Semester 12

Well, it's been just about a year from my last post. That's how busy the 3 classes a semester has kept me.

It turned out that I was only able to work a year and a half at my temporary position, due to their internal company policy. Because it was a call center, but they were kind enough to have me only do data entry, no open positions were available for me to become employed there. I can't complain, however, since they did allow me to get in a good year and a half of school.
Prior to my departure from that company I had a dream that I had died. It was very heartbreaking, and oddly (plus terrifyingly), real. When the last day at that company came all of those feelings came back in sickening detail. Leaving that job, although it was intended to just be temporary, really did feel like dying. I had a lot of good friends that I had made there. I loved the low-stress and no-demands atmosphere. I did my work every day to the best of my ability without anyone micro-managing me all the time and I loved it. In many ways it felt like home.
The other odd shock was the work load began to diminish before my official time was up. They began to send me home early just because there was not enough work for me to do. As it turned out, they decided to have my last day be almost 2 months earlier than expected. The good news was it allowed me to put my focus on my school's finals right when I needed it. The bad news was that it really hurt us financially.
That was just the least of our concerns, though.

When I went home to give Donna the bad news that I would be leaving work 2 months earlier she had even worse news. We had been living in a small, 3 bedroom apartment on top of her dad's workshop for the past 7 years. Because the apartment was very run-down her dad only charged a minimal amount. Even though our ceiling collapsed on us due to years of dripping rain, constantly broke down in various aspects, and allowed the heat to escape in droves it was still our home. Well, not anymore.
Because the building required constant repair dad was unable to pay the property tax for 3 years. Without his knowledge, it went up for auction. In the same day we learned that I no longer had a job we also discovered that also didn't have a home.
Miraculously enough, I felt strangely calm. In time, my wife and her family did, too.

Dad's building and our home were purchased by a group of people who made all kinds of promises, none of which were upheld. In the end, they gave us a time frame in which to leave. To make a long story short, my parents provided the miracle we needed. As we were hunting for an apartment my mom suddenly called with the news that she found us a house in my old home tome to rent for the same price of an apartment in Salt Lake. It is a very cute little place with a basement and upstairs. We had quite the adventure moving down here. Dad started hauling his big load, only to find the trailer unhitch from the truck as he was getting onto the freeway. Gratefully, no one was hurt, although both her parents and my wife's aunt could've been killed.
In the end, it took several smaller trips to get everything moved.

Until our situation changes for the better my family is living on the generosity of others. My parents are paying for the monthly rent on our house and allowing us to eat Sunday dinner at their house every other week.
The building my wife's dad was working out of was such a money-pit he gained a huge amount of money from the finalized sale of his building to the buyer's group. His lawyer, a customer of my wife's dad, made sure that he was (and is still) not taken advantage of. Now that he no longer has to deal with the tremendous responsibility of trying to upkeep a 50+ year old building he has money in his pocket. As such, my wife's family is kind enough to pay our bills. They also supplied us with funds for this year's Christmas. Aside of that, we are living on food stamps.
Despite our desperate situation, we are quite well provided for, for which I am eternally grateful.

The drive to school is my one complaint. It previously took me 15 minutes to get to school. Now it takes me 45 minutes and I have to get up at 5:45 AM. I have to get up that early in order to beat rush hour. I've actually been getting to school at hour early, which I spend by catching back up on sleep. When I first started out I was getting up 6:00, only to get stuck right in rush hour. It was very stressful and I'd get to school right before class started. I found it amazing that with an extra 15 minutes I could get an hour's worth of sleep.
The stress of it all has had an impact on me physically, as well. Every Tuesday night I've had a very difficult time in falling asleep. I've tried warm milk, mental exercises, and finally had to rely on taking a quarter of melatonin. 

I still have all of my classes on Wednesday. I've been doing that for the past 3 semesters, I believe, going on 4 went school starts again in January. I just finished a semester and looking forward to spending a long, 3 week Christmas break before the stress starts all over again. In that time I'm aching to get some more project done and posting my school work online.
As I've also been working to get my game created I finally sold my first one to a nephew who is a big fan. We played his version this last weekend at my parent's and he is pleased to have won his very first game on his own copy, as well. He's been playing for years.

I just finished my Digital Prepress, Concepts in Motion Design (Animation), and Organizational Psychology classes. I learned a lot.
In Digital Prepress we used a handy website to make books: blurb.com We made them with InDesign and had to go over all of the aspects used in printing; RGB vs. CMYK, line quality, text color, flesh tones, and moires. I was not allowed to create a rulebook for my game so I did the next best thing: a visual tour. I received the final book copy in the mail and opened it today. It really did make a difference to see the printed copy vs. on screen. It was cool to see all my hard work in a physical version, as well.
My instructor for the class told me that after this class I was not allowed to work on anything for my game as a class assignment. She said I needed to have stuff for my portfolio that was not my game. I told her I agreed. I have my next portfolio class already lined up for next semester.

In my Animation class I was the only Graphic Designer student among the 30 or so Photographer and Animation students. We learned how to use Photoshop and Illustrator to do simple animations used in web graphics, such as banners and ads. On our first assignment I spent 9 hours doing a simple animation. I learned all too quickly that animation is a time constricting project!
We we started to use AfterEffects I thought I was going to loose it. I didn't get it, I was having trouble all over the place, and I was going to go bonkers. Gratefully, the instructor was kind enough to give me some serious one-on-one coaching that helped me to pass the assignment. From there I had to come back to school on Saturday to work on assignments since I didn't have AfterEffects at home.
For the final I downloaded the trial version. It took me the whole of the 3 weeks to complete. It was nothing but suffering and stress. I had to start over several times and at one point I'd accidentally deleted all of my important elements. We were doing a Kinetic Type animation and I'd deleted the words!
On the last day I hunted down the school's tech guru 3 times to try and get it to work, to no avail. The necessary Quicktime upgrade was not available for the school's CS6 and we could not get it to play the video segments I had included. I was finally impressed to save it in a CS5 version, open the program, and render it from there. After that it took close to 30 minutes to download it onto Vimeo and have it be available for presenting.
When the instructor came into the class he could see everyone hunched over their machines, still working like I was. Because of everyone's busy scrambling to get the final assignment done he was kind enough to decide to not have the final test. I had been trying to study between fixing rendering errors so I was grateful.
Only 5 kids had their animations ready to show at the beginning of class. When he showed them, we could see why. One kid complained that he'd spent 5 hours on his and didn't want to mess it up so he didn't do anything else. One girl did a fantastic job, but limited hers to only 90 seconds, which was the minimal time requirement for the assignment. None of theirs had pictures, graphic elements, or additional video segments, which the assignment required. The others were equally disappointing, with the exception of one. It was a full song and had some great elements in it. However, as I said, no video or graphic elements.
Once the students showed their finals they were allowed to leave. I was able to show mine next, 30 minutes after the last animation was played. By then, the completely full classroom only had a small handful of working students left in it. The instructor was telling some of them that he still required previous assignments from them, as well as the final. So, many of the students showed up for class, watched the animations that were shown at the beginning of class, and left. It just blew me away.
Upon seeing my animation, the instructor had plenty of good things to say. He showed me which parts he liked the best (particularly the winding road) and I caught him toe-tapping to the music. He also thanked me for taking the time and effort to complete the assignment. He immediately then asked if I'd like to see my final grade. I rushed up and looked over his shoulder to be greeted with an "A+." It made me feel really good, knowing that I was the only Graphic Design student among so many Animation students and since I'd had such a hard, hard time with it.
As I was looking at my grade I inadvertently caught sight of the grades for several of the students listed under my own name. Without even trying to count I took in at least 4 'D's.' Again, I was shocked. I could only hope they were for students that had yet to turn in their final and were still working hard to do so.

In my Organizational Psychology class I learned what I felt to be some of the most important information, exactly when I needed it.
First, I panicked a little in the middle of last semester when it came time to register for classes again because I couldn't find my 3 classes all on the same day. Alan Murdock, the Academic Adviser who had been helping me for so long, already had the solution in hand. For my 3rd class he was able offer me the choice of an independent study class. With the independent study the class requirements could be negotiated between me and the instructor. So I chose Organizational Psychology since I was taking Cognitive Psychology at the time and liked the instructor. She agreed so we met for only 30 minutes in the library after Animation class.
She was very relaxed and chill, which made the difficult concepts of psychology better to enjoy. Her requirements included reading 2 extensive chapters a week (30 pages each) and answering 2 of 5 provided questions on the chapters. This required me to keep track of what the questions were and what they were on. I also had a final paper, midterm, and final test. Both tests were open book at took about 4 hours apiece to take.
Organizational Psychology is the study of psychology within groups, specifically jobs in businesses. I felt it was the best class I could've taken while unemployed. It taught how people should act and why while employed in a business so that they can advance. It taught the reasons and benefits of working freelance. It also taught me the pros and cons of a business that does or does not follow moralistic values. It also verified my emotions and feelings regarding some of the treatment, or mistreatment, from my past jobs. That helped me to feel very good.
All in all, it provided some serious instructions on what to do when out looking for work and even more importantly, what to do when you finally get in one.

For this last semester, I've been trying to have my classes be on Wednesday so that I would be able to take advantage of the Life Drawing lab. As it turned out, the lab was to be held on Tuesdays, so that would not be an option. Instead, like I said, I went straight to the library to meet with my Organizational Psychology instructor.
I finished the big Life Drawing picture I'd been working on at the end of the last semester, one of the reasons for taking the lab. I posted it on my Life Drawing class site and even sent a copy to the model at her request. I now needed a new project and decided to focus on my own characters. After discussing it with my wife I was starting to feel that I'd learned just about all I could from the class and lab. I was ready to focus on my 3 class instead and do my action figure drawing projects from home - without a live model.

The good news about starting school again is this will be my last year! Alan Murdock helped land me another independent study for the next semester so that all of my classes could be on Wednesday again. He also outlined all the rest of the classes for the next year that I would need to graduate. As I mentioned before, 3 of those semesters will include portfolio classes.
He also told me that now is the time to start looking for an internship. When my assignment was to end at my last, big temp job I had already been thinking about it. I've been applying to as many internships as I could up to this point without any worthwhile results. Now, the school's Academic Adviser is telling me, 'now is the time.' So, I'll keep looking and applying. Here's hoping something can turn up soon, since an internship is required to graduate.

So we've been living the past 3 months or so in my old home town. Our little house it very comfortable, with the exception that it has no insulation and holds heat as well (if not worse) than our previous little apartment. The garage was constructed with old, military ammunition boxes. There are a few places in the wall where pieces are missing and you can see the old boxes.
We love the room of the basement which allows us to have a make-shift gym, music nook, and playroom. During our time here, we are unable to visit sensai and my beloved karate classes. So, instead, I've been focusing on workouts/training/therapy to try and overcome some of the major areas of pain that have been holding me back from progressing for so long. I've had some great results so far but I can tell I still have a long way to go.
I was able to organize a fantastic study/office/project room upstairs and my wife has her own small room for sewing (she has a small sewing service she does). Our son's room is adequate for his needs and we love the bigger kitchen space. I, personally, love having a tub in the bathroom. I also love being able to work and keep our car in the garage. I love having a fenced yard, cement driveway, fruit trees, and storage areas.
I add all of this because my mom says she keeps needing to hear that we like our place. Part of this is because she needs to know that their hard-earned money is being appreciated. Another reason is because we all miss living in Salt Lake.
Being back in my old home town has put a lot of stress on my nerves. I've already run into a handful of people from my past, a few I'd have rather not have met the first time around. I've spent the last several years working myself to be who I am now. The last thing I need and/or want are any reminders of who I no longer want to be. Being at home is just that: home. Stepping outside, however, is just... hard.
One good thing about being back here is my wife. For years I've been telling her stories about my upbringing and the overall mentality of this place. She's been a good listener but reluctant to believe all of my words. Until now. Unfortunately, she now is having first-hand opportunities at seeing what I've been talking about. 
Another reason I bring this up is for this the situation of my wife's grandpa. He is not doing well and is not expected to be with us for too much longer. He owns his own home, which is in my wife's parent's name. When the time happens that he is no longer with us it has already been arranged that we will be allowed to move in. His home is smaller than the one we are renting. It is also missing the usable basement, a fence, a fruit trees, and an upstairs. But it won't cost 2 arms and a leg to be in and it will be back in Salt Lake. With that possibility comes the option of being closer to school and (*knock on wood*) and karate/internship/job.