I try post one decent thing a week, usually on Friday.
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I’ve been looking at the hundreds of resumes I’ve received, I conducted just shy of one hundred interviews last week, and a few people have asked me for resume critiques lately. It seems like a good time for some job seeking advise. Keep in mind that I spent more than a year failing to find a job, so don’t put too much stock in anything I have to say.
3 votes 
Loading ...He said it would happen but I didn’t believe it. I’m training for the restaurant my wife and I are opening. I spent two weeks learning the front of house and am now doing two weeks in the kitchen. I’ve discovered a restaurant is the anti-mullet; party in the front, business in the back. It’s a lot of work. Anyway, my trainer joked I’d be dreaming about this stuff, and I laughed, but last night it finally happened. I dreamed I was making a Chicken Caesar Wrap, but I couldn’t remember the ingredients.
So, for obvious reasons, I haven’t written anything at all, except that lame mullet joke. I don’t even have time to get the last word in with my sisters. Well, it will have to do. I’ll try again when I figure out that damn wrap.
3 votes Loading ...I decided to wrap up 18 months of unemployment with a month long vacation to Europe, because that’s how I roll. I had a brief window before activity for the restaurant became my life and it seemed like a good opportunity to finally take the trip I’ve been finding practical reasons to put off since high school. So, I went to Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Barcelona, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, and Paris. The trip produced some good stories, which I’ll tell here.
First, a note to my family and friends. I love you all but I didn’t listen to your tips and recommendations. Partly because most of it I could read on the front page of a tourism website. “Go see the Louvre,” is hardly an insiders tip. Mostly though, I didn’t want to go on your trip, I wanted my own. And, in my opinion, the best parts of life, or travel, are not reproducible. I can’t have the same experience by standing on the same spot as you, and taking the same picture you did. So, I’m sorry, the promise you extracted from me to find that little cafe you loved was entirely empty, I had no intention of doing any such thing. I was just indulging you while you told your story, and I now ask the same of you as I tell mine.
I thought I would write them, not in the order I visited, but in a “top ten list” approach, ending with Prague, which I loved the most, and which definitely produced the most interesting tales, including a sad story about a death, and a funny story involving great boobs. None of my writing will involve recommendations for museums or cafes, in that respect you are on your own.
9. Marseille – Dog shit. That’s the key reason Marseille is on the bottom of this list. A nice enough city, a little difficult to explore on foot, and while you do, you have to keep your eyes open for dog shit. It’s not like the place is over run by the stuff, but there’s enough dog shit to take note of, sort of like this introductory paragraph, and friends, that’s too much.
8. Brussels – They take their beer seriously in Belgium. I was standing in a bar and a customer ordered a mojito. The bartender screwed up his face into a disgusted grimace and yelled back, “Are you fuck’n serious!?”
7. Amsterdam – My random wanderings planted me at a bar with a rainbow of beautiful people. I thought maybe they were shooting a United Colors of Benetton Ad. I finished my beer and got out before someone saw me and started to point and laugh.
6. Barcelona
5. Paris
4. Berlin
3. Lyon
2. Bordeaux
1. Prague
2 votes Loading ...Amsterdam was filthy, and not so much in the way it’s advertised. Although, that depends on what you call filthy. Anyway, I wasn’t talking about that, I mean the garbage.
Amsterdam, as advertised
The first thing I saw exiting the train station was a square full of blowing newspapers. A lonely apocalyptic scene, except there were people everywhere, and none of them seemed zombie like, I’d know, I’m qualified. It took me a day and a half to realize something strange was going on. The first person I asked said, “You know about the garbage strike, right?” Which made more sense than what I had assumed, so I felt apologetic for my leap. “I’m sorry, I thought maybe it was always like this.”
Garbage will swallow a city in a surprisingly short time
I tried to see beyond the garbage, but it wasn’t a landscape that appealed to me, narrow streets, and two dimensional canyon like architecture. But, the thousands of bikes and pedestrians produced a rhythm I liked, a people centric heart beat.
Plenty of people pour into Amsterdam to party, and it’s definitely a good place to do that. In fact, if letting your hair down is out the question, then Amsterdam is not for you, because there are certainly prettier places. However, if you are a little adventurous there are gems in the city for any taste. I saw some great street dancers1, talked to a DJ I liked2, saw great acts at a blues bar 3, and I watched a beautiful couple in a smokey coffee shop pull back from a deep kiss with an enviable mix of adoration and sex in their eyes.
This is a playground for all of Europe and it shows. My random wanderings planted me at a bar with a rainbow of beautiful people. I thought maybe they were shooting a United Colors of Benetton Ad in the place. I finished my beer and got out before someone saw me and started to point and laugh. I went looking for locals, and those I found, I really liked. They confirmed what I had already observed, locals are treated differently, there is a strong sense of community in Amsterdam, the tourists get the tacky candy coating.
The Anne Frank museum was one of the few that held any pull for me. It’s well done. There are hundreds of exihibits weaving throughout the house. The one that captivated me was a small square of paper pinned to the wall. Anna’s father used this tiny map to track the bits of news he got from the radio about the Allied progress.
Anne’s father planned to hide from the Nazi’s. He hid his family and some friends, seven people, for two years, until someone betrayed them, and they were all taken to concentration camps. Nine year old Anne, died in a camp believing the rest of her family was already dead. Months later her father was saved by the Allied liberation. He was the only surviving member of his family of four.
As I stood there, I thought of what it would be like to carry that weight and to look at the pins in that map everyday and hope help had made it to the next town. I think now that it would be a good recolection the next time I feel put out by something in my privileged life.
No Votes Yet Loading ...I worked at one of the big multinational oil companies doing environmental work. I spent millions of dollars cleaning up environmental spills, and I never encountered any evil. I know the stories, I’ve seen Erin Brockovich, but that wasn’t my experience working for a big oil company.
A coworker of mine was preparing for a public meeting to discuss an environmental clean-up. Being the voice of Big Oil at a public meeting is a nightmare. A mob mentality can take hold, plus you have to deal with the personification of that character from the Simpsons, who shouts, “What about the children?! Won’t somebody please think of the children!?” I thought it would be funny for him to open his comments by asking, “By a show of hands, how many of you rode bicycles to the meeting tonight?” I still think that’s funny.
Oil is our way of life, yes yours too. We have a complex world wide network of infrastructure and technology to find, extract, refine, transport, and use petroleum products. It is the largest single industry in the world and it is woven into every aspect of our lives from how we get our food to why we don’t sit in the dark. I understand the urge to curse the oil industry, but the soapbox you are trying to get up on is plastic, it’s made of oil. This is not an industry problem, it’s a human one.
Do you know how people choose where to buy their gas? Location and price. People buy gas at a station that is on the way to or from work, or they drive a little further to save a few pennies per litre. No one pays more for gas based on the environmental performance of the company selling it.
The BP spill will be analyzed, problems will be identified, guilty parties will be named, new procedures will be put in place, but it’s all sort of irrelevant. We all understand that continuing to get oil out of the ground is not making grass greener and water cleaner, so where does all this indignant shock come from? You and I are the reason men are drilling for oil more than a mile under the ocean, so our hand wringing and finger pointing is disingenuous, because none of us rode bicycles to this meeting.
5 votes Loading ...My sister, and Google Analytics, tells me I have regular visitors, so I thought I should try do better with the schedule. I thought the posts I was writing on each city in my travels would be short and sweet. I under estimated the amount of time it would take to turn three days worth of notes and random observations into something. It’s taking even longer to try and make it interesting. This is the long way of saying, “I don’t have anything. Try next week.”
No Votes Yet Loading ...I had a great time in Brussels and it all stemmed from stepping up to a bar and showing an interest in the local beers, which Belgians are passionate about. When asked for my order at a restaurant or bar, my most common response, when I can make myself understood, is, “What do you recommend?” It’s an approach that produces more than its share of disappointments, but you can’t discover hidden gems on your own.
The place I was in, Celtica, has a good selection of draft beer, it’s ridiculously cheap, and they serve it, and little else, by the bucketful. The next night a customer ordered a mojito, and Alex, the Irish bartender I was about to meet, screwed up his face into a disgusted grimace, and yelled across the bar, “Are you fuck’n serious!?”
On this particular evening though, Alex was on my side of the bar, and when I asked for a recommendation, he piped up at my elbow and ordered for me. I spoke to Alex until the education he was giving me on Irish whisky caught up to him and he had to go home, but before he did he introduced me to Margret, also an off duty bartender at Celtica, the second of four I would eventually meet.
Margret is a straight forward and honest Londoner. About 5′9″, slim, fair skin, dreadlocks, an eyebrow piercing and dark eye makeup turned up a little into a cat’s eye at the edges. She told me she worked the upstairs bar during the recent St. Patty’s day. The upstairs bar in Celtica is just a small ell shaped counter set in the middle of what becomes a crowded scrum on busy nights. The bartender is not cordoned off, people surround on all sides. It’s a ripe atmosphere for drunken louts to make a grab at breasts and asses, so female bartenders are not assigned to this role, except Margret, who requests it. She likes mixing it up with the people, and tells me anyone who grabs her ass doesn’t do it twice, she enjoys throwing elbows. She describes St. Patty’s day with pride, like someone who has stepped into the fray and come out victorious. I liked her a lot.
She invited me over for beers with her and her flatmates the following afternoon. She shares a small apartment with her boyfriend of three and a half years. They were splitting up, so it was an invitation I was somewhat hesitant to show up for. I’m glad I did, all the people I met through Margret, including her boyfriend, were welcoming, generous, and fun.
The two of them told me lots of stories from their own travels, including living in the middle of a dry1 aborigine village in the Australian outback. I also got their thoughts on Brussels, Belgium, beer, and bus fairs. None of the locals pay that last one, there is a healthy underground economy going on in the European Union, I observed.
I went out drinking later with Margret and her funny friend Greg, another Irishman. We ended the evening at Margret’s for a few sensible cocktails before turning in. Greg put a stop to my plans to walk home. He insisted I “didn’t know Brussels for shit” and that we should share a cab. Fifteen minutes later he lifted his nodding head and observed the cab was not heading toward his house. In his Irish accent, made so much thicker with drink, he yelled, “Hey! Where the fuck’r we going?” Then he turned and looked at me, “Who the fuck’r you!”
I told him my name in the most reassuring tone I could muster, and informed him of the plan we had to drop me off before he headed home. I was prepared to provide additional proof of our time together, but this was sufficient, reality and Greg were now friends again. He just said, “Oh. Right. OK,” and slumped back into his seat. Minutes later we shook hands and parted ways as friends.
Brussels houses the headquarters for the European Union and consequently is home to more languages per square block than I encountered anywhere else in my travels. Many of the cities residents are transplants from somewhere else, or tourists. Standing in a local bar I heard German, Russian, French, English, and I think, Ukrainian just from the people that stepped up to order a beer. It’s an eclectic mix that makes for an interesting atmosphere, and it is this, more than any sightseeing there is, that makes Brussels a place to visit.
Brussels is known for its “frites”. I don’t get the big deal. A fried potato tastes the same in Canada as it does in Belgium. A rainbow of sauces are available as an accompaniment, maybe that’s what everyone is so worked up over.
You can still smoke in bars and restaurants in Brussels, the only such place remaining in Europe, and people take full advantage. Perhaps no one has mentioned this to you yet Europe, but smoking is bad for you. Just FYI. Cigarette butts in the streets are prevalent everywhere I went in Europe but this city dominates. It also excels at honking drivers and beggars with infants and small children, something I hadn’t see before.
The Manneken Pis, smaller than you'd think.
There are some beautiful elements to the city, most of which can be explored on foot in a day. My suggestion is to stop at the famous fountain of the little boy peeing and buy a box of Belgian chocolates at one of the shops you can see from where you are. Gourmet Belgian chocolate is dirt cheap by Canadian standards, and it’s amazing. It compares to the first time I had a girl’s nipple in my mouth. Sample your box of chocolates in front of the fountain, and see how many you can eat before one of the tourists in front of the fountain says, “It’s smaller than I thought it would be.” You won’t get to eat very many.
4 votes Loading ...Marseille is the oldest, and second largest city in France. It’s history and development has been dominated by it’s function as a key port town. Known for it’s multicultural population and with such a lengthy history of growth, decline, and rebuilding Marseille is a Frankenstein mix of culture, architecture, and inhabitants. It’s difficult to define a particular personality to the place. There is beauty here, and some interesting areas, but there is also ugliness, which is less hard to find. I liked Marseille, but i don’t know I could love it. I would pick a different, smaller city to explore on the Southern coast of France the next time around.
There are some beautiful parks, monuments, coastal scenery, and commanding views, spread out over a diverse geography, which makes this city particularly difficult to explore on foot, although I wouldn’t recommend a car. The streets are narrow, winding, and filled with fearless, noisy drivers who park and drive wherever a car will fit. The streets are also home to a significant amount of blowing garbage and dog shit, and enough dog shit on your sidewalks to make note of is not an attractive quality. The central harbour area is the busiest tourist area, but as an advertised highlight, it was disappointing. I had good experience with the food at a small local restaurant along the water, and a great cheese shop with a friendly and helpful owner.
1 votes Loading ...
It started with a particularly talkative fellow on a business trip. I grabbed a bite on a bar stool to kill a couple hours before my flight. The man on the stool beside me loved the sound of his voice.
I had seen a TV program about privacy issues that demonstrated how easily an average person could extract information from strangers by engaging them in a conversation. My new friend brought this to mind because he hadn’t asked me a single question, or paused for that matter, in fifteen minutes. It occurred to me that I could learn a lot about him and tell him nothing about myself, so I did. I figured our time was short, so I should just keep him talking, which proved not to be difficult. This became my Secret Agent Interview Game.
The idea is to build a mental dossier, like an Agent on a secret mission. I just put whatever I can into it. Work, family, hobbies, history, and health are topics people like to talk about. If you like specifics, any innocuous detail is a good starter, like Favourite Breakfast Food. It’s information anyone will readily give out, but it takes practice to work it naturally into conversation.
The easy part is not talking about yourself. People rarely ask more than cursory details in a series of rhetorical questions; name, rank, serial number sort of stuff. The difficulty is in asking good questions to keep someone talking and to steer the conversation in a direction you are interested in, all the while keeping track of it all. It’s just the refined art of conversation, but it sounds cooler if you call it the Secret Agent Interview Game.
It started as a way to pass the time with strangers, but it’s worked it’s way into other relationships. I now remind myself to play it with my wife when she comes home. Ask questions, listen to the answers. It works as a spouse, and I think it will be great as a bartender, or a father. It’s one of the reasons I’d like to have a daughter, I do better with girls. In fact, should I have a son, one of the few sage pieces of advise about women I could offer is just a fundamental of the Secret Agent Interview Game. “Son, do you know how you get a woman to tell you her secrets? You ask her.”
3 votes Loading ...“Ow!”
“What?”
“You punched me!”
“Oh, if I punched you, you’d know it.”
My wife is the one doing the hitting, so it’s OK, you can laugh, this is the acceptable sort of spousal abuse joke.
3 votes Loading ...
Think what it must be like to live in a building designed for you, made to weave itself into your life. I’ve never loved my home, and I think that’s a shame. I could love a house, I just haven’t met the right one yet.
A structure of words needs to proceed the structure of concrete, wood, steel, glass, and stone. If I can express what I want clearly I can help define it, and that will get me closer to seeing it built. I think. And, so…
Bigger isn’t better. My idea of luxury has little to do with square footage. I want quality over quantity. There is elegance and beauty in simplicity. I want a simple, comfortable, beautiful space, built to outlast me.
I like things to make sense. We flush our toilets with drinking water. That doesn’t make sense anymore, if it ever did. There is a very long list of things in the average home that can be built better. The Engineer in me wants to see how many of them I can find.
A building can have all the modern conveniences and be efficient, independent, environmentally friendly, and functional. A friend, who lives in a desert, showed me his pool. As the sun beat down on us he cocked a thumb at the petroleum heater beside it, “Costs too much to heat it all year though.” I like the idea of building a house as well as it can be, and there is an increasing supply of practical green technology, so it’s a great time to have those goals.
I want a house to fit my life. My wife is particularly neat, I am not. That can be a source of friction, so thought needs to be put into the design of entries, closets, storage, and how easy it is to keep everything clean, and that’s before we even get to the stuff I care about. When I talked about building a house she expressed concern that “we” would design a house which I loved and she hated. I told her one of the things I wanted as a central theme in the house was, “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” She said, “I’m in. Let’s do it.”
I tore through this book. It expresses, in a much clearer way, some of what I am trying to express above.
“It’s time for a different house. A house that is more than square footage; a house that is not so big, where each room is used every day.” – Sarah Susanka
Answer one or both of these questions, if you’re feeling inclined. I’m looking for ideas.
What do you love / hate about the place you live?
1 votes Loading ...I was fired from my job more than a year and a half ago, although I was asking myself, “What now?” before that. I wanted something else, but I didn’t know what that looked like, so I was excited about the prospect of finding out. My search for a dream job didn’t wrap up into a neat result like I thought it would. It’s been eighteen months, and my temporary retirement has altered my ideas about a number of things, like long term retirement (no longer a goal), and a dream job.
I put significant effort and time into figuring out what I was looking for. What am I good at, have skill in, and enjoy? I wrote a mission statement, a one page resume, and then I talked to employers, agencies, friends, contractors, consultants, CEO’s, and one man shows. What came out of all that writing and talking was a confirmation that my dream job is not a destination, but an ever changing target. When I thought about it, I’ve had a number of jobs I loved, but they changed, or I outgrew them. So I threw away the idea of “finding” a dream job and focused more on the notion that its creation is an ongoing process.
The other more interesting thing that developed was the realization that I wanted a more unified approach to life. When I had finally written down my values, skills, goals, experience, and mission, I looked at these lists and wondered why I wouldn’t apply all of that to every aspect of my life. A dream job seemed short sighted now, what I wanted was a dream life.
It struck me that I was applying radically different approaches to creating happiness in my job and the rest of my life, based on the arbitrary distinction that I made money at one thing and not the other. Thus was born my notion of taking a more unified approach to life. In practical terms, I’m not entirely sure what that means yet, but the idea feels promising.
In related job news, my wife and I are opening a restaurant. Restaurant ownership has always appealed to us, but starting an independent restaurant sounded like a fairly good way for me to lose a lot of money. We are opening a franchise restaurant you Canadian prairie folks might be familiar with. It’s an upscale pub; good food and beer.
Opening will be in the fall (September?). I’ll be managing, for a couple of years, and then I’d like to turn the reigns over. So, if you know of anyone in the service industry, who lives in Victoria, BC, let them know I’m an awesome boss and I’m shopping around for someone to eventually replace me in that role.
One of the other things I looked seriously into doing was home construction. Legos were my favourite toy as a kid, which lead to a Civil Engineering degree, and then a decked out workshop. I like to build stuff. I had some specific ideas of the type of projects I wanted to be involved in, but could find no way to get into that work, so I’m going to do it myself.
I have sketchbooks dating back to high school with clippings of house plans, sketches of rooms, and random architectural details. I’ve wanted to design and build my own house ever since I realized that’s something a person could do. So, I am going to, and I’m giddy about the idea.
3 votes Loading ...
