Brian Fields

I’ve been working this new job for almost two months now and it still seems like I started a couple weeks ago.  I remember why I didn’t like third shift last time and that’s because it seems like I don’t get any time to do anything.  It makes me want to sleep the day away and regret not getting anything done when I decide I need to sleep an extra hour or two when my alarm goes off.

A few weeks after I started, the announcement was made that a company called ACS would be taking over operations for our department.  At first there were layoff rumors going around, which really had me worried because I’m in no rush to be umemployed again.  Long story short, they hired in all of the people working for Kelly Services that wanted to stick around and then did away with Kelly Services in favor of the temp agency they normally use.  I applied, had a fairly informal interview after my shift, and was hired in pretty much right away.   The downside is that my pay was cut down a bit.  The upsides are that I’ll hopefully be moving to second shift as the lady who was on second shift decided to not accept the ACS take over.  I haven’t been able to look over the benefits package and such, but I’m also hearing that there may be some sort of performance-based monthly bonus or something, which would be fantastic.

I wish I had more to say but I really haven’t gotten much done since I started third shift.

A couple of weeks ago a friend from RPI gave me the contact information of a man that works for Anthem (The insurance people) and said he was looking for some reliable workers for some general labor positions.  I got in touch with him, he called me back and in less than 24 hours after I had his name I was filling out paper work for a background check and pre-screening.  I was told the background check would take about a week to be completed but it ended up taking only a few days… and the Thursday following I started my new job.

I now work third shift operating an envelope stuffing machine for Anthem.  Technically, I’m employed by Kelly Services in a temp-to-hire position.  (If I remember correctly, I can work there for up to a year before Anthem has to either hire me in or dismiss me from the job.)  The funny thing is, it actually pays more than I was making at RPI (mostly because of it being third shift).  I can’t say the job is super exciting… it’s actually quite boring… but the important thing is that I have a job and that it’s not a bad job… and it will keep my afloat and allow me to make sure my next job is one that isn’t taken out of panic or desperation.  The cool thing is that unlike Cast-Fab, this third shift is from Sunday night to Thursday night… so I have Friday and Saturday off to hang out with friends… and while there is some potential for overtime (yay!) it doesn’t seem like I’ll be working the majority of weekends (if at all) because there is someone running the machine on long shifts through the weekend.

So yeah.  That’s where I am.  Hooray for having a job, and even more hooray that I didn’t even touch my savings account during the time that I was unemployed.

Two weeks ago half of our department got called aside and laid off.   This was following the news my boss gave saying that RPI had chosen to lay him off.  Despite the fact that I had been uncertain about my job since the fall it was really a bit of a surprise.  We hadn’t heard anything and considering the past two rounds of layoffs were well known before it happened I didn’t expect it to happen that day.  For the first time since August 2nd 1998 I’m unemployed.

All-in-all I’m doing my best to be positive about it all.  I hadn’t had a raise in about 22 months, I was making well below industry standard salary, and our department always seemed a bit neglected or under appreciated.  I’m not bitter about it all.  I don’t think I have the right to get angry… after all, that’s business.  There are really only two things that upset me about it.  The first is that I probably won’t see a lot of my friends as often… if at all.  The second is that I was pumping 15% of my earnings into my 401k and now I’m going to have to roll it over into an IRA or something while it’s down by about 50%… meaning I’m going to get shafted out of a thousand dollars or so.

Admittedly, I’m not looking for jobs constantly.  I have my ear to the ground so to speak, but I just keep thinking about how it took me a year to find that job, and now that the economy sucks the experience I’ve earned probably isn’t going to get me as far as it would have last time.  I spent my first jobless week getting a lot of things done but now I’m just going a bit stir crazy.  There’s only so much I can do to keep myself occupied while not being able to spend any money.   On the subject of money, I’m doing fairly well.  With just my monthly bills I can probably go a little over two months with no income at all (not even unemployment) and without touching my savings account.  I guess I’ve done a pretty good job preparing for this over the past year, even though it wasn’t something I was planning for.  I think my best bet right now is to get a low-level job that can support me until I can get going again.

So yeah.  Here I am.  Jobless, looking for something to occupy my time and looking for a sign, answer, or push in the right direction.

This weekend my mom IMed me and told me that my dad was going back to his old Job in Cincinnati (The same foundry that I used to work at) and that they would be selling the house and moving to Cincy in (hopefully) near future.  Now that I no longer live in Franklin and none of my friends live in Franklin (at least nobody I talk to on a regular basis) that pretty much means that chapter of my life will come to a close and that at best, I won’t have a reason to visit but once a year, if that.

Franklin was the place where I grew up.  My family moved from Troy in 1989 when I was 7 when my dad got a job at a Foundry in Franklin. (which he left to go the place in Cincinnati, then went back to, and is now leaving again for the same place in Cincinnati.)  Having only lived in Cincinnati for the last 3 years, it’s not hard to say that most of my memories are of Franklin.  I spent the majority of my life there.  I met my best friends there.  I graduated from Franklin High School, learned to drive around the streets of Franklin, voted for the first time in Franklin… you get the idea.  I can barely remember Troy.  I remember certain things, I’m sure I could strike up some memories if I had to, but a lot of it is very faint.  Granted, I was 7 when we left, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how to get to my old house or schools… I might be able to draw a rough diagram of our house but I couldn’t tell you what color the carpet was, where the fridge was in the kitchen and such.  My point is that while it was my home, it no longer seems to be as big of a part of my life.

Although my mother seems to be a bit worried about what the future holds I think this is absolutely awesome.  I think that they should just move to Oakley but I don’t think they are too keen on the idea.  Just as long as they are closer I think I will be satisfied.

Mike has been looking for an apartment with one of his friends for about a month now.  Their desire to find a place had been on and off a bit since Mike moved back to Ohio, but Mike looked at a place on Saturday that he’s super excited about and his friend is going to check it out with him tonight.  Who knows.  He might be moved out by the end of the week for all I know.  He knows he’s welcome to stay with me as long as he wants but I think sleeping on a couch for about 7 months has hit its limit.

I hope to be looking at houses soon.  A year ago I said I wanted to start looking around this time and in the Spring, when the bottom sort of fell out of economy and the dollar began it’s great downward spiral I thought that I should wait up to a year longer to make sure I have everything in order.  But now I feel like I’m in a “s**t or get off the pot” situation.  The way I see it, I can keep saying I’m going to start looking at a certain point in the future and keep pushing it back 6 months at a time or I can buckle down, start taking the steps I need to take now and be prepared to jump on a deal that comes along.  I’ve really started doing my homework and I’ve filled out a few pre-approval applications online that have told me a rough estimate of how much I’m going to need to front at closing, what interest rates I can get and such.  I’m working on devising a budget that can fast track me to that amount.

The biggest issue with my plan is my job.  I haven’t had a raise in a year and a half.  I can understand that we had to let people go earlier this year and that the economy is in rough shape, but it doesn’t change the fact that my research shows that I am well below the bottom of the “average” for my job in the Cincinnati area.  I love my job, but I don’t know how much longer I can love it if I can’t achieve my goals while I’m working here. I know I can’t build my financial plan off of expecting a raise, but I do think it’s fair to expect that you can at least keep up with inflation.  Doesn’t seem to me like 0% is keeping up with anything.  Anyway, I’m ranting now so I better stop.

See ya.

… and all I got was a fridge full of spoiled food.

Last Sunday (the 14th) Cincinnati had a huge windstorm leftover from Hurricane Ike.  It was really quite unexpected as the most we’ve ever really gotten from hurricane leftovers was a fair breeze and some rain, so nobody really thought that we could get winds reaching up to 60 MPH.

While watching the Bengals blowing just as hard as the winds that day, the power flickered a bit at Joe’s for a bit, then went out a short time later.  I went back to my place to see if it was just his street/house or all of the area and sure enough, power was still on at my place.  I called Joe and Mike over so they could keep watching football and about 10 minutes after they came over, the majority of Oakley lost power.

Trees were down all over the place.  A tree on Drake Avenue had fallen the length of the road and taken out two telephone polls, nearly every other street was closed off because of downed power lines, and of course everyone on the roads became a total idiot without traffic lights.  FOR REFERENCE… if a traffic light is out, you treat it as a stop sign, you don’t just assume that you should keep going through the intersection because you’re already driving 10MPH over the speed limit.  (I kinda hoped that someone would just nail my car as a result of this so I could laugh in their face as I get a new one… I know, I’m a bit twisted.)

So anyway, with the power out there wasn’t that much to do.  As I said previously, it was really unexpected.   Joe, Kristen, Mike and I really just sat around watching trees be torn apart and half napping until the evening, when Joe and Kristen went to a party where the electricity was still on.  Mike and I eventually went to a bar down the road that amazingly still had power.

Monday morning I got a call from Lindsey saying that the power was out at work, but I figured it would be smart to at least show up and not assume that I wouldn’t have to work.  As expected, I arrived to find out that there was nothing we could do about it and that the building was too pitch black to even do some manual labor.

I went home and decided to take a walk to see how torn up Oakley was and to check what time the library opened. (they still had power.)  On my way back, Kristen saw me and picked me up.  She was going to check out the house of some family friends that were on vacation and make sure everything was okay.  I went back to Joe and Kristen’s place afterwords and we started cleaning up their yard.  Their neighbors have a huge tree that reaches over into their yard and it left some larger branches for us to clean up.  We started a fire and just ended up burning a lot of it for the sake of getting rid of it.  Around lunch time, Joe and I went to my place and tried to recover as much food out of the fridge as we could, then we used his grill to cook some of it.  Unfortunately I still ended up throwing away a lot of delicious stuff, but it’s good to know that it wasn’t entirely wasted.

Joe and Kristen’s power came back around 2pm on Monday, but our power didn’t come back until around 1pm on Wednesday.  The showers by candlelight were starting to grow on me. (Thank goodness we still had hot water!)  My parents just got their power back yesterday around 1pm… just shy of a full week without power.

So after a really miserable week in general I’m hoping things will be back on track this week.

I’m a bad news first kinda guy.  Lucky for me the news could be much, much worse, but it’s not.  We had to go through another round of layoffs at work and our department wasn’t as lucky as it was last time.  I wasn’t part of the layoffs, but nonetheless they left a sour taste in my mouth about my future, the future of the company, and my opinions of some individuals at the company.  Don’t get me wrong, I like it here and I hope the place is around longer than I am, but it’s hard to NOT have doubts about these things when you have to watch your friends walk out the door and stand there wondering all sorts of things.  Like I said, it could have been much worse for me personally, but it’s hard to keep a positive attitude amidst all that’s going on.

I avoided going out people from work because I didn’t want to spend the money at a bar. So after “Black Friday” I went home and mulled some things over all by my lonesome.  Mike was out of town for a wedding and Joe was tied up, so I had a few beers, bored myself with some games and found myself in a staredown with the clock… just waiting for a reasonable time to go to bed.

Saturday was more or less the same.  Kristen called me around 10am and invited me over to have waffles with her and Joe and I hung around there until noon or so.  I loafed around until dinner, went and had a burrito, then went to the Apple store to buy Quicken for Mac.  (FYI: It sucks.)  I really just wanted to get out for a little bit.  Later on Kristen called me and invited me to Don Pablo’s for dinner… I just had desert since I have alredy eaten.  Then we went over to Stephanie’s for a few beers but nobody wanted to do anything but sit around and be tired.

The next morning I went to church and almost immediately went up to Mom and Dad’s place for the day.  I got to see Yahtzee again.  She’s getting so big!  I think mom said she’s up to a whopping 16/17 pounds.  Dad taught me how to drive a stick shift.  I was getting pretty good at it, I think.  I stalled more times than I could count, and still need some practice, but I could do it by myself if I had to.  After a nice delicious dinner and a little bit of television I went back home.

Here it is Wednesday and I suppose I’ve cheered up a bit since Friday, but it’s really just a matter of my thoughts being shoved to the back of my mind so I can do my job.  Monday was a pretty confusing day as the layoffs left pretty much all the teams missing people.  I’ve had work but it’s been pretty stale around here.  We’ve been told that the company is at a “sustainable” point with our current business level, but I think it’s best to prepare for the possibility of the worst, regardless.  Hopefully things start shaping up soon to lift the cloud over us.
See ya.

If for some reason you haven’t noticed that I changed the look of the site to be a bit more graphical, you might notice that some things look a bit disheveled right now. I’m working on it. Hope you like it. Just gimme a few days, right?

Edit: So far so good… I think I have most of the page done, with the exception of the photo gallery (because I have to edit completely different files to change the theme of that page.)  I wanna re-do some of the icons to make them look a little less… crap… but I think that’s going to come after the site functionality is 100% (or close to it.)  I’ve been exploring a bit more of wordpress’s features than I did previously.  In the previous look I spent more time just cutting things out of wordpress so they couldn’t be accessed but now I’m trying to make sure that everything is built in is being used… whether it actually gets used or not.

Edit #2: Still coming along. The written content of the site should be good to go. The photo albums are being worked on and should only be another couple of days while I try and figure out the new gallery software a bit better.

I just received my new e-statement for Duke Energy. I dropped the bill another $12 to $54, but I still think I can get below $50. The gas usage dropped from 21ccfs to 14ccfs, and the electric usage dropped from 192kWh to 168kWh. This is the second lowest bill I’ve gotten since I’ve been here, and the lowest was for a whopping 2 or 3 days and cost about $9.

I filled up on gas on Tuesday. I spent the last tank of gas trying to get the best MPG I could. I want to get 37 MPG out of my car. I don’t know how achievable it is. I removed some excess stuff from my car (including completely emptying out the trunk, removing the back seat, and some other stuff.) and I managed to get an extra 2 days out of one tank of gas. I went about 400 miles on less than 13 gallons of gas… I think the MPG I calculated was 33MPG and some change. It’s going to be rough adding a whole 4 MPG, but I’m also considering that the first tank of gas included a trip to Franklin with 4 people in the car and a trip to Aunt Maria’s (where there are tons of hills.) So ideally, if I keep up the methods I’m using, I think I can go 3 weeks on this tank of gas.

Mike has been with me for 2 months now. He’s starting to consider if he wants to get a place of his own or if he wants to just hang with me for a little while longer. He actually is checking out a place today, but he wasn’t very excited by the location of it. It looked decent in pictures but pictures can’t tell everything. It could be awesome. It could totally suck. I don’t think he has the intention of moving in either way, I think he just wants to get an idea of what his options are. In any case, he’s welcome as long as he wants. He started working at Meijer a few weeks ago… just doing general work… a few days in to it, someone suggested that he apply to be part of the inventory crew. He had an interview for that recently and will be starting next Wednesday. The best part is that the job is only Monday through Thursday, so with that in mind, he got a second job for a valet service that his friend works for and seems to be pretty excited about having 2 paychecks.

I still really want a second job. Now that Mike is going to be working some evenings leaving me home alone, I might just go ahead and get some secondary job for a little extra income. My big concern is that I’m not sure who needs a guy that can only work a few hours in the evening a little bit on the weekends.

Work has been so-so. I’m not too fond of the stuff I’ve been working on lately. I’m learning new things with it, which is good… but at the same time a lot of the work is a bit mindless. The majority of the trouble is the fact that there is a lot of work, not that it’s particularly complicated. It’s really a “lather, rinse, repeat” deal.  I pick up other jobs when I get the chance, but needless to say I can’t really be a part of any big projects for other departments.  We had a lot of layoffs about a month or two ago.  There have been a few since “Black Friday”, but I’d like to think that I shouldn’t be worrying.  Even still, the mood around here has been a bit on the bitter side.  We’re all fairly worried about what could happen, and it doesn’t help that we’re supposed to have a company-wide review next month in which some overdue raises will be determined… makes it pretty hard to negotiate for more money when the company lost a chunk of business and had to let people go, ya know?  If my goal is to be making $40,000 by 2010, I’m in a bad place right now to still be wondering how I’m going to do that.  Maybe this is where the second job comes in.

Anyway, I’m probably going to be giving the site a quick makeover soon.  I just don’t know how I want to go about it… or exactly what I want to do.

See ya.

The day after my last entry I received the electronic statement for my gas/electric.   I’ve dropped my consumption to $67, (approximately $42 in gas, $25 in electric.)  The electric I’m satisfied with, but the gas struck me as odd because the thermostat had been completely off that whole billing period.  After talking with some people I realized that my hot water heater was probably the source of that other gas usage.

So thinking about this logically… does it make THAT much sense to have like… 50 gallons of scalding hot water in a tank in the basement for the 20 minutes of showers and 10 minutes of dishes daily?  I’m going to turn it down a bit.  I figure that if it has to run from straight hot water for a bit it’ll be fine instead of mixing hot/cold.  My goal is to drop by bill to $50 or less, and that’s also factoring in that there is a second person with me right now.  So yeah.  It’s gonna be a tough goal, but that’s the only kind of goal worth having.

I’ve now done a solid job of keeping track of my finances for a full month without lagging behind and more than a day or two.

I want to get a second job… maybe 2 or 3 nights a week for a few hours and one day on the weekend… a 20 hour sort of deal.  If I do, this money will go directly to my savings and will not be touched unless there is an emergency.  The tough task will be finding an employer that has a need for those requirements right now.  There are plenty of businesses within walking distance of me that would be great, but I think food service would be a bad choice for me right now.  I wouldn’t mind it… but it may be more of a hassle than anything.

The past month and a half has been a little weird. I’ve been occupied with plenty of things that could keep me from updating frequently.

At the beginning of March, Joe found out a pipe behind one of his kitchen walls was cracked and leaking. So I spent a few of my weekends helping him both tear a hole in his wall and repair that hole after the pipe had been fixed. It was a great experience to learn how to do some of this stuff with a little more than blind ambition, the advice of parents, and a book. Seeing as his house is roughly 100 years old, tearing it down and repairing it was somewhat awkward. The first layer of the wall was drywall, which would have been no big deal to replace if it was just that, but underneath was about 5 coats of ugly green paints, plaster, and lath. We kind of had to improvise on repairing the hole to ensure that that drywall we laid over it would be flush with the rest of the drywall. We couldn’t replace the lath because the replacement section of pipe stuck out too far. So essentially we got a piece of plywood that was the exact same thickness of the plaster, laid it into the hole as close as we could size-wise, and fit the drywall in. One edge was a little “distorted”, but after mudding it and painting it, it wasn’t even noticeable. Joe was really thankful for all the help I gave him in the process, and I offered to help him tear holes in his walls anytime he wants.

During the course of working on Joe’s kitchen and talking with him, I came to the realization of how much I want a house and how possible it is for me to have one by this time next year. I really spent some time thinking about it and I knew that my first course of action was to be in good shape financially. I started off figuring out my monthly budget rather than just blindly spending money. I closed most of the credit accounts that I never used and never really had a need for. I had a shell card that I hadn’t used in like… 5 years… I had a Dell account that had an APR of about 30%… thank God I wasn’t dumb enough to keep a balance on that… and a few other stupid accounts that I knew I didn’t need as long as I had one credit card.

Step two in my budgeting process was to see where I could cut the most money. I stopped eating out for lunches. To not see a new transaction on my account everyday was a big relief. My energy bill had been plaguing me all winter and even after programming my thermostat I was still paying about $100 for gas alone. (the furnace was the ONLY device using gas in my place.) I decided to just turn it off and see what happens. I was really surprised when the temperature never fell below 60. I could deal with that. I’m fine with bundling up… mom bought me an electric blanket back in January so I should be fine. I’m under the impression that because the doors in my place are really thin and there are lots of gaps in them that other people’s heat is keeping my place warm. Which explains both why my place stayed decent with the heat off and why it costs $100 to heat a 1 bedroom apartment. I’ve also been turning my computer off… I removed a light bulb from a socket in the basement that was wired to my electric line and the other tenants ALWAYS left on… that really annoyed me. My previous energy bill had fallen about $75 through all of this to a shade over $100… which only included 3 weeks of these methods. Hopefully the next one will be well below the $100 mark.

One of my other big costs was my car. It is by no means a gas guzzler, but my insurance was about $110/month, and with gas prices going up, that was another $75/month. I only have to fill up a little less than every two weeks, but that’s still a decent amount of money. The first thing I did was shop around for different insurance prices. Paying $1200 per year for car insurance on a car worth just about that is stupid. One company gave me a rate that would come out to about $120 every SIX months… so I took this rate and called up my insurance agent. I talked with him for a little bit and he helped explain things to me a bit better than the other site could. Joe recently left him when he got joint insurance with Kristen and I think he got the impression I was trying to do the same. His final rate was higher than the other guy, but he gave me better coverage and has never been a problem for me, so I stuck with him and essentially cut the costs of my insurance by more than half. Nothing but success so far.

Of course, with a lot of my bills lowered, the biggest of my bills more or less can’t be touched. $450 a month in rent. Now comes the twist in the plot. Mike came back the Thursday before Easter because he had a job interview. While being here, I think he realized how much he just wanted to come back, whether the job interview went well or not. Lo and behold, a week later Mike is living with me. I haven’t really talked to him about it before he came back, but I think he plans to stay with me at least for a while, and it would be awesome if he paid half of the rent. I have a living room in my place that has its own closet and is bigger than my bedroom. Assuming I could find a door for it, it’d make a perfect room, thus cutting my rent, internet and utility bills in half. We’ll see how that develops, though. So far the big idea here is that Mike gets a job.

So that’s more or less where I stand right now. I’ve been making some sacrifices here and there in terms of buying stupid crap for myself and finding reasons to NOT go out and spend money. Let’s hope it pays off in the end.