2005/10/20

Katy

So with the house coming up and more importantly getting married, Katy and I spend a little time trying to hash things out. With a couple of things tonight we had to reach a compromise. I told her that I felt shot down, and that I was realizing I will have to deal with being shot down a lot. I also told her that I want to make sure I don't become the husband that deals with being shot down many times, then after 15 years doesn't want it anymore. This obviously led to a great deal of discussion, and we kind of felt better in the end. Of course since neither she nor I have been married before, we don't really know what we will have to deal with, what we will fight over, etc, but I do really think we are trying our hardest to do and work out the right things. I think we are a bit more realistic than many couples.

But after coming home, and listening to some of my old bands music, and thinking about what is really important to me, I realized a couple of things. First off, I'm not really that guy. I have a big problem with getting hung up on things in a moment, but it is EXTREMELY rare that she and I disagree on something and after stepping back and thinking about it I still consider it an issue.

Also, she's smarter than that. I think about things that have happened between us over more than 5 years of dating and more than a decade of knowing each other, and it seems like she usually knows what's going on. It's an awesome thing. We will still fight and have trouble, but in the same way your parent's did things that upset you and you later look back and realize they really were doing what was best for you, she does these things a lot. I think she knows a lot more about what I'm thinking and doing that I even do, much less what I think she knows.

It's easy to take things like that for granted. I'm really blessed. I think it's bad to go off on how I don't deserve her, but I do sometimes wonder if I'm getting the better end of the deal.

And about the old Of music. I don't listen to it often, but I put on an old recording of a practice, (that I don't think anyone else has) and the demo type thing that we did, and I realized something I hadn't in years..... we were pretty good. I was always kinda the weakest link musician wise, but even my parts weren't bad, and going back and listening to Nick's song writing, and some of the little licks and hooks Mike and Shwin were doing was a lot of fun. We were all very jazz inspired and I guess I forgot how much we broke out of the modern rock mold and added some snazzy little bits that to me separate a good performance of a song from just a good song being reproduced. I miss that stuff a lot. Nick has sorta gone his own way now, but I feel like I still have a very good bond with Mike and Shwin.

I'm sure Katy will be able to tell me when I should try to go down that path again............

2005/10/18

"But it doesn't looks smaller"

OK, I really have all sorts of things I want to post, but because I have so much going on to post about, I haven't had as much time to post. But this is funny.

I've been pretty burned out at Kinko's lately. I'm starting to fall victim to a lot of the attitudes I hear Kinko's people talk about. Saturday night a lady came in with an oversize. I had seen one of our guys helping her the night before. As we often see she brought in an 8.5x11 piece of paper (probably designed in MS Word) and wanted it blown up to "poster" size. There is no official "poster" size. Many are either 18x24 or 24x36, but there certainly is no standard. So she had told the employee the night before to make it the same size as the promotional signs FedEx sends us to hang in the windows, because our in-house printing capabilities aren't good enough for us to use for promotion.

She has another oversize that she has somehow mounted to a precut 20"x30" board she bought at Wal-Mart. She shows me the one done for her the previous night, then shows me the board, and says "See, I told him this was too big for poster size."

At this point she has already lost me. Being the jaded punk I am, if someone gets stuck on this "poster size" pet peeve of mine, they have already lost my good favor. But I try to make people happy. At this point I told her I could try to fix it for her, but I couldn't do it as a free redo if the employee last night had done what she asked for to the best of his ability. She told me she asked him to size it to the promotional banners in the windows. I walked over to the window, pulled out my tape measurer, and it was 40"x30". That's TWICE the 20"x30" she wanted. I pointed this out and her response was "But I don't think they are that big!"


?????


Befuddled, and a bit offended someone of the same species as me could be quite so dense, I held out my tape measurer for her to use. She of course didn't like that and said that she didn't need to measure it, she just needed her copy made right.

So I made the copy for her, got it to exactly 20"x30", and didn't even charge her. It just wasn't worth it. I honestly felt kinda bad for her after realizing her capability to reason.

Bleh.