it may take some time, but I need to make something new and different. Perhaps I will just create another blog from scratch. I'll have to think about it and experiment when time allows.

More Fun with Employment

OK, I've been here for a year. Here is a contract job in a government funded non-profit. The pay is lousy, the benefits are paltry, the commute is an hour plus drive each way. On the job, I wait for people. I think my job should be called "senior waiter". Well, maybe not. "Waiter" implies "to wait on", as opposed to the defacto "to wait for". So maybe "senior waitee" is better.

However, looking at it from a larger perspective, it doesn't really matter. I will be leaving here shortly. After 10 years of contract work, watching my pay rate go down, down, down, the almost unthinkable has happened. I have been offered a direct position. The pay is much more, the benefits are fabulously better, the commute will involve leaving the car in the driveway while I walk to the train. On the job I suspect there will be very little waiting if history can be any judge at all.

Onward, upward, forward.

Nippon Nightmare

It is not easy to take all this in, to comprehend it, to fathom it. Japan has suffered a triple blow. Disastrous, catastrophic earthquakes certainly have happened many times before in many places, even recently. Chile, Haiti, New Zealand, just to name a few. And also recently there was the tsunami that destroyed much and killed many along the coastline of Indonesia and around the adjacent Indian Ocean. But now Japan has suffered not only the earthquake, but also the concurrent tsunami, and to cap it off the Fukushima Daiichi cataclysm.

As did many, I watched some of the videos captured by the people in Japan who were not crushed or swept away. The power of nature is astounding and impressive and the vulnerability of people to natural forces is astounding and terrifying. More terrifying is the vulnerability of people to their own errors.

And now the numbers in Japan are truly awful. More than 18000 people believed to have been killed in this disaster. Meanwhile, radiation is showing up many miles from the reactors. And we hear that in hard hit areas where food is scarce, with a plethora of vending machines all around, not one has been broken into.

Japan will recover. It will take time, it will be costly, but Japan knows how to recover. They have been through this before.