Weekend warrior - not so much

Well, here it is, Saturday morning about a quarter to eight. The sun is shining and it is minus eight outside, moving towards a high of 21. After possible snow showers tomorrow, however, it is supposed to warm up a bit and we will have almost a whole week with highs above freezing and not much snow in the forecast. The patches of ice still on some area roads may disappear by next weekend.

Yesterday morning on my way into the office, I passed a guy jogging down Birchwood Road. I can understand -- that part of the road was cleared of ice and snow for the first time since mid-December, and he must have been feeling totally cooped up. I did notice that it was still only five degrees, though. Dude! Five degrees! At least he wasn't in shorts. I see kids on their way to school in the morning wearing shorts, no matter what the weather. Is it a macho thing?

Last night Tom called from Las Vegas where he, Bob and Mike were waiting for Bob's brother, David, to call so they could go out to eat. Today they are getting out of the city to visit some of the countryside. Tom says it is too cold to swim, but it was warm enough to sit in the sun by the hotel pool. They did visit the Liberace Museum, which apparently was everything one would imagine -- and MORE! Also, Bob's friend Mike is a big-shot architect out there, and one of the homes he is working on is for Siegfried and Roy. It will include a tiger compound. Okay .... Does anyone out there read the news?

My Friday was pretty unexciting. I went in to help the Screnocks in the morning and then did my library stint in the afternoon. I ran into a friend from church at McDonald's where I had stopped for a "senior coffee" before going to the office, and we had a nice visit. She is about eighty and was on her way to take communion to some shut-ins after the morning Mass at St. Joseph's in Baraboo.

Do they call it "senior coffee" because it is old coffee? Or is it Señor Coffee, a sort of spicy Mexican blend?

The library is a good place to catch up on local gossip. The ladies who work there seem to know everyone and people are always dropping in to talk to them at the counter where I am processing books. The local job market continues to get worse. One of the manufacturing places (there aren't many left) just laid off over a hundred workers and an additional thirty office personnel. The good news is that the tourist season is about to begin and some of these folks can get jobs in the "hospitality industry."

The bad news, of course, is that those will be minimum wage jobs with no benefits and weird hours. Typical ads are for people to work evenings and weekends, total of fifteen hours at $6.35 an hour. Before deductions.

To put that in perspective, according to an inflation calculator that I found online, the $1.00 an hour I made at Bookland in 1968 has the purchasing power of $6.19 in 2008. The $4.00 an hour I made working for the Department of Research and Development after graduating MSU in 1972 would be the equivalent of $20.54 today.

A lot of those jobs, too, are reserved for the eastern European students that the business owners import for the summer on "work-study" programs, meaning they will work for less. They are often provided housing in some of the old motels to make up for the lower wage, and they don't have families to support or anything. So it is a good deal for them, and they do get to learn English. In fact, I may wind up tutoring some of them through the library's free English tutoring program. Still, getting back to my original point, it makes the job market even tighter for the local residents who are trying to raise a family and survive here. Cost of living is certainly less here than in Chicago, but then the price of gas just went up ten cents overnight (literally) and you can't get anywhere -- like to work -- without driving twenty miles.

Meanwhile I found another potential literary agent to represent the mystery and sent off a letter to her. Almost all of the legitimate agents are either in New York or California. I would prefer to deal with someone I could visit face-to-face, and I would have thought surely there was someone in Chicago, if not in Wisconsin. There may be, but if so, they aren't members of the various national accrediting organizations, and therefore maybe a bit risky. At any rate, I'm still trying.