I got out for a bit today. Classic nor’easter en route. I feel like I might have let down a friend from back home, but it’s not safe to go out and about at times like this. He’s in town with a school chorus that he conducts, doing a couple of concerts inmanhattan and at Queens College. QC is in Flushing. Getting there from here is a time-consuming enough project in normal weather, but it would be bad to get shanghied (sp?) out there on a night like this.
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Contemplating moving again. These days it almost seems possible. Laziness is the leading deterrant. Once in a while I see the perfect listing: 2 bedrooms, with a big living room and a big bedroom, with a smaller 2nd bedroom that i would use as an office. I need that. Dedicated work space where no one is allowed in and where I can shut the door at the end of the day. Or whatever constitutes a day in my unstructured life.
When I briefly hired people to do stuff I was introduced to an aspect of the new economy that I hadn’t considered: pay by production versus pay by the hour. Or maybe pay by project is the better term. I was familiar with that, with the flat rate for a given project with the burden of hours estimate on the worker. But different type of projects, like transcribing audio or editing text content, is better billed by the word than by the hour.
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These weather emergencies remind me of Florida. My mother would get hysterical over dramatic weather forecasts. Not so much when I was a kid but later. Thus it would surprise me to see news of an approaching hurricane and make not much of it, but I would call my mother to see how she was bracing for the storm to find that was freaking the fuck out. She had a 1950s-era weakness for believing what the newscasters told her. I hated that. I didn’t hate that about her, I hated that this was so typical of a generation to believe any bullshit they put in front of you. She would backhandedly admit it. I don’t remmeber the details but some nonsense conspiracy theory floated into a mainstream news broadcast. I expressed disbelief and derision to which she responded “Well someone said it, didn’t they?” The “Someone” was the television, which could say that aliens had invaded Miami and she would panic, if lightly.
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