Hopper Employed!

 

I started my fourteenth job ten days ago, after a ten-week layoff when I quit my New Jersey job for the move down here to Texas. For those keeping score, I was a

 

Temp

Deli worker

Student librarian

Pager programmer

Warranty clerk

Email Help Desk tech

Computer support tech at the HQ of a Japanese bank

Computer support tech at the HQ of a Canadian bank

Payroll admin for an auto dealership

Payroll admin for another auto dealership

Payroll admin for yet another auto dealership

Payroll admin for a mental health nonprofit

Tax return preparer

 

And now I m a “Payroll Coordinator” for a large soft drink manufacturer. The job is still 100 percent remote due to the Wu Flu, but they are looking to go to a hybrid schedule at the beginning of November. This, however, is taken with a grain of salt, as prior deadlines have come and gone. I could be remote for a while, and a kinda like it. I’ve set up an office in the carpeted front room of my new house, and it’s a thousand times better than the cold, dank dungeon basement of my old home workspace back in NJ.

The company has over 25,000 employees nationwide, so there’s a team of 47 people handling payroll. I am one of a team of 9 who handle disbursement from paycheck withholdings. Specifically, I pay dues to the unions that are pulled from employee paychecks. The difficulty is that there are 96 unions, and some require payment by the 10th, the 15th, or the 30th of the month. So there’s lots of spreadsheets and shared drive activity and WebEx meetings and such.

So it’s very Zen and once I get everything down it will give me the degree of freedom I had up in NJ. That’s something to look forward to. In the meantime, it feels great to be a contributor again to the family finances, in a proactive way!

Another Birthday Comes and Goes ...

Good Lord! So much has happened in the past week and a half! Hopper’s been so busy and has had so much going on that I haven’t even had time to walk or throw the weights around, eat clean and keto, get the girls to school in the morning, or even read, for that matter. Well, I still kept reading, if only late at night after everyone’s gone to bed.

Over the past eight or nine days, Hopper celebrated another revolution around the Sun, started a new job down here in the Lone Star State, and had a run-in with the big bad old Covid. More on the last two in the next few days. Here I want to talk about my birthday, as I generally do this time of year.

The girls made it fun and special. You see, Patch turned thirteen the day before I turned, well, several decades older than that. But imagine that! She was just a tiny little fetus still in her mom’s belly when I started this blog, barely past a tadpole on the evolutionary ladder, though ensouled she was. And it was a great blessing for me, for I tend to shun the limelight. Her birthday celebrations now overtake and overshadow mine.

For her we went to that sushi place in downtown Dallas not too far from Dealey Plaza. The girls did not pound as much raw fish as they did back in the beginning of August, and I switched entirely to a tame Chicken teriyaki and washed it down with two IPAs. We all had fun, and when we got back home she opened up her presents and put on quite a show for us all. For my part I bought her a new copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and a used copy of Dean Koontz’s Lightning. She read a couple of Koontz books in the past couple of months, and I recall enjoying that fantasy-mystery-thriller when I read it back in the late ’80s. As for Dracula, I decided to read it this Halloween (never having read it before) and she agreed to read it with me, akin to something of the bonding we did two years ago over The Count of Monte Cristo.

The next day, my birthday, was one of my last days of unemployment. We let Patch take the day off from school, too, since she has worked very hard, maintaining an above 90 average and doing very well on her volleyball team. So the two of us tooled around in the morning. We hit one of my favorite chains down here, Half Priced Books, where I scored my copy of Dracula and a gnarled, yellowed slim paperback on the German V-2 project during World War II, written by a German general and published in 1954. I am pretty excited to read both.

I let her pick lunch and she chose Boston Market. We did a few other errands but what was more meaningful was the conversations we had in the car: important ones, about life, philosophy, career choices, nostalgic reflections on the past. It was a day I’ll remember for a long time.

Of late I’ve been asking to be let alone my birthday afternoon to watch a classic SF movie. It started with The Day the Earth Stood Still, and was followed in subsequent years by Dune and Fantastic Planet. This year I chose 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It’s been ages since I’ve seen it and it’s quite different in style and tone from later Trek films. Plus the girls have been really digging on Shatner and Nimoy’s songs. You know, that whole ironic / sarcastic millennial thing. The movie held up, and I enjoyed my return to the Enterprise.

The Mrs. made her version of my mother’s “lazy lasagna,” a childhood fave of mine, and the four of us ate at the dinner table. They let me, the birthday boy, choose the music, and I had Alexa play assorted Rush. That didn’t last long, and by the third song the little teen-aged ones commandeered our home spying slash music device.

How did Hopper do gift-wise? As always, pretty darn good. Patch gave me a $25 gift card to Half Priced Books, and my mother-in-law got me a Visa gift card. Little One gave me a hand-written gift certificate for me and her to do a night sky tour with my telescope – “One time only!” she emphasized. (It should be noted here that she is taking a class in Astronomy over at the high school.) My mom sent a card with $20 in it “to buy a chicken parm,” and I’ll probably get to that first afternoon I have off.

My wife did an admirable job, also as always. A bag of well-needed clothes, in this case, pants and shorts. Then, tickets to see the Dallas Stars hockey game on October 7 (forgive me uncle if you are reading this). Finally, she bought me this book:

 

It has become my latest obsession. More later, in a detailed post.

Anyway, such was Hopper’s celebration of the earth entering the same part of its orbit it occupied when I entered the earth, kicking and screaming, many, many revolutions ago.

Book Review: The Maracot Deep

 

© 1928 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 

This was exactly what I was looking for back in the cold, uncertain weeks this past January. There, on the dusky shelves of ye old book shoppe, it stood, untouched by human hands in years – The Maracot Deep, slim, yellowed, gnarled. The perfect cure to what was ailing me back then, only in the whirlwind of The Move to Texas I did not get to crack it until three weeks back.

This is exactly the type of book I would have bought from the Bookmobile, that 70s thing that would drive up to our elementary school every spring, where we’d enter in groups of two or three to peruse the selections. Did I buy Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes? Think so. One of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian paperbacks? Probably. Anything from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Not sure, but this was the type of stuff that was big with me way back then.

So it promised nostalgia and a quick read. And it provided both.

The story’s fairly simple and straightforward. Professor Maracot, famous Renaissance man of science in the late 1800s, along with his protégé Mr. Cyrus Headley and everyman Bill Scanlon, plan to plumb the depths of the bottomless seas while on a transatlantic voyage of exploration. Actually, to descend to about two or three miles if I remember correctly. Best of all, the bathysphere that he plans to do it in is completely decked out as any Victorian sitting room den laboratory combination would be. I absolutely loved that visual. All that was needed would be Peter Cushing as the Professor and Christopher Lee as Headley. I even envision this as a Hammer flick on the ABC 4:30 movie back in the day.

Along the bottom, at the edge of an abyss, the team encounters a tremendous crustacean monstrosity which severs their tether and air lines to the surface vessel, and the bathysphere plummets over the edge to the darkness below. Stoically facing their deaths, Maracot intends to continue his observations until the air will run out in a day or so.

Crashed on the ocean floor, in a dark lit up only by eerie planktonic fluorescence, at the edge of death – a face at the porthole! And so the Atlanteans are introduced. The three men are rescued, introduced into the society of Atlantis, the sunken world from Plato’s antiquity, and are set to marvel at the wonders of this undersea utopia – television-like devices that translate thoughts into images to make communication easier, translucent body-hugging deep sea diving apparatuses, negative-buoyant glass spheres, which our heroes use covertly to send messages to the surface.

Recently I was looking at some blog posts here from ten years back and came across an entry to the effect that I never liked the Victorian adventure novel. I am not sure why I wrote that. I understand memory is quite malleable, and over the life of this blog I’ve read stuff that has opened my eyes. But those bookmobile memories are certain, and if I also remember my science fiction movie regimen with any accuracy, I’ve always loved the Victorian man of science as well as the Victorian Man of Science adventures stories. And the main ingredient of such stories is an eccentric, brilliant scientist accompanied by his protégé and a blue collar man for the hard labor.

No women allowed. Except, perhaps, as a one-dimensional love interest. That box is checked off here in The Maracot Deep.

Despite the unbelievable aspects of the story – the Atlantean society as a whole wholly improbable, as well as the denouement of a battle of wits with … the devil! – I kinda enjoyed the story. Maybe it was the quickness of the read. Maybe it was the bookmobile or the ABC 4:30 movie nostalgia. But I’d definitely read more of Sir Arthur, particularly his Professor Challenger novels, and I’ll put them on the Acquisitions List in case I stumble upon them in those dusky shelves of the various ye old book shoppes I peruse.

Grade: B+

 

Oh – WARNING! The book, and the man who wrote it, is a product of its time. As is anyone who permanently resides in the vaults of history. They should be judged on their merits in their time, and not by our morality or what passes for faddish morality. The case in point in The Maracot Deep is the word that shall never be spoken is indeed spoken by a character. And I must confess I found it shocking. Do I wish to cancel Sir Arthur? Not a chance. I don’t play those games. But I felt it needed to be pointed out. There are two other minor instances of a character using dated slang for people of the Chinese persuasion. But that was it. A product of its time.