It's always impressive to me that no matter how good a shape you think you're in, you're never quite as good as you could be. My muscles have been reminding me of this little life lesson all day today. All I did was help trim some bushes and pull some weeds and monkeygrass (the kudzu of the flowerbed!), but yet my muscles have decided to let me know--hey, we're not used this way every day.
Now, I will admit I think I'm in pretty good shape--I mean, I do swim at least five times a week, but it's not often that I use all my muscles in such a way as yanking out weeds and plants that, quite frankly, are pretty darn happy to be in residence where they are. And, yes, I will admit that going and swimming laps today did make things feel a lot better--not only from a physical standpoint, but also a mental one. My whole outlook hss picked up just a bit from my swimming--and certainly I needed it.
Now if only my leg muscles would just stop protesting every time I do something silly like, oh, move!
But ya know, it was worth it becuase I had a great long Fourth of July weekend. My old buddy, Rich O (by the way, Rich...if you're reading this...why don't you have a blog yet?!?) made it up this way from near Atlanta to regale me with stories of his new house, that he and his wife, Carolee are expecting (congrats to them BTW!) and to just check in. Oh yeah, and we saw
Spider-Man 2, which rocked. The previews--well, there wasn't a lot there that excited me as much Spidey 2, I'll be honest with you. I think the jury is out for me on
I, Robot. On the one hand, it looks like they're taking just part of the Asimov book--mainly the rules of robotics--and jettisoning the rest. But on the other hand, it's Alex Proyas as director and I really think
Dark City is one of the more underrated sci-fi movies out there. So I am waffling on whether or not to plunk down my money to see it. We also got a
Catwoman preview, which makes me think more and more than someone owed Satan big time to get this stinker to the screen. We got some other previews as well, which were enjoyable enough, I suppose. I guess now I'm really kind of waiting for previews for the
Episode III and for
Serenity as the next big ones I can't wait to see.
My parents actually went to see a movie at the theater over the weekend. That makes two for my dad this year--he went with me to see
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban a few weeks ago. So, this means that he's pretty much seen his quota of movies in a theater for the next four years. They went to see
Terminal, which Mom raves about. She says it was great and that we should all see it. I am more of the, well, I am gonna wait for DVD on that one and rent it. Personally, I'd rather go see
Dodgeball or Spidey 2, again! (I am waiting for a second Spidey trip to see if it opens on the IMAX out at Opry Mills).
Saturday night the town of Smyrna did their own fireworks show so as not to compete with downtown Nashville. It was pretty nice and I enjoyed it a good deal. But let me just say the really great fireworks show was Sunday night in downtown. My father works for the state and arranged with security for us to watch the fireworks from the 30th floor of the Snodgrass building where he works. It's got a conference room that has windows all around and a balcony running all around it. The view up there is nothing short of spectacular. We got there early and you could walk around and see pretty much all of downtown and middle Tennessee stretching out before you. You could see fireworks shows of other cities, counties, etc off in the distance and people shooting off their own fireworks all around. And then the show began--up at eye level. It was spectacular. We brought a radio along and tuned into the sound of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra's accompaniment and it was superb. In a lot of ways, it rivalled Boomsday in Knoxville--though Boomsday features my personally favorite, the power T done in fireworks. None of that here and no Rocky Top. Oh well, football season will be upon us soon enough.
All in all, I have to admit it was a pretty good weekend. And today I went out to fill out an application for a job, in addition to making some network contacts. I got to have a two minute interview at the application screening and was told my new resume (the active one that I had tweaked for this opening) looked very good and professional. So, hopefully that will at least get me into the first round of interviews and I can win them over from there. We'll see how all of that goes. At this point, the jury is still out on whether the passive or the active resume is more successful. I have yet to get any nibbles from the job fair I went to a few weeks ago, but then again I wasn't expected an deluge of calls. It's easy in the whole job search process to have this image of someone waiting by the phone or mail box for your resume to come in, seeing it and thanking the stars that you're available for work. In reality, they get tons of mail and it's part luck of the draw that they see you and notice you. The active resume, featuring bold text and points bulleted out is one way to try and draw in attention. One thing I learned in a class at college was that magazine covers have 10 seconds to make you decide to buy or not on impulse. I often feel that is the same thing with resumes--you've got ten seconds to catch an eye and make them want to read more--maybe 30 seconds--about you.
Hopefully someone will see mine soon and think--hot diggity...this guy is the perfect fit for us. Until then, I will go on fighting the good fight.
posted by Michael Hickerson at 7/06/2004 05:20:00 PM |
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