fresh-cut grass!

It's about 61 degrees out now (1:44 PM), but it feels warmer in the sun.  I just took a nice stroll around the neighborhood, walked around for about an hour.  On Gravesend Neck Road, right around East 1st Street, there was a strong scent of fresh-cut grass, certainly the first time I've smelled that this season.  I've seen a crocus or two, but this really smelled like spring.

I'm home today on "Independent Job Search" -- which requires a midday walk in the spring sun.  I had an interview yesterday and I feel 98% sure I'll be hired -- possibly because she kept saying, "I am going to hire you."  She said it about three times.  I think what happened is that I asked for a little more money than she was planning to pay, and had to talk to her accountant about it.  But I think I did convince her that I was worth my $35K asking price:  even though I had limited experience in the jewelry field, I had a lot of administrative experience, and it was clear that I'd learn her business very quickly.  Stay tuned.

I have no idea exactly what happens on the public assistance front if and when I get a job.  Do I still have to go to the daily grind until I start work?  what happens to our benefits?  (I do know that Medicaid will be good for the next six months no matter what.)  I'm going to try to see my job counselor tomorrow morning, because I may well have an offer very soon.

I'm seeing Lily tomorrow, which is a big event because she is insanely busy with school and internships and work these days.  We're going to have lunch, since we get released from Back-to-Work around 12:30 on Fridays.

Also -- someone else who did me a good deed:  my former boss Ken (the good boss who hired me at Penguin, not the bad one who got rid of me).  He sent me a St. Patrick's Day card with a $25 Starbucks gift card in it.  I very, very rarely hear from him, although he's one of my job references.  He's a quiet person; I don't think he'd disagree if I said he's shy.  But he's tremendously goodhearted, and one of the very best bosses I've ever had.

Ken really believed in me and was always willing to give me a chance to tackle something.  I came to his department as a temp, and temped there for three or four months before I finally managed to get hired (there had been some terrible hires in that department over the past couple of years, and Ken and I had to really work at it).  One day when I was still a temp, Ken was overwhelmed by calls he had to make, or maybe there were a bunch he didn't want to do.  I think it was following up with some media that had received galleys (this was in book publicity, by the way).  I volunteered to do it, telling him, "I'm really good on the phone."  So he said, "Go ahead," and stood by to listen as I made the call.  A minute or so later, he gave me a thumbs up and walked away.

Once I was on permanently and had my own book assignments -- well, let me go back for a minute.  I actually had my own book right before my permanent hire.  There was a certain author that Ken couldn't stand dealing with, and I volunteered to make a call to this author.  I figured out how to deal with the guy pretty quickly, and told Ken that I would handle any contact with this author if he wanted.  So he was actually my author before I was hired.  I guess because it was my first assignment, and at first, my only one, and maybe also because I realized how different and interesting the book was, I worked my ass off on it.  In all fairness, the author did get a few major publicity hits set up before I got started (a piece in Rolling Stone, an appearance on The Colbert Report).  It was a big home run, both in hardcover and in paper, and it really made me at that job.

But once I was hired, Ken would pretty much assign me to any book I got very excited about.  He figured out pretty quickly that I pushed really hard for a book I really believed in, even if it was a "big" book that wouldn't normally go to the most junior publicist.  (This was very untrue of his successor, who kept every single big book for herself.)  That's how I got to do the David Lynch book -- the second I heard about it, I ran into Ken's office and said Please Please Please.  (The new boss was there when the Lynch book came out in paperbook, and made a screwface about my being the publicist.  I was already in with the Lynch crew and she really couldn't do anything about it.  Very early on, she and I went to a Lynch event together, and when David came up and kissed me on the cheek, I think she knew she couldn't take the book from me.  As Emily Litella would say, "Bitch.")

One more story about Ken's generosity:  he represented an author I liked a lot, and loved the book, and I believe we had already arranged that I would do the paperback, or maybe it was that I took over a bunch of work on it a bit after publication.  Anyway, I was involved somehow, and Ken and I were both invited to a launch party that a friend of the author's threw (in an amazing little townhouse in Harlem).  Ken was both editor and publicist for the book, but when we were heading up to the party, he told me to tell people that I was the publicist.  It certainly made me feel more comfortable in a group of writers and book people who were strangers to me.  Ken actually looked fairly uncomfortable at the party, but as I said, he's shy.

I'm still on the mailing lists of both the difficult author and the author I liked, but not with the Lynch camp any more.  I had been closely in touch with his right-hand guy (I wasn't close enough to contact David directly), but he sent me a very snappish e-mail one time, and I never replied.  If it had just been a bad mood, he never made amends; I never heard from him again.

I've been thinking about setting up a little shop on Cafe Press to sell tee shirts and what-have-you with old advertising images on them, mostly, I think, beverage labels.  Like so:

Do we like these?  I also have some smashing foreign ones, and beer as well as soda.  I was playing around with some of the images this morning...they tend to get a little blurry when I enlarge them.  Maybe I need to scan some at a higher resolution -- these are actually images I downloaded, although I do own these labels and many others.

I would wear tee shirts with these images on them.  (Cafe Press, by the way, is set up so that you can sell with no set-up costs; last I checked, the seller uploads the images and chooses what kind of goods to use -- tee shirts, coffee mugs, etc.  There is a price for making each item, and the seller chooses how much over that to charge; the items are made to order.)

advertising design, 1900-1950

Maybe more like packaging than advertising, these things that have caught my eye.  Pre-1972 bottlecaps (the ones with the cork on the back).  Matchbook covers from the 50s and 60s.  Space-age dinnerware design and atomic-age glassware.  Soda clocks.  Soda labels.  Roller rink stickers. 

I love vintage stuff in general, but I am fascinated by the look of these things, the excitement and the ornament and the style.  The art.  Art that didn't think it was art.  Commercial items that didn't know they were beautiful.

Some of them I collect or intend to collect.  Others, I just save images (although I am bummed out at not being able to save images from eBay any more). 

First off, something I intend to collect, though I've started in a small way.  This is going to be my dinnerware set.  It was made by a firm called Iroquois, a line called Informal.  The designer was Ben Seibel, who was less well-known than another Iroquois Informal designer, Russel Wright.  His patterns, and the shape of his dishes, remind me of the kind of styles I saw as a small child.  I actually discovered Informal by accident, when I was looking at restaurant china on eBay.  I liked the idea of buying mismatched vintage restaurant china (which is also very cool. design-wise).  And I chose my pattern, which is called Garland.  It's not horribly expensive, but at a certain point, buying collectibles (even ones I would use) proved to be too much of a luxury.  So far, I have four Garland bread plates and the sugar and creamer.  Here's the pattern:

Here's a big pitcher from the set, which is the same shape as the creamer:

As with the MST3K stuff, stop here if you don't like it.

The thing I collected madly for a time was the vintage bottlecaps.  I had a friend who collected them, and one day I actually looked at some of his caps, and I was a goner.  My core collection is pre-1972 American soda caps, but I've also picked up some foreign caps, beer caps, plastic-back caps, and so on.  But the US cork sodas are to me the real beauties, and I have about 2,000 of them.  Again, I haven't been able to buy them in years, but I have a beautiful collection.  I am too lazy to scan them in right now, but I'll post some saved images, and I do own all of these caps:

One of the truly amazing things about bottlecaps, as opposed to many other kinds of collectibles, is that no one knows how many there are.  There were so many little local bottlers that occasionally one or a whole cache will turn up in an old barn or attic.  There does not exist any kind of guide or checklist.  Bottlecaps are infinite.

To be continued...

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.