jobs and so on

I never did hear from the collectibles place.  I'm guessing it had to do with the hourly rate I wanted, even though I said I could be flexible.  I can't imagine what else it could have been.  But I'm still determined to work in the collectibles field.  I've started educating myself online about different types of collectibles.  I started with vintage watches and am wishing I knew how to repair them, since eBay has a lot of decent watches going for very low prices because they need cleaning and/or repair.  That would be an awesome business: repairing and selling vintage watches.  I'll have to research how to learn watch repair.

I took a beading class on Saturday.  I get daily e-mail coupons from Groupon and Living Social, which provide discounts for local stores and services.  Living Social had one last week for classes at a small bead store in Brooklyn -- $15 for a coupon good for $45 worth of classes. I'd been to the store and hadn't been impressed (very small and high prices), but a couple of the classes looked interesting, so I bought the coupon and registered for a class on making wire-wrapped rings.  It turned out that I was the only person registered for the class, so I got a private lesson, and made two rings there, and three more at home.  Good skill, and I liked the lesson.  Since I learned almost all of my jewelry skills from magazines and books, I often turn up my nose at classes (the only one I took before this was on knotting, which I just couldn't figure out from diagrams), but this one was really useful.

I'm bailing on an interview today with a temp agency, with a long-term position that, now that I look at it, is most likely highly corporate.  Plus I'm getting enough nibbles on my applications that I'd like to stay available for interviews.  I have one on Friday, for a university job.  I have mixed feelings about it: the pay and bennies are probably quite good.  On the downside, the potential boss seems extremely formal; also, I screwed up and applied to a university where the commute would be appallingly long, maybe two hours each way.  When I applied, I confused it with another school whose campus is on 42nd Street.  There are a couple of universities I haven't bothered with because of a similarly long commute, and this should have been one of them.  Well, we'll see about it *if* I am offered the job and *if* the money is right.  (My idea of "right" for this job is anything over 40K with benefits and without frequent overtime.  I would consider another job "right" for a lot less pay if the commute were shorter.)

In the meantime, I'll continue to file applications and hold out a dim hope that the collectibles gallery has just been too busy to call and that I'll eventually hear from them.