Cass's Craftiness!

Hello followers. I don't have any news for the bathroom remodel right now. I haven't done anything except buy a bunch more cement board. This week was my last week of working at the Help Desk. Since I fell ill late in the week, my energy's just completely gone to be working on the bathroom.

Anyway, I just wanted to update everyone to say I start my new Business Systems Analyst job this week. If you're thinking that title sounds familiar, it may be because that is the same title my wife has. We now have the same job just in different departments of ITS. I'm über excited!

I also wanted to show you a cool wall hanging that Cass and her craftiness made. Cass found this idea on Pinterest and we both liked it enough that she wanted to give it a try. The idea's really simple but time consuming. You drive a whole bunch of nails in the shape of a state and a heart (or whatever shape you want) inside the state (like where your hometown is) half-way into the wood plank and wrap a long continuous thread around all the nails between the inner shape and the state outline.

We bought a few 2oz boxes of 3/4" long 18 gauge wire brads. They're about $1.30/box from Lowes. Cass started hammering the nails in and quickly discovered she didn't enjoy doing this very much. Needless to say I hammered a bunch of nails in for her, probably about half of them. There were a bunch of really tight areas where it was really hard to hold a nail to get it started. This is where a pair of needle-nose pliers comes in really handy.

Cass recently bought this Silhouette Cameo cutter machine that she used to cut out the shape of Michigan which she just taped to the board temporarily to use as a template to follow for the nails. We're really happy with how it turned out. Cass is going to do two more. One of Texas (where she was born) and one of California (where I was born).

I hope you have an awesome week! I'm expecting to! ^_^

Vocation Alteration

Hello family and friends. As promised in my last post I need to talk about this job interview/presentation I had two Mondays ago. It was for a Business Systems Analyst position with the eResearch department of ITS at U of M.

Photos are a selection of slides are from my presentation.

I had to do a presentation on a technical topic (of my choosing) to a non-technical audience. Since photography is a passion of mine, I decided to do the presentation on "How Aperture Affects a Photograph" which my audience really seemed to like! They also really liked the fact that I used Google Presentation for my slideshow instead of PowerPoint since U of M has "Gone Google!" The photos are of some of the slides in my presentation.

So like I mentioned last time, I was told on Friday 3/30 that I would have to present this on Monday 4/2! Yikes! The hiring manager asked me on Friday if I'd be up for doing the presentation the next Monday and my thought process was pretty much this..."Whoa! That's not enough time! I was always given at least a week in college. This isn't college stupid, it's the real world. Crap! I can't tell her 'no' or suggest a different day because then I'll seem incompetent and that I'm not confident that I'm able to meet deadlines." I said..."Monday's perfect!"

I told Cass that I wanted the whole weekend to work on this, so the bathroom remodel would have to be put on hold for a weekend. Not only did I have to come up with the material for the presentation, I needed to take/make the photos I was going to use in the presentation as examples. For example, I took a couple photos of cars driving on i-94 for one illustration. I went out to the pedestrian bridge over i-94 in Belleville to get a good vantage point for the cars driving by. I got a few funny looks from drivers probably wondering what the heck I was doing. I also wanted a series of photos for another illustration that involved a falling baseball. I wanted to illustrate that differences in shutter speed by changing the aperture. So, I set the camera up on the tripod, tossed the ball in the air a bunch of times, and tried taking the picture at just the right moment. Not as easy a task as I'd hoped. I ended up taking over 100 pictures in that exercise and ended up with a handful of usable pictures and whole bunch of pictures of a blank white wall.

I finished a draft of the presentation on Saturday afternoon and we went to have dinner with my parents. I practiced presenting it to them and got some useful feedback. Dad really seemed to like my illustrations on Depth of Field. On Sunday, I practiced presenting to Cass again and put the finishing touches on it.

Monday (4/2) comes and my interview is scheduled for 11am. Right off, I could tell my audience seemed excited to learn about a photography related topic, maybe except for Peter (one of my old co-workers who was there for my interview). I'll bet he already knew everything I presented. Hopefully he at least enjoyed my pictures. Felt to me like it went without a hitch and I had a really satisfied feeling that I'd genuinely done my best. I also had some great feedback about the presentation and my skills in general from my audience.

After all that and a week and 3 days of anxiously waiting, I got the job! I just signed my offer letter yesterday (4/12)! I know there were a lot of people praying for me and I thank you from the bottom of heart for that!

I start the new job on April 30th.