The drive started at something like 6:00 a.m., which meant I had to be awake around 5 a.m. The 5 a.m. wake-up call is not uncommon as Erin and I have Camper and he is pretty regular in his sleeping/waking cycles. He is also pretty regular in wanting to eat every three hours, though the last couple of nights he’s gone for longer periods in between eating. This morning, when I got up with him at 2-ish a.m. he cuddled into me and then fell back to sleep. I went back to bed and a few hours later he was awake and Erin was feeding him. Then I woke up, per our usual cycle, and took him downstairs, fed him, and watched a couple of the shows we recorded over the past few nights – which is always cool. I like TV.

However, Tuesday morning had me and b-i-l leaving the house a little after 6 a.m. and driving the five hours (one way) to get his stuff. Fortunately, the drive was pretty uninteresting and there wasn’t much traffic. I liked it. We made a couple of stops, mostly for gas. When we got there we went upstairs (the apartment was on the second floor of an old house) and quickly gathered b-i-l’s things, wrapped the mattress set in a large blue tarp, and then strapped everything down in the back of the truck and headed back to Massachusetts.

Approximately 10 and a half (or eleven) hours later we pulled back into the driveway and unloaded everything on this end of the drive – right where we started.

What I realize is that I don’t really enjoy nor handle the 10 hour days of driving. The kick in the pants is that between driving semis and visiting my parents, long round trip drives used to be a part of my life. Now, though, I don’t like it a whole lot.

When we finally got home and everything was set, Camper was in bed, I’d fallen asleep on the sofa. Erin suggested I go to bed, or get ready for bed, and before I knew it I was asleep and waking up to take care of Camper and then asleep again until almost 8 a.m. Point being, I don’t think long drives with preceding nights of little sleep are really my thing anymore. Yes, I lament the loss of real road trip buddies and wish I could do that; while at the same time wondering, “Why would I want to?”

Regardless, it was an enjoyable trip and I think everything went just the way it was supposed to. Even though b-i-l’s idea of a road trip (as he described it briefly) isn’t even remotely like my idea of a roadtrip. Nuff said.

Real Heroes Fly ]]> http://www.johnhattaway.com/2009/03/john-versus/feed/ 0 http://www.johnhattaway.com/2009/02/a-little-bit-brain-dead/ http://www.johnhattaway.com/2009/02/a-little-bit-brain-dead/#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:34:13 +0000 smokingpen http://www.johnhattaway.com/?p=1724 I got up this morning and sat with Camper. We sat and Erin sat with us. 24 this week was okay. Not great. Kind of slow, though one of the (I am sure) many moles has now been revealed. Regardless, it is what it is.

Then, after a shower and a shave, I drove 2.5 hours to Fairfield University to speak with Michael White author of Soul Catcher: A Novel. And, “No,” my reason for going was not to speak about the book… though in hindsight and after purchasing a copy, and given one of the many reasons for this blog, that would’ve been a good idea too.

In all, I think I spent about five hours of driving for about one hour of talking and came away with a couple of resolutions:

1. Get into an MFA-Writing program and preferably Fairfield’s program.
2. I am still working on this one.

The point in all of this is that I am pretty mentally fried. Granted, I could go on for several thousand words in a rather dense essay about the trip and various aspects of the landscape and topography and what I was thinking about and why it all matters to you. But, truth told, I think I am going to take my copy of Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe, the burrito we got me for dinner, and my (currently) depressed about work attitude and not stare at a computer screen.

Though, for those who wish to bug me, I should have a revision of the submission piece done by Monday next (this would be 23 February). So. Bug away.

Real Heroes Fly ]]> http://www.johnhattaway.com/2009/02/a-little-bit-brain-dead/feed/ 0 http://www.johnhattaway.com/2009/02/the-second-test/ http://www.johnhattaway.com/2009/02/the-second-test/#comments Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:49:39 +0000 smokingpen http://www.johnhattaway.com/?p=1695 Well, I got up early this morning, sometime around the crack of dawn, and lay in bed waiting for my alarm to go off. Every do that? And then it goes off and if you are me you swear because you’ve been expecting it for so long you stop expecting it and then you leap out of bed and turn it off. In this case, because I’d given myself some lazy time, I laid back down in bed and listened for Camper to wake up. When he did I grabbed him, gave him some quick cuddles and a snuggle and maybe a kiss or two (babies are great that way) and then handed him to his mamma. At which point I jumped in the shower, dressed, and headed to places north of where I currently live.

The test today was the Supervisor’s test. It, like yesterday, was a timed test. Except we got twice as much time and, like yesterday, I ended up sitting around twiddling my thumbs and watching other people answer questions. The lady across from me, with the same test letter, answered one completely wrong. I told her after the test was over what she did wrong and why only one was the correct answer. The sad thing is she did the math right and still got the question wrong. Sad.

Before the test started, though, the old dude from yesterday reminded me that I wanted to replace him in his position. One of the ways in which you get to replace, say, the guy above you is by taking the test I took today. One of the ways you get to be a Census worker is by taking the test yesterday. As a result, I am now in the queue for potentially being hired; and I am also in consideration (with the possibility of having my name put into the pot for the supervisor’s supervisor position, say that twelve times fast) for supervisory positions. Salary is better than non-salary. JSYK. At least, in my opinion.

Once I was done, and the clock was sometime after 11:30 a.m., I got back into my car and headed south. I do have to admit the drive was kind of nice. A few hours later, Erin, Lisa, Camper, and I drove back to (relatively speaking) where I took the test this morning to drop off a quilt top to be quilted and on that drive I noted several places where I should probably come back, stop, take some pictures and then do it again when the trees are green, the sky is blue, and there is a decidedly obvious lack of snow on the ground. It occurred to me that people make money by uploading pictures to different websites and I’ve discovered several places around these here parts where I can take rather nice pictures.

All-in-all, the day didn’t accomplish everything I wanted it to, and at the same time we are progressing forward.

Real Heroes Fly ]]> http://www.johnhattaway.com/2009/02/the-second-test/feed/ 0 http://www.johnhattaway.com/2009/01/driving-around-town-and-ending-up-at-the-library/ http://www.johnhattaway.com/2009/01/driving-around-town-and-ending-up-at-the-library/#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:59:59 +0000 smokingpen http://www.johnhattaway.com/?p=1661 Woke up way early this morning, before the sun was up, played with Camper while Erin got ready, then gave Camper to Erin while I got ready, and then started the car, put Camper in the backseat in the base I moved (this morning) from Erin’s car to mine, and then drove through town in the early morning light. We had an appointment we had to be too. Neither Erin nor I had really been there before, though Erin was pretty sure she’d been there before, and we were following mapquest directions with Erin as the navigator. Once we got there we spent a couple of hours. Discovered that 17 year old’s may not be the brightest people in the world. And when you run into a pair of women who had their babies on the same day and named them the same might also have the same father, though I am pretty certain that was just Erin’s dad pointing out the conspiracy in the connections. Besides, who would want a couple of half-brothers with the same name? George Foreman, that’s who.

Erin made an appointment for this afternoon to discuss the changes in library sciences over the years and how those changes have caused librarians to have to adapt to necessary changes in technology through the years. Camper and I went with her and I got to wander around (Camper in arm) the library which was, at the same time, small and actually quite interesting. They have most of a series of books I’ve wanted for a while that are the collected folk and farm wisdom. They also had a book chronicalling the World Fairs of the turn of the century and how these fairs were the launching point of a lot of different inventions to include the telegraph, telephone, and record player. Sure, these are all old technology in light of text messaging, cell phone, and MP3 player. However, we don’t get to today without starting back when and the real outcome is that the World Fair’s led to Steve Jobs leading to Pixar and the iPod and all the way down to today. I’d recap but am done with that train of thought.

Yes, I am still looking for work. I have applied to a few different places ranging from technical writing to retail and the latter half of that is not super-positive. I did start the application process for Teach for America today. That should prove to be interesting. They want my GPA per year for as long as I was in school. They also want to know how much I worked and how I paid for school and how much I contributed to my own education. At that point, I decided to take a break from the application because having to come up with that information is a bit stressful to me. Plus, I don’t think I want to teach high school or pre-college anyway.

What I did learn today is that I don’t mind libraries with giant moose heads in them and with women who dote on my little boy. I should’ve taken a picture of the moose and posted it. Maybe the next time I am in there I will. I wonder if I could convince them to donate that to the John Hattaway needs a moose head on the wall organization?

Oh, and I created a page on Facebook and have ten fans. One of which I have no idea who she is. Well, not entirely true. There are three I don’t know. Two of whom know Erin. The other one, couldn’t connect her to me to save my life. Feel free to become my fan. This is an agrigator for when I do start publishing to push that information out. Thought I’d let y’all know.

Real Heroes Fly ]]> http://www.johnhattaway.com/2009/01/driving-around-town-and-ending-up-at-the-library/feed/ 0 http://www.johnhattaway.com/2008/09/van-driving-cards/ http://www.johnhattaway.com/2008/09/van-driving-cards/#comments Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:43:23 +0000 smokingpen http://www.johnhattaway.com/?p=1021 … and what they are worth.

Well, as many have been told (or were to understand), I went and got myself a BYU Van Drivers Card. The card consists of a piece of paper with my name written on it and the initials of the dude who taught the class and showed us the video on the back. The class was, not so interestingly enough, insanely boring.

Basically, there was no driving involved, people just had to sit and listen and, to a smaller extent, participate so that the class would progress. And the dude from Czechoslovakia who was teaching the class, and had a rather thick accent, and who tried to make a lot of jokes that fell flat, THAT DUDE, also tried to draw out of us things he wanted to hear about how we could be safe driving vans. It wasn’t all that effective.

So, mentally I fell back in time some number of years (18 for those who are curious) to when I was 16 and taking Drivers Education at Temple High School in Temple, TX in the VoTech building where, wonder of wonders, the school had a relatively technical method of teaching and monitoring driving skills of the students in the class (I remember sleeping through most of the classes, JSYK). This was a projected video, reel-to-reel, that had timed marks that were, in turn, synchronized to different data points on the film where, as individuals in mock cars, we were meant to respond to the circumstances of the movie. The outcome, for me, was a barely passing grade; but the idea behind the simulator (not computer run) was to gauge whether or not the students (15 to 16 years old) were getting the principles of driving from the video.

Move forward 18 years and a couple of months and there I am sitting in a class with a bunch of traditional college age students all there with the same purpose as me, to get a Van Card to drive BYU owned vans. For one girl it was so that she could take the German speaking people in the Foreign Language Housing to buy groceries once a week. For another it was because she was promoted at the Bookstore and needed to be able to drive vans to deliver things. There were other reasons. I was the only one there who did not need a van card for my job.

The class starts and we talk about the four differences between a van and a car:

1. size
2. stopping distance
3. center of gravity
4. blind spots

I am not impressed. And then we come up with six excusses not to wear a seat belt. I don’t need six excuses, all I have to do is not wear a seat belt and if Erin is not in the car with me, I pretty much get away with it. My one reason is in protest against a common sense law that mandates the wearing of a seat belt. And even then, since purchasing the latest car, I don’t think I’ve driven farther than the end of the driveway without the safety belt on, period. So, other than my occasional protests which existed in the Jeeps I owned, while driving to Oregon to help move a siblings sister-in-law, and the Honda I drove that had an automatic shoulder belt, I am pretty consistent in wearing seat belts. Especially given that I am now married, we have a child on the way, and it really is common sense to wear a seat belt even if state and federal law requires it (stupidly).

One van driving requirement at BYU is to ensure that all passengers wear their safety restraints. As that was made clear I had to think back to the days of yore when I was first here (this go round) and whether or not the class I was in that did a multi-day field trip to the San Rafael Swell, if we all (or any of us for that matter) chose to wear safety restraints? I am not recalling it.

Regardless, the point in the class was to inform. Inform of what? Well, honestly, it was to inform of responsibility to the driver for the vehicle and what proper safe driving methods and practices are or were. Great. Now I know. However, the problem is that we are forced to watch a rather old and outdated video that requires the participation of the viewing audience in looking for possible hazards. The problem is that the image quality of the video (VHS) projected over an LCD screen onto a size the video is not capable of handling actually obscures the items that are meant to be looked for and as a result, seeing all of the hazards that, invariably (and ostensibly) the narrator is going to identify and ask if you saw it, is nearly impossible.

More, when approaching various man-made obstructions, truck-driving training indicates you actually watch signs, which never came up in the video, and when the narrator would get around to narrating a scenario I would’ve already seen a sufficient number of signs indicating what was coming up to look in the general direction of what the video expect and as a result (at least in my own driving) would’ve adjusted my driving to the situation at hand. However, since I broke my driving teeth (at 16 and 17 and maybe 18) on driving the family van to and from school and other places and chauffeuring siblings about, the outcome was driving practices that didn’t really seem to make sense to me.

Sure, you want to introduce students who are young and relatively inexperienced to proper and safe driving practices, like:

Always avoid backing up.

But the means whereby this was done was substandard and I am surprised that more accidents don’t happen as a result of mere driving stupidity. One of the things I would’ve appreciated, had it happened, was a statement along the lines of:

Past driving performance does not guarantee future driving safety. Accidents can happen to anyone.

The point to all of this, I am sure, is not that driving a van is good or bad or that getting a van card is worth the time or not (I may never use it as I am a backup driver), but more along the lines that a lack of proper oversight on the parts of the people issuing the cards probably leads to an increase in the number of instances with the vans and that a certification without proper testing of understanding and ability coupled with a record of past performance ultimately guarantees that vehicles are going to be driven poorly and people are going to get into accidents.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

Real Heroes Fly

You see, I was employed a bunch of years ago by Waldenbooks. This was the first bookstore I worked for and it was fun. Well, fun and stupid all at the same time. Working for Waldenbooks was an education into a lot of things, most especially myself since I had to learn some aspects to my personality I was not aware still existed (keeping in mind that this was between the ages of 17 and 19). The sins of our youth never really go away – I guess.

Anyway, the relationship between Waldenbooks and Borders is all at the corporate level. The relationship begins when K-Mart decided to acquire Waldenbooks for a database system that the bookstore used and that K-Mart wanted. Once K-Mart had the database system (this is actually quite common in corporate America) then Waldenbooks was let go and Waldenbooks successfully gained a majority share in their own company.

Then enters Borders. Borders bookstores, music, café, etc., was started by a couple of brothers in Minnesota (this was all in some news article back about the same time I was working for Waldenbooks) who had started a series of bookstores over the course of their lifetimes. Each bookstore failed and eventually the brothers would get enough money together to try it again. They finally succeeded when they came up with the Border’s philosophy and style. At about this same time the Border’s corp. opened a store in Dallas and I dragged all of my friends, in the middle of the summer in Texas, in a Mercedes without air-conditioning, to Dallas to see this bookstore.

So, I quit Waldenbooks to work full-time at Mobile Plastic, a local plastics plant in Temple, TX, and then to serve a mission. With that, I left Waldenbooks behind me (with one exception) and never really thought about it again. That was the past.

Somewhere between 1992 and 1993 Borders and Waldenbooks bought into each other. At the time it seemed as though Waldenbooks bought out Borders and then Borders may have acquired a majority stake in Waldenbooks (this part of the relationship is foreign to me) with the outcome that Waldenbooks became a part of the Borders Group. They have other bookstores, mostly outlets, but the primary relationship is Waldenbooks (principally found in malls) and Borders (principally found in strip malls or stand alone stores).

When I applied to Borders my mind didn’t really drift back eleven or twelve years to when I worked for Waldenbooks, even though I knew the relationship of the stores, because most companies purge employment records after three or five years. So, I applied to Borders, they are the only place that has interviewed me AND offered me a job, and where I have been able to work. This took an interesting turn the other day when, as I was sitting in the break room during my lunch hour break, the girl who does the paperwork for human resources walked in to ask me whether or not I had ever worked at a Waldenbooks or Borders before.

This floored me. Don’t people purge records after a while? It is common practice in corporate America to purge records after x-amount of time (x equaling three to five years). Isn’t it?

Anyway, Garth was standing there, he is the Operations Manager or the Store Manager, or something equally as fancy, and I looked at him and her and said, “Well, yes, ten or fifteen years ago I worked for Waldenbooks. It’s been so long I didn’t even think about the job until just now.” Which is true. I hadn’t really thought about that job or the consequences of that job.

Of late my mind has been working around a simple concept. Specifically, that we, as people, count and determine time based on events that have taken place in our lives. As a society we count time before and after the birth of Christ. Hence the Gregorian Calendar system. We are now, allegedly, 2004 years past the birth of Jesus Christ.

However, there are still other events that cause people to personally begin counting time. For example, when you get married you start counting time, as related to you, from zero to one. You have been married six months, one year, five years, thirty-five years, etc.

Cancer victims may begin to count their lives in respect to when they were diagnosed and when they were declared cancer free (five years after successful cancer treatment).

The list goes on. Maybe time restarted when a terrible accident happened, a child died, a spouse died, a parent or loved one died, the first time you rode a bike, drove a car, watched a space shuttle launch, wrote your first story, dreamed your first dream, whatever it is that is important to you is where time begins again. And there can be several areas where you begin counting time. Marriage AND cancer AND death of a loved one AND your first TV appearance. You instinctively have numbers for everything and you are counting time, anew, for each item.

Anyway, that is a lot to go through just to say that one of my restarts to counting time began in September, 1993. That was when I entered the Missionary Training Center in Provo, UT for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to begin two years serving as a full-time missionary. I even had, have, the card the certified me an ordained minister for the LDS church. The second such event, for me, happened in late August, 1995 when I came home from my mission and started living life again. Every other event has meant little or nothing to me (except for turning 26 and becoming an official Menace to Society).

To further illustrate this, it’s been eleven years and some months since I left on my mission which means it’s been almost twelve years since I worked for Waldenbooks and a little over nine years since I came home from my mission. Because of this I can say that it has been eleven years since I graduated from high school (not something I care about except in relation to other events that have taken place in my life) and just over eight years since I made the fateful decision to drive semis rather than go to school directly.

All ancillary items are associated to when I served a mission and not when other things happened. I only remember when I graduated from high school, when I drove semi’s, when I drove across the western United States with my dad, in relation to the mission. So, my remembering that I worked for Waldenbooks, since I choose not to live in the time before my mission (or for that matter within my mission) is not something that I do very often. And, since enough time has elapsed since then that I shouldn’t have to remember that stuff, well, it was a little bit of a shock when they wanted to know if I had ever worked for Waldenbooks and Borders before and I had to say “yes” and then apologize for not remembering it.

Garth waved it off. But then, Garth doesn’t know what I know and am now remembering. The girl who does the HR paperwork had to fax my paperwork over to Anne Arbor, MI so that the people there could handle the transfer of store. I am surprised, needless to say, that my social security number still exists within that chains database and I am a bit disturbed by it.

I am legitimately concerned over the nature of the world where data can, and is, stored over a very long period of time in a digital format. My bookstore career started at age 17 in Temple, TX, continued at a rival bookstore, B. Dalton, also in Temple, TX (post mission), and now continues back with the original chain in Concord, NH.

I think what is really getting me isn’t so much the retention of numbers within a database, but that those same numbers are associated with a part of me that I left behind a long time ago. That they have not been dissociated with Waldenbooks in Temple, TX at the Temple, TX mall and that I now have to wonder what the manager, whose name I cannot even remember, said about me when I left.

Like I said, I left on good terms… it was six months later, as I was in the MTC and preparing to head to San Jose, CA for two years, when I was feeling that I needed to take care of some aspects of my time at that store, that worries me. Those aspects are between me and the Lord and apparently a company I now work for again, and all are things that I had left behind me a long time ago on what seems, to me, to be a place that I left far behind me.

Here’s hoping I walk into work tomorrow and still have a job. My mind is still working through worse-case, best-case scenarios and I think the middle ground there may be me apologizing again for not mentioning my previous experience. Heck, a resume is only supposed to hold ten years.

Real Heroes Fly ]]> http://www.johnhattaway.com/2004/09/after-four-days/feed/ 0