Annual Performance Review

So I have my annual performace review this afternoon, which has absoloutely nothing to do with the general focus of this blog. But it gives me a chance to plug one of my top-10 clips from "The Office."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjBQc2bCFk8


Which begs the question, do people still get raises when the economy is in the crapper? Or is the least I can hope for is having my "salary kept consistent with inflation?"

In preperation, I have reviewed the Wikipedia entry for negotiation .

And there goes any case I had whatsoever for being someone that uses my time at work productively.

Population: 105

The landscape of Northern Wisconsin is littered with crossroad settlements, villages, and dried-up ghosts of towns. Many of these classic "blink-and-you'll miss it" stops were once considerably more populous logging-camps or railroad stops.

You know how the story goes though, people move somewhere and create a settlement based on some sort of economic opportunity in that area. If that opportunity is single-pronged, though, when the opportunity eventually dries up so do the people.

These small villages are all slightly unique, but have much in common too. They all have a shuttered, crumbling, closed school. Most have a shuttered, crumbling, closed church too. They all at least have a bar. And then there are the 2-3 blocks of less than a dozen houses each. I wasn't kidding when I said these places were small.

The population game gets to be a vicious cycle. Kids grow up, leave because there are few opportunities, and day by day, the population ages that much more. Without young adults in town to start families, there's no longer any need for a school - and then there it is, one less reason to move to the village if given the chance.

One of these burgs does stick out from the rest though: the Village of Tony, population 105, and hometown of former Wisconsin Badger star and current Baltimore Ravens player Jim Leonhard.

The village is proud of their local-boy-makes-good. They've got a huge billboard devoted to him as you drive through town. The bar has his jerseys on the wall.

It is kind of a neat idea though, that any place, no matter how small, desolate, or empty can produce anyone capable of anything.

I'm watching Leonhard play football on tv as I write this.

The Place Where A Kid Can be a Kid...

Doing some random websurfing over the holidays, I stumbled across this interesting site, Urbangeography. It's basically a web clearinghouse of graphs, charts, and other visual items related to information. I suppose there is some sort of vague link to geography with most things posted, although not all. It may just be my inherent geekiness that made the site attractive to me, but what the heck, check it out.

Anyways, stumbled across this little graphic showing of all things police reports from calls to Chuck E. Cheese restaurants. It's a pretty funny snippet, but a little disturbing too. I don't recall any major incidents from my age 7 birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese's but maybe that has more to do with the fact that it was in placid Omaha more than anything else.

I did a little further digging and found this article from the Wall Street Journal which delves a little deeper into the trend and comes up with an unsuprising culprit: alcohol. Apparently, most Chuck E. Cheese's serve both beer and wine.

The Milwaukee branch of the restaurant has even gone so far as to begin having armed guards stationed at their location. Go Wisconsin!

Unfortaunately, I haven't ever witnessed the mayhem at Chuck E. Cheese - I can see how it would be one hell of a show though. The best I can do is to recall the time I saw a family at Chippewa Valley low-caliber pizza buffet specialists Pizza del Rey that had their two children (who had to be aged somewhere from age 10-12) dressed in footie pajamas.

So where are you gonna have your next birthday celebration?

Obligatory Year-End/ Year-Beginning Post

Here it is, the end of one year, and the beginning of another. It's interesting how one of the unintended consequences of the calendar is that the end of each year triggers near universal recollection and introspection at the course that we plotted over the previous twelve months. Inevitably there are things that we wish would have gone better, tiny (or sometimes not so) failures, and to be fair - victories of the spirit as well.

The process of looking back at the previous year leads us to make mental notes of things that we'd like to see ourselves do differently over the upcoming one: resolutions. Oftentimes we don't quite make it to the point of following through successfully on those resolutions, but for some of us, we're bound to get it right eventually. One of these years, something will click, and ta-da we'll finally be where we've wanted to be for so long.

For myself, 2008 was not one for the record books. It opened with a brutal winter season before segueing into a middling summer season, and ending with a fall in which things where on the upswing. I've got high expectations for 2009, though. Both of fate and the random rolls of life's dice, but more importantly for myself. There's alot that will be up to me. This time, I'm ready for the fight.

Local Boy Makes Good

Not sure if anyone else is up on this, but Eau Claire native, and UW-Eau Claire alum Justin Vernon has taken the indie/alternative music world by storm over the last 12 months culminating with a gig on the David Letterman show last week.

Vernon's band is Bon Iver (French for Good Winter) and is part of the neo-folk movement, although they do manage to rock it out at times too. Vernon had been on my radar for years, since my early days at UW-Eau Claire, well before his current band has taken off so it has been a neat thing to see this guy I used to catch at shows as a freshman on national tv, and in national magazines like Rolling Stone, and in the New York Times, and generally anywhere you look online if the site is related to music.

The basic story behind Bon Iver's rise to international prominence follows. Vernon and fellow Chippewa Valleyians who had formed an immensly popular local band, Deyarmond Edison took their show on the road, moving to Raleigh N.C. To make a long story shorter, the band broke up, Vernon broke up with his girlfriend, and decided to recess to his father's hunting cabin in northern Wisconsin (not all that far from where I'm at currently) where he self-recorded an album and generally got his head right. Late last year, I caught one of his shows, bought a copy of the self-recorded/self-released CD and then things really took off. Things caught fire in the music blogosphere, Vernon's band toured the U.S. and Europe, played on Conan O'Brien and Letterman, and had their album named the 29th best CD of 2008 in Rolling Stone magazine.

Granted, it is not music that everyone can get it into, I'll be the first to concede that. But you have to admit that the story behind it all is pretty unique. And it's been pretty damn cool to see this guy I met early in my college career, drank down the bar from later in my college career, and saw release an album that he poured his aching soul into, achieve international fame in the music field.

Let me know if you dig it.

Giga-waabamin minawaa.

The Chance to Live a Second Life

Interesting essay here about one man's dream of building a cabin in the woods as his second home. It's not his venture that is anything remarkable (although anyone doing anything with real estate right now is somewhat remarkable), but rather his comments on doing so that struck me. The author writes of building a cabin by hand with his brother in the Maine wilderness and comments that, "Second homes are an American obsession, partly — maybe mainly — because of the chance they give us to live a second life, one that may be truer to our real selves than the first that we live out of necessity." Intriguing thoughts.

The landscape here is littered with second & vacation homes/cabins/palaces on the water. I had never really thought about the pysche of the second home. Obviously it is a place that we view as an escape, but I had never really thought about what people were escaping from. Well, besides society. But that one is basically a given, right?

The other thing that stood out for me was the authors harvest of the lumber that grew near a previous home. I've always enjoyed the idea of taking a piece of a property with you when you leave, something tangible in addition to the obvious memories. But harvesting the trees into lumber and then building another home from the product of that land? That is a whole new take on that concept.

Which makes me wish that I would have taken some sort of piece of furnishing from my last two residences to add to future ones. Especially now that one of them has been destined for demolition. Oh well, the memories live on forever. And always in the form of drunken bar-tales.

Gave it a whirl

Yesterday morning, bright and early, I drove down the unplowed highway for a return to the building at UW-Eau Claire where I had roughly 90% of my college classes - Richard E. Hibbard Hall.

The purpose for the pre-dawn visit to the alma mater was to take the law school admission test or LSAT for short. In brief -- that was one tough exam.

Applying for law school is an idea that has always been creeping around in my head -- way, way back there. I had never really taken the idea all that seriously though. It had always seemed like quite the application process for something I wasn't all that sure I wanted to pursue. Truth is, it is quite the application process, and I'm still not all that sure I want to puruse that field. What it comes down to though is that in order for it to even be an option I've got to at least take the test and send in a few applications. I figure that I will get the applications in and then force the decision on accepting the offer (assuming I could even get accepted) further down the road.

Back to the test though: it consists of six 35 minute sessions. Two sections titled Logical Reasoning, two labeled Analytical Reasoning (only of these counts though - the other is basically a placebo), one section on reading comprehension, and a final writing sample. When you factor in breaks and procedural business, it came out to about five hours worth of time yesterday.

I ran through several timed practice tests in preperation as well as tried to develop some strategies for each section. With 25-30 substantial questions for each 35 minute section, timing becomes a big issue. With each practice run things got a little easier so I went into things optimistic yesterday. The logical reasoning, writing sample, and reading comprehension ended up all being in line with my expectations for difficutly, but the anaylitical reasoning ended up being quite a bit to wrap my head around. In talking with others after the test though it seemed like that was the most difficult for others as well.

If you're curious on what the format of the questions are, there's a sample from each question type here.

Now it's a matter of waiting a month for the test results to come back and beginning to gather letters of reccomendation, work on application essays, etc.

Giga-waabamin minawaa.