The Jack Noodle Journal

I started writing this post yesterday (monday) and then got sidetracked from the typing. Maybe I can finish up my report on the last weekend before the next one comes.

Here:

oh man. Show me the coffee.

I had a pretty full weekend. It was a fun weekend overall. Now that it’s Monday I can relax a bit. Yeah, not really.

On Friday night I went to the “We’re From Japan” show. It was pretty rocking. The boys were very loud. The show worked well at getting the strange taste out of my mouth created by the presidential debates.

On Saturday there was lots of napping. I tried unsuccessfully to help K with the house chores.

Later in the evening we went to Lianne and Martin’s for some bbq and paella fun. Great to see the whole crew of course. There was a bit of Seth birthday well wishing going on. We were also there celebrating Kathleen finishing her dissertation, but the Shelton Twins couldn’t make it down I guess. The satellite feed to Kathleen’s live acceptance speech wasn’t coming in either.

On Sunday I got up pretty early and put about 4 and half hours of work working in. With such a full schedule of weekend events I was a tad worried about not putting in some “get ahead of the game” telecommuting hours in. I think I’m okay still.

Sunday afternoon we went up to my grandpa’s in Vancouver to have some birthday cake and ice cream for my mom. Good to see the family of course. G Noodle had some good times with my aunts and mom wrestling over holding him.

Sunday night I headed over to the Holocene to celebrate at a wedding party for co-worker, Jason and his new bride Becky. It was a really fun party. Jason performed some songs and there were other musical guests.

I know, I know. K did stay home with G quite a bit of the weekend while I went out. It’s okay though because it was my turn to go out. She went out the weekend before and will probably be out next weekend. Also she got hang with G. That’s a major party in it’s own right.

My friends the band, “We’re From Japan!” are playing a rock show, concert, fun time at the Doug Fir Friday night at 9:00 PM. You should all go and show your love.

I’m going to try my best to be there.

They’ve got a new album that has to be coming out soon. Right? Where IS that new album, kids?

Here’s their myspace.

Here’s something someone from Spin wrote about their Music Fest NW appearance this year (third band down).

See you there!

Oh my god! my god, my god!

K, G and I were walking the dogs this morning and a yellow jacket flew into G Noodle’s stroller and stung him on the head! I was waving my arms trying to shoo it out of the stroller (hopefully that’s not when the sting occurred) and K comes running back with the dogs. I pulled the young G out of the stroller and hugged him close.

“Did it get him? Did it get him?”

That’s when K spots the angry red sting mark on G’s poor bald head.

We raced back the 6 remaining blocks to the house and franticly called the doctor.

I don’t know if K would have called herself frantic. I was pretty frantic.
It was horrible! A mean bastard bee stung my little man on the head!

Maybe frantic is too dramatic of a word here. Deeply concerned and pained by my child’s discomfort. Freaked out a bit, yes.

I’ve been thinking about this for the past few weeks, and with parenthood there has come a power to imagine the most horrible things possible. I thought I could think up some whoppers before but the awful things that you can think of happening to your child take the cake. One could lose sleep if they dwelt on the unpleasantness. Atrocities that can’t even be spoken aloud! Oh man. Worry. This is what it is like to care about someone more than you care about yourself.

I was just imagining G swelling up like a giant red, angry stay-puff marshmallow man. What if his throat swelled closed? This was just a bee sting! What happens when a really horrible accident comes?

The lady on the hospital call line calmed me down. The internet came to the rescue with what to do as well. The lady I talked to on the phone said that if there is going to be an allergic reaction to a bee sting it will happen in the first 30 minutes after a sting.

He has survived the attack! Gilby is sleeping right now. He’s fine. There isn’t any swelling from the bee sting and everybody is breathing fine. He might be a little sore when he wakes up.

One thing we learned today is that we need to get ALL of our important phone numbers typed up, printed out and pasted to the fridge. There was too many seconds of phone number finding today.

I also need to figure out how to chill the hell out. This bundle of nerves thing is really starting to get ugly. Maybe I should exercise and eat better, drink more water. Spending quiet meditation time and going to my inner happy place should help as well.

Stupid bees! Argh! Nature!

Happy birthday to Big Baby Seth! He becomes an old man today.

Hundreds of you fine readers of this here journal have birthdays in September.

Let me give a run down, shout out all in one blast and be done with it.

Happy birthday to nephew Caleb! 9 years old!

Happy birthday to mi madre Mary!

Happy birthday to Mr. Baptist! We’ll see YOU soon.

Happy birthday to the dashing Mathew!

and of course happy birthday to the strong yet gentle, Officer Steve.

If I missed you please send me an email so I can update my September birthday database.

Hey there. I’m sitting here in the green chair with a sleeping baby laying across my lap. I’m going to try to do some typing, but it’s difficult because he’s laying on my left arm.

Yeah, we’ve got an election coming up huh? I thought I should put a couple of words about it into the journal so I would have something to look back on in the future.

I haven’t written anything on the subject of politics for several years now. I don’t know. It’s often such a sad topic and I don’t feel I have any new insight to add to it. I have a lot of head shaking. I entered “John Kerry” into the journal’s search engine (here, I’ll do it for you) and found plenty of political blog posts crafted by me during the 2004 election. Yeah those were the days. I think my departure from blogging on politics is best represented by November 3rd, 2004 blog post titled, “Bush Wins“. Ah, I love when future versions of me check in like I’m doing now with the “John Kerry? who the heck was that?” post.

Well, It’s four years later and those 2004 posts sound oddly similar. One thing I have learned from the last election is that a large portion of the United States doesn’t think the same way as people in Portland Oregon do. I think that I’ll be more guarded from the surprise of this when November 2008 rolls around.

At first I was thinking, “I would really love for someone to (calmly) explain their logic and reasons for continually voting like they do”. I don’t think that any more. I don’t have the time, patients or energy to try to figure the other side out. I’m happy with not knowing for now. If you think that 4 more years of the last 8 is a good thing, then nothing I’ll say will convince you. I’m not interested in you trying to convince me of anything either. I haven’t been an undecided voter for many years now.

I think both sides of this election are in pretty bad shape. I’m frustrated with all of it. Maybe it’s the media’s fault? There is some really scary and serious stuff going on and we are all treating this like the finals of “American Idol”. The candidates are behaving like children and no one is really talking about anything of actual substance. This election shouldn’t be a form of entertainment for us!

Deep breaths…

I heard somebody somewhere say that in a democracy the country always gets the government they deserve. I don’t know. I hope we actually still deserve something great.

I guess it’s pretty easy to be down in the dumps when you stay home and listen to the news and read web posts all day. I’ll stop doing that right… now.

I DO like the point that Rushkoff makes today by saying that it is important to stay happy.

Baby Watch 2008 has been going marvelously. I think this is going work people. G Noodle and I have been having a great time! Having me home while K is out working has strengthened the bond between the lad and I. I feel much closer to him than I had in the previous months. Part of that is probably due to him developing into more of an actual person now.

I’m figuring out how to manage my at home workload better now as well. I have had a really good week work-wise. I don’t feel as freaked out by the daunting task of 20 hrs like I did a few weeks ago. It’s all about time management and working as hard and fast as you can when a spare moment opens up around here. When you are at it don’t screw around boy.

One thing I haven’t managed to get under control is my house cleaning and yard work duty. I guess that is a good sign that I am able to lift my head up from the diapers long enough to notice my surroundings a bit more. We have got a lot of work to do around here! It’s hard keeping up with things when I’m always holding the little pooper. Sure, I set him down quite a bit but it’s still hard to do any cleaning when he wants to be picked up every 10 minutes. When he falls asleep I haven’t yet mastered the method of setting him down in his bed without him waking up. Sometimes I can sort of get it right. It’s a really quick yet gentle move.

K has a better handle on this than I do. She has found a way to actually get stuff done. I’ll figure it out I guess. It’s hard as well when K gets home for me to do my chores because I have to hit my computer workload and stay up on the 20. My time to do my housework is definitely going to have to be during the day.

Our yard is a disaster! G and I have been sitting out there with the dogs off and on during the day and it just makes me sick. It needs some major work. K says that we have reached the point where everything is going to have to be cut down, torn out and we’ll just start over out there.

It’s funny when we have been going on our dog walks during the weekends and we pass a house with an over grown yard, we realize that they must have a new baby in the house as well. We’ve actually called it perfectly a couple of times when we saw the family sitting on the porch with the little one.

Perhaps we can get some yard work done this weekend. If you all would stop inviting us to your weddings every weekend then we might have a chance! I think we might throw a weed wacking party and have our friends pitch in. Hmmm… now there’s a plan.

I think i said it around the same time last year, and I’ll say it again: Enough of this heat! Summer is over people! I have resigned myself to the fact that I am now only a fall and spring man. Let’s get it back down to 60 okay?

During my stints in the art school circuit there always seemed to be hundreds of students who’s major goal in life was to be able to illustrate children’s books. What do you want to do when you get out of art school? It would always come up at least once during introductions on first days of class. Usually twice because the second person was lazy and stole “illustrate children’s books” from the first person.

Well, sure everyone wants to illustrate children’s books. It was never one of MY desires though. I guess I kind of saw it like saying you wanted to be an actor, a movie star. What do you want to be when you grow up? I’m going to La La land to be in the pictures. A stunt man. An astronaut. A fireman. A children’s book illustrator.

I always thought I would create Nike commercials when I grew up. I guess there’s still time.

We were at my mom’s house a while back, talking about children’s books and she went and got out all of my brother and I’s books that she had been saving from when we were kids. Thank goodness she has had them all of these years. They would have been destroyed if they had gone with anyone else.

I looked through the stack with the Gster. All of the greatest hits were there. “A Hole a Box and a Stick“, “Peter’s Chair“, “The Caboose Who Got Loose“, “Good Night Moon (of course)”, “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble” and several others. A flood of memories came back. I had remembered again a lot of the illustrations and remembered how I would practice drawing the pictures from the books.

After going through my mom’s stash we went to the bookstore to continue building on Gilby’s. We got him a couple of his daddy’s favorite’s, “The Monster at the End of this Book” and “Corduroy“. Oh my goodness, Corduroy is an eye moistener isn’t it?

I was amazed at the copyright date on some of those books. Those tales have some years on them! I quickly realized the whole market of selling the books to the parents who want to pass the fond memories on to their children has been going on for generations now.

My grandma has always tried to make all of her grand kids bookworms. She worked as a school librarian back in the day. I can remember her and others reading to us back when my brother and I were kids.

My mom always appreciated how my father’s mother read to us and wants story time for her grand kids now as well.

I hope, I hope we can make Gilby into a bookworm. I think with each generation it gets harder to keep them still long enough to read a book to them. We’re gonna try with this guy though. Who knows, maybe if we force it on him now he will have fond memories of the books and people who read them to him when he is 35.

You know, being a children’s book illustrator wouldn’t be a bad gig at all would it?

I have been interested in working faster and more efficiently now that I am working half time at home. I have a stack of hundreds of apparel product shot photographs that I retouch, construct and add clipping paths to each week. Being speedy and staying on task quickly becomes a matter of life or death.

I got to thinking about it and realized that with my hundreds of years of experience as a Photoshop professional, I could probably construct a decent list of speed increasing tips. I’m not the fastest production worker, photo retoucher person by any stretch of the imagination, but I have been around several speed demons and may have picked up a few of their tricks along the way.

If you have any good tips, or see something I may have missed on my list, by all means send them my way.

1. Drink lots of coffee. The more the better.

2. Concentrate. Try to focus only on the image you are working on at the moment. Get in a zone.

3. Create a pattern, the fastest route possible through a file, and stick to that pattern. Memorize those steps and repeat them the exact same way with all of the files you are working on only faster next time.

4. Learn your keystrokes. I need to do better with this one. Using key commands instead of pull down menus to perform tasks saves little bits of time that add up.

5. Don’t work on unnecessarily large file sizes. Why is there so much empty white space on your image? Crop that puppy down! Why are you using 25 layers? Get in the habit of merging your layers together and using as few layers as possible. The more layers you have in a file the larger it becomes, making your computer work harder on it.

6. Don’t zoom in past 200% to do your work. You’re too close. You’re spending time on details that people won’t notice in the final product. Once you are zoomed in, try to do as much as you can in that one area and the areas next to it before zooming out again. Zooming in and out and scrolling around eats up time.

7. Click as fast as possible.

8. Be tidy with you page construction, file naming and folder structures. The more order you can harness, the faster and more efficient you will be. Pay attention to what’s what and where it’s at.

9. Don’t make any mistakes. Do it right the first time so you don’t have to do it again.

10. Finish with your file and let it go. Move on to the next one. Hit save, and then close it. Don’t dwell on work you’ve already done. Don’t worry if it was done correctly or looks good. QC will catch it. Plus you followed your pattern (#3) exactly the same way so there’s nothing wrong. Don’t get distracted between files. Move on to the next file, finish that one and move on to the next. Forget as you go. Stay in the moment or a little bit in the future.

11. Only take breaks if you have to. This is probably the opposite to every other increase production advice tip. Really though, take a break only if you come to a natural pause in your work load. Remember that you will be leaving the zone you were in and time burglars (coworkers) are hiding around every corner. You will need to take a break though when your back starts killing you, your eyes get dry, your vision blurry and your neck, shoulder, arm, wrist and hand are numb from the pain.

12. Don’t look at the internet while you are working. Stop checking your email every five minutes. Seems obvious right? It’s crazy how quickly a click to the internets or email can enter your work flow routine. Between files or tasks is the time to beware of this. This one is hard for me as well. I’m always checking in with my Google Reader to see if anyone has put up new posts.

13. Don’t Listen to your headphones while trying to work hard. Maybe. I’m not sure about this one. I’m going to do some more research. I don’t want it to be true but I have been starting to notice a speed increase at home when I’m not wearing my headphones. I know! What will this do to my music listening? I have been listening to music out loud at home without headphones and this seems to be okay so far. Headphones are a must at the office though for drowning out other coworker conversations and loud phone calls. This is a troubling one for sure.

14. And lastly, a very important method for increasing production speed in Photoshop is to not spend valuable production time typing up a blog post about how to increase production speed in Photoshop.

I know that there are many programs that one can use to check out all kinds of statistics in regards to one’s website. I don’t worry too much about my stats. I check out the stats that Feedburner gives me about the Noodle Journal and that’s it.

One thing I do find interesting is the reports that come in showing you which cities and countries are tuning in. I assume that most of the audience that tunes in to read about our adventures here at the Noodle Compound are friends and family.

I can kind of tell who’s checking for the most part around the globe. For example, when I see hits coming from Japan, I know that it’s our friends of the family that live over there. We’ve got bases in Arizona, California, Washington, New York, and Maryland so we are familiar with those peeps as well (who did I miss?).

I know that the occasional Google search will bring people from places I have never heard of like Issaquah. Who, what or where is that located? There’s a US flag next to it. Hmmm. Let me check. Oh Washington! Of course! I just talked to you guys today. No, wait. You guys aren’t from that city. Well let’s see. Where’s Fort Lee then? Oh, New Jersey huh?

The folks I’m curious about are the frequent readers of the Journal who are coming from Herzogenaurach, Germany. Who do we know over there? I do have a few German colleagues, but not from Herzogenaurach I don’t think. They wouldn’t know about the Journal anyway.

I am given even more pause after reading Herzogenaurach’s Wikipedia page. Hey, wait a second. Do you think? Nah! Couldn’t be.

Drop us a line Germany! Tell us how it’s going over there.

G Monkey and I went with Ari and Kathy to the Mommy Matinee at the Kennedy School yesterday. It was really fun. Mommy Matinee is a great idea. Get those parents and kids out for some playtime and movies during the middle of the day. I had to laugh to myself at one point because I couldn’t hear the movie over all of the kids and babies talking, crying and running around the theater. Oh yeah. Exactly. Awesome.

We’ll definitely be attending Mommy Matinee again the future. When does Dark Knight hit the McMenamins circuit? I might be switching off weeks with K though so she can go have fun. She’s been to like three of them already though. Maybe I should catch up before she gets to go again.

That was the first time we had left the house by ourselves to check something out. Phew! We did good! Baby steps people. Soon we will be fully out on the town and chillin’. I carried G in the snugli front pack harness holder thingy and that seemed to work well.

Gilby slept through the whole movie.

The movie we saw was “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”. It was fine. Okay. The little bits that they slipped in that you liked from the other movies were exciting to see again. The song man! The song! I can see why my friends who are fans of Indy were so upset. It was amazingly over the top. It was SO ridiculous that there was no way it wasn’t meant to be that way on purpose. Some of the stuff was just a tad too silly though.

I guess maybe all of the Indiana Jones movies were supposed to be seen that way. Not serious. Just go and ride the roller coaster and have fun.

Oh yeah, feel free to also apply the title of this post to the Republican National Convention that I had the misfortune of having on in the background while I was doing my computer work last night.