So. I can't wait for April to be over. This has been the craziest month ever. Without a doubt. Not the busiest, but the craziest.

No, there are no monkey related stories in this post; I just thought it made a cool title. Welcome to fiction. One of these days I WILL make up some strange story.

Anyway back to the crazy month:
So the business deal went awry and I lost my park service job by three days becase of the sour deal. It sucked for the deal to go sour, but that wasn't unexpected. What really sucked was losing my back up job by three days. So, I had to start researching for a job and I started with the park. To make a long story short, my job had already been offered to another, so technically it was gone, but not completely gone because there was a catch. You ready? There use to be a government means of choosing from the top three-five candidates applying for a position. That way, there was a little leeway based on "rank" which we won't even get into. However, the stupid powers that be passed a new law that requires military veterans to ALWAYS be considered above any other applicants. Well, as it turns out a military applicant had "ranked" higher than the person my boss hired. But my boss didn't know of the new directive, and he was told by his boss and others to unoffer the job to the poor college kid and offer it to the veteran (Talk about a shitty position). However, the veteran had worked at the park before and was rude, incompetent, and just plain awful. No one wanted him back, yet the directive was clear. So, The assistant superintendent was enlisted to contact the destrict office in Omaha, NE (I work in MI) to get an official waver to higher this poor college kid who just had a job "unoffered" to her because of official BS. So, the only way I was getting my old job back was if 1) They couldn't get a waver to bypass the rude veteran and hire the college kid. Therefore it was out of my hands, yet a really awful situation nonetheless. To summarize: they did get a waver, but the next day another park employee took another job at another park so I was able to come back and the college kid was able to be hired. A happy ending!

So I've decided to jump in and make my own blog. I don't see this as something that anyone else is necessarily interested in reading, but it might just keep me a bit honest and allow me to capture a few thoughts for future reference.

I spent yesterday and today at the Hartford National Writers Workshop. The principal sponsor is the Hartford Courant with additional sponsorship by the Poynter Institute. Not surprising, about half the content was aimed toward journalism, with the rest of the workshops talking about other kinds of writing. It was a seasonal weekend: it was cool and rainy the whole time. My friend, Bonnie, who had invited me to attend based upon her experience at the workshop last year neglected to tell me that all the general sessions were being held in a tent.

Hi all,

Last year I'd attended a screenwriting workshop run by Lew Hunter.

A person from that colony published a pictoral journal at http://www.msgroup.org/msg/introducing_superior.htm

Hope you enjoy the trip down memory lane.

Boris

I've installed a rudimentary notify feature. What it does is allow you to receive emails when content is added or modified. To enable this feature, go to "my account" and click the "my notify settings".

Additionally, I've been fooling with the permissions settings again. If it's too confusing, let me know.

Hi all,

I've created a new blog site that you're welcome to view.
I've been meaning to keep a journal for some time and I finally started it up a few days ago.

The website url is: http://writerboris.blogspot.com/

I'll post to it regularly.

Boris

Please welcome Boris (sfwriterb) and Jana to SFWW! Boris officially joined our group Monday, and Jana is in the process of signing up.

Note: to contact either Boris or Jana by email, refer to the SFWW updates for email addresses. Or follow the [b]member list [/b]link to send a private message.

Ah. It's Monday. This means I'm motivated to post some virtual drivel on the net. Or it means, since I'm also chatting with this group at the time, that I sneak out every few moments to write something in this space. Is this what they call multitasking? But I'm not really doing this simultaneously. Hmmm.

Had a bit of a rough week. Had a business deal implode three days too late, which means I also lost my previous job--which is the reason I came to MI in the first place. Oh to look for work. Ucky. (which by the way is one of my new favorites words). To be more specific, my wife and I gave a proposal, which the current business owners took to their advisors. They returned with only a few minor conditions to agree to. Now, I never thought the deal was "solid" but I did think it was about 90% good. We were on our way to writing a contract. Meanwhile, my old job boss needed to know whether I was staying or leaving, and after waiting to the last possible moment, I had to say leaving. Well, big surprise after going out on a limb, the branch snapped--the owners came back from drafting a contract with their advisors and suddenly wanted twice what they had agreed upon for an initial downpayment. Needless to say, that was not going to happen, out trust was broken, and my wife and I had to move on. Sadly, she too has just quit her job, but for reasons unrelated to this business deal gone bad. Oh well. Crap happens and all those cliches.

A couple of interesting developments this week for the science minded individuals:

1)MIT researches have built a tiny battery using viruses.
This is cool. Its the beginings of using biologies own tools to build the first generation of nanotech tools.
Can molecular assemblers be far away?

Article is here:

[url]http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-04/miot-mrb040606.php[/url]

2)researches at another site have found that if you introduce Chaos into a system, Order is created. This has some far reaching implications for those who believe the Universe is too complex to not have an Intelligent Hand.