Le Café De Paris, The Boise Egyptian Theater, and Lynne McTaggart

DDS called Wednesday. They are pulling another hiring list next week and my score was expired. They wanted to let me know, so I could update my score before they pulled the list. This felt like a really good sign. I updated my score by taking the test again, but their system still uses my most recent score from a similar position, which was lower than last time. The State of Idaho has four positions with very similar on-line tests and I can retake the test every three months. My score keeps varying and I have no idea what questions I change and get right or wrong or if I do better on one of the versions of the test. I hope at this point the score doesn't matter as long as I get the interview.

Yesterday morning was my interview with Medicaid. This was for the same position title as the one I interviewed for at DDS, although agencies are autonomous here and everyone seems to do something different under the same title. This interview was fairly informal, although I had to do an Excel test after the interview. I am not good at spontaneous tests. I think I did alright, although I thought of a more creative solution after I got home. They will be conducting second interviews and are in a hurry, although I bet they are not in as much of a hurry as me. At least I felt less desperate after getting the call from DDS and I am sure that helped my attitude at the interview.

Last night I met some friends for dinner and then went to see Lynne McTaggart at the Egyptian Theater. We went to dinner at Le Café De Paris, which is a French restaurant, but last night was First Thursday and they had a special menu of Portuguese tapas.


The waitress said they were Argentinian tapas, are they the same or does the waitress not know her geography? Tapas are hors d'oeuvres,

All Tapas $4
Choose 5 for $18
Choose 7 for $25
Choose 10 for $35

Clams Alentejo
linguica sausage, cilantro, peas, wine

Queijo de Portugual
Portuguese cheese

Bifanas
marinated pork tenderloin

Caranguejo e Abacate
crab and avocado croustini, peppercorn aioli

Marinated Olives

Salmão Ahumada
smoked salmon, arugula, pears, capers, tomato dijon-vinaigrette

Camarroes piri piri
sauteed shrimp, black pepper sauce

Alcatra
red wine and garlic marinated beef

Gazpacho

Bolo de Bolacha Maria
Portuguese Cookie Cake

We chose a variety of 10, not including the clams.

The Boise Egyptian theater is super cool inside. It was recently renovated and the inside includes golden statues and Egyptian paintings on the walls. It includes a pipe organ left over from silent movies, although last night this was covered up by the stage. We sat up in the balcony, just because the theater had one and we could.



I thought the evening included a bit too much self promotion and time taken with audience participation, but it was an interesting evening. McTaggart talked a bit about John Nash's game theory, which seemed to me to make a good case against Socialism and I would like to investigate that further.

She gave two examples. One was experiments where a group of people contribute money into a communal "pot". They are generous with their contributions as long as they see that others are contributing, but once they perceive that others are freeloading, their contributions decrease as freeloading increases, until they are not contributing at all. Another example was experiments where one person is offered money and asked to share a portion with a second person. The first person decides what percentage of the money to share, and in experiments around the world, most people decide to share 50%. The conclusions, people are naturally altruistic, but need to perceive fairness.

McTaggart was promoting her latest book, The Bond. Reviews describe her as “a bridge between science and spirituality” and she researches the shortcomings of modern medicine, and quantum physics and it's application to you and the world. She seemed more scientist than hokey New Age spirituality, which people here call "whooo whooo." The idea behind The Bond was that we can create positive energy, which is most powerful as a group, which initiates positive change.

We did an Intention Experiment, where a group holds hands and sends positive energy to someone's injury, which last night was my aching arthritic hip. Afterward, I felt a bit better, and today I feel even better. During the experiment I felt like my body was rocking all over the place and I kept opening my eyes to check to make sure I still had my feet on the ground. We did another experiment where Christelle and I held hands and I sent her a mental image, which she got before we even started the experiment, but she is a good receiver. I will have to watch my thoughts around Christelle. Overall, I thought McTaggert's ideas sounded like Bill Wilson's, although not nearly as well thought out or as purposeful as AA. If there is a spiritual part of McTaggert's work, I did not get it last night, unless she equates the source of positive energy with spirituality.

I got home after 10:30 and walked out of my garage into my backyard filled with the sweet smell of my neighbor's tree, which is now a puffy snowball of flowers.

Today is free admission day at the Idaho Botanical Garden, tonight is the Eagle Gallery's First Friday and one year anniversary, tomorrow Sara and Joe are having a Kentucky Derby party and I'm invited, and Sunday Sara and I are going to see Always, Patsy Cline. I feel busy again.

It is Finally Spring!

Anybody remember that World War I started with an assassination? Am I the only one that wonders why the Obama Administration cannot do anything without a piece that does not make any sense?

It is finally Spring! Everyone says our April was more like February. This is the second year in a row of an unusually long winter. Sunday afternoon was warm and sunny enough for me to sit and read in my backyard in a tank top and get some sun. At our house in Simi, Cruiser used to like to lay in the dirt under a tree on our backyard hill. Here he is trying to recreate the experience with the blueberry bush,



My neighbor Kurt has been home for about three days out of the last two months. He must be truck driving again and taking his dog Tia with him. I decided there is a direct correlation between the absence of Tia and the increased presence of my neighbor's cats.

I have another interview with the state this Thursday. What a relief. This is for the same job as the last one, but with Medicaid. At this point I really don't care what the job is as long as they pay me.

Yesterday it was warm, and by warm I mean around 60 degrees, but with low clouds all day that gave me a headache. A storm blew through late yesterday and it was cooler today, but tomorrow we are into the 70's and get to stay there for a while.

I finished my application to do a mural on a traffic box in downtown Boise and dropped that off this morning. I've been playing some Facebook games and looking at the art. Just in case I can get some work doing computer art again, I am in the process of adding some of my old games work onto my website. When I can get myself to stop playing games, that is. I just can't beat Forty Thieves Solitaire.

Where is John Gault?

On a brighter quality of living note, I used to wake up in my room in the Simi town home that I owned in the Spring and feel like I was waking up in an aviary. It is like that here, except it is still too cold here to open the double paned windows, but I hear all the birds chirping away every morning when I sit outside with the cats on their morning stroll.

This is my neighbor's backyard tree, which is in full bloom,


I do not know what kind of tree this is. I don't think it gets fruit, but last night it smelled awesome. Here is my neighbor's other cat, Cookster, terrorizing Cruiser and Spit from the safe distance of my car,


Friday it got really cold again and Friday morning I woke up to a small patch of snow in my backyard. The Boise River is roaring and people I talk to say they have never seen it so high. It is running fast and the bottom foot of the trees along the bank is under water.

Wow, applying for jobs is super boring and no fun to write about. I took the day off on Friday and went to the movies. My brother Dave reminded me recently that in high school I could have won the Ayn Rand most likely to achieve award, so I went to see Atlas Shrugged in an actual movie theater. A business man financed the film, since none of the studios would touch the subject, and it has a made-for-TV look with some mediocre writing and acting, but I still walked out of the film feeling pretty fired up. I read the book years ago and felt like it predicted a future that was coming true, but after watching the film I realized Rand's future is here.

When I read the book, I wondered about the main female character and the lack of spirituality. The main female character is a man in a woman's clothing and there is no feminine role model in the book. Ayn Rand's writing about sex is pretty warped, too. Makes me wonder about her. Her writing about individualism is ego-centered, and I would not agree with that concept today, but I did wonder if Rand's ideas could easily apply if they were spiritually-centered, which is why I went to see the movie. The movie is only the first third of the book, so after getting fired up seeing the movie, I had to go buy the book so I can read it again.

In the book, all the creators leave. (They are invited to a secret place by John Gault, who is the first to leave.) They are tired of having the life sucked out of them by government regulation and having the fruits of their labors taken away and given to all the non-creators. As an artist, should I create so that all of my work be given away for the greater good or to benefit the less fortunate? Am I not to be trusted to do some of that myself by choice? If I want to sell it so I can afford to live or to feel rewarded for my creation, is that bad and wrong? Does that make me a money grubbing Capitalist? When I remembered that in Atlas Shrugged all the creators leave, it made me think of me leaving for Idaho.

The Feds completed a yearlong sting operation on an Amish farm in Pennsylvania, and announced this week that it has gone to court to stop Rainbow Acres Farm from selling its "contraband" to willing customers in the Washington area. The contraband is unpasteurized milk! Those money grubbing Amish Capitalists! Endangering others in their never-ending quest to make money! The public paid for a year long sting on the Amish over raw milk?! When government pretends that they need to protect the public from the Amish and raw milk, when producing and selling your raw milk to willing consumers is against the law, and when government starts protecting the interests of large corporations (pasteurized milk producers) from small competition, that is Rand's future and we are here.

Where is John Gault?

Tulips and Daffodils

My friend reminded me of another one of my remarkable neighbor noise experiences, although the worst part of this one was not loud. After I sold my house in Simi, I rented a town home. It was quiet until my female neighbor bought a Harley. Her garage was right outside my bedroom window and she would come roaring home at two in the morning, the motorcycle running would wake me and then I would have the pleasure of listening to it while she waited for the garage to open and then parked it just right. She also had a monster truck that she backed into the parking spot right in front of my front window, just to be sure I had a chance to enjoy the fumes.

Then there was the guy down the street with a motorized toy car that he ran with a remote back and forth in the packing lot in front of my house. When I walked up to him at midnight to ask him to stop, he looked surprised, like he thought I was coming over to ask him for a date. I really fantasized about buying a remote scrambler on that one.

The absolute worst though, was the time I woke up in my bedroom to moaning. Am I having sex? Nope. Where is that noise coming from? No, no, don't look! That image will forever be etched on your brain! I sat up and looked out my window and another neighbor was having sex in front of the window by candle light. He was an old guy and I was kind of happy for him, but I never could look him in the eye again. Close the window! Close the blinds!

I did not find out until later that my friend lived a few doors down, but moved due to a noise issue.

Yesterday, I met with the Department of Labor guy and then the artist with an MPA that works for the City of Boise. I now have another list of Boise art resources and a call for artists to create art for traffic boxes around the city. They print the piece on vinyl and wrap it around the traffic box, so my watercolors still apply. Here's a picture of one I took when I was here last May,


This afternoon I went to the Eagle gallery and dropped off a painting and ran in to the IWS President. She was just talking about me and wondering if I could help out with the annual workshop that is June 1 to 3. I said before that I would, but I did not know about my job situation. Today I was thinking that I could just volunteer and act like everything is going to work out by June, and besides, it gives me a chance to observe how the guy does a workshop, so I can work on doing my own workshops. It's being given by Sterling Edwards and he's been doing workshops a long time. Then I can also use the person that I will be working for to run the workshop as a reference.

When I got home, I took a walk so I could take pictures of the tulips and the daffodils before they end.





Even the run down houses with old cars parked in front still have tulips,


The tulip trees are just about done,



These appear to be a wild hyacinth and they are everywhere,


This is a cherry, but there are so many white flowering trees that I can't tell which one is a pear or an apple or something else.


These are some of the stores around the corner, just to prove how eclectic Boise really is,




The Quasar store is empty, but how long ago was it that there was Quasar? How long has this store been empty? I have not been in the Bosnian market, but the Orient Market smells super bad and is a good place to buy a large amount of rice.

A Little Bit of Scotland closed a week ago and is for rent. The bagpipe player that had the store must live down the street, because I see a guy wearing a kilt working around the yard. I did really enjoy the Friday afternoon bagpipes.

Happy Easter!

These are my neighbor's tulips,



And I swear the bases of the blueberry flowers are turning blue,


I bought my local honey yesterday, 3 pounds for $12. I could have bought 7 pounds for $24, but that is an awful lot of honey. The honey makers are Idaho Honey and are in Weiser. Weiser is an hour and a half northwest of Boise and, according to the honey salesman, Weiser is not known for honey, it is known for the National Oldtime Fiddler's Contest in June.

As part of acting as if everything is going to work out, I entered "Quinn" in the Idaho Watercolor Society annual show and was accepted. Hey, they had 135 entries and could only pick 50. The show starts May 25.

The Eagle gallery is having their one year anniversary the next First Friday, May 6. I did not realize that the gallery was that new, although it makes sense.

One of my Artists Way friends went to Singapore for two weeks and brought back silk scarves. I picked one that is a mauve-pink with gold and copper embroidery. As soon as I saw it in the pile, I picked it up and hugged it to my chest. I felt like I was five years old and was saying I loved it and one of my brothers was asking me if I wanted to marry it. It is good to feel five years old again every once in a while. My friend loved Singapore and felt like she was in a sea of color for two weeks.

Another Artist Way friend ran in the Race to Robie Creek, called the "toughest half-marathon in the northwest". She said she was grateful to finish. Another Artist Way friend is training for some bike race. In our meeting last week I was feeling like a bit of a slacker. I prefer hiking and it is past time for a hiking road trip. I was thinking of a trip to Silver City, but I am giving it a few more weeks for the wildflowers to come out. By then, the drive should have wildflowers and snow on the mountains. One of my friends camped at Bruneau Dunes State Park, which looks somewhat like Death Valley and is only an hour and half away. I like Death Valley and Bruneau Dunes sounds like another place to go before it gets too, too hot.

http://parksandrecreation.idaho.gov/parks/bruneaudunesstatepark.aspx

Happy Easter!

Synchronicity

My neighbor was out planting for Spring last weekend and reminded me to disconnect the garden hose. There is still a chance of freezing and connected hoses have a way of exploding. When I planted the blueberry, I realized I needed a hose, but I thought it was late enough in the year to leave it connected. I disconnected it Sunday evening, before I forgot, and this week we promptly had a few nights below freezing. When I left for the Meridian job club on Tuesday morning, the dreaded temperature light was back on in my car.

Boise had two bright sunny days this week, although it was colder than when it was raining, and I took the opportunity on the first one to mow the back lawn. About half of the lawn was getting too tall to mow and I did not want to go through what I did last summer when had to mow the back lawn three times one afternoon because it was so tall. Today is another bright sunny day again, but still cold, and I tackled the front yard. The front yard did not need mowing, but was full of weeds and dropped seed pods.

It has been a week of synchronicity and I am honestly really tired.

The woman that did not hire me for DDS called me back and confirmed what I thought about my performance reviews. She said next time do not provide the one with comments all about how I do not get along with my coworkers. That review was years ago and I forgot that it included some comments that today do not seem justified. I was glad to have the chance to explain those comments and she said I have two good reviews to provide and to just provide those. She said in the end the competition was really tough for that job and I got the impression I came in second. Since my one reference that did call back was all about an art job, she asked about me as an artist. I thought I was the only artist on the planet with a Masters in Public Administration. Turns out that I am not. She gave me the name of someone that she completed her MPA program with that is also an artist and works in the City of Boise Arts and History Department. I called her and we are going to have coffee on Monday.

The Executive Director and Development Director at Ronald McDonald House shot down my painting idea already. It seems like a theme that my work always appeals to the everyman types, but I can never get past the directors. After I brought up Ronald McDonald House last night though, one of my friends said she had a job opening referral for a job at Ronald McDonald House, which she sent to me. I sent an email to my new contact asking about how to apply.

Last Saturday I met someone I thought could help me find a follow up to the soul retrieval I did last year. When I met her there was a workshop going on upstairs called "Your Call to Be Peacemaker and Social Healer" with James O'Dea. She was talking about spiritual healing and pointing upwards to the workshop upstairs and I suddenly felt she had an answer to my question. Really, how many people can you ask what to do as a follow-up to a soul retrieval? I have not done my homework for that yet, I had a busy week, but she invited me to a class on TAT in someone's home that I went to yesterday morning.

TAT stands for Tapas Acupressure Technique and was developed by Tapas Fleming. It is pretty simple. It is not tapping, everyone I talk to about it thinks it is tapping. Tapping is the Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT.

I was glad to be at this class with someone knowledgeable, someone that I could talk to about my reservations afterward, because there was a good amount of opinion and uses I thought were irresponsible. The actual technique is very simple and I would not pay much to learn it, but I strongly believe that it should not be done without a guide. I don't mean a guide to help you do the technique, I mean a guide to help you deal with the results. In the class there was also some conversation about applying the technique towards others because quantum physics says we are all one energy. I do not think anything in quantum physics encourages you to play God. I am responsible for my own energy and other people will react to that energy in kind, changing other people's energy or spiritual path is not my business.

After the class my guide and I went to lunch. During lunch she was showing me how she uses a pendulum to see and change her energy, and it was on the table. As we were about to leave, a waitress walked over and picked it up to check her energy because her mother recently died. We talked about Lynne McTaggart being here on May 5th. This waitress left and told our original waitress about Lynne McTaggart and she came back to ask us about it. Turns out she has been visited by people from the other side since she was a kid. Am I in Idaho?! I felt like I was in some spiritual center of the universe spreading positive energy and support.

I am generally skeptical of anything that appears New Age. Something starts as spiritual and then ego intervenes and makes it something different. A good example is James Arthur Ray, who took a valid Native American spiritual tool, the sweat lodge, and twisted it into a New Age moneymaker, used it naively and irresponsibly, and killed people. I prefer a spiritual program with no leaders, no experts, just trusted servants and some more experienced than others.

Spreading positive energy is exhausting. I came home and slept all afternoon, and went to The Artists Way. I got to talk about my synchronicity this week and initiate some more when I talked about Ronald McDonald House and found out about the job there. My friends reminded me that just two weeks ago anyone talking about synchronicity just pissed me off.

Today I took a break and just sent some follow up emails. I received a no thank you letter from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. They say they will keep my resume on file and I think I will take the opportunity to send them my new one for their files, since I am very sorry I did not fix mine until after I sent that application. Now I'm ready, good resume, sorted out references. A very old friend used to say, opportunity will come, you just have to be ready.

Anyone that has known me for more than a few years knows I always have a problem with a noisemaker neighbor. Some places I moved into peace and quiet and then in moved the noisemaker. One of these times it was a couple with a screaming dog. As soon as the couple left, the dog started screaming, and that's not whining, it was screaming. I had never heard anything like it. The animal control guy said it was separation anxiety. Sometimes the noise is not the neighbor's fault, but due to a design flaw. Although my upstairs neighbor in Thousand Oaks never sat down, he was walking around on a paper thin floor and that was not his fault. I lived in an apartment in Vegas where my neighbor's garage was under my bedroom. Every morning I would wake up with a start to the noise of the garage door opening underneath me and just as I was about to fall asleep again, woken up again to the sound of the garage door closing. Sometimes my neighbor forgot something and we would do this twice. My house in Simi Valley was mostly really quiet and the noisy neighbor did not last long. He was a drug dealer with a fascination with fireworks. All it took was one police visit to a fireworks party and that guy was moving out.

This is the first time ever that I said something to a noisy neighbor about the noise and they actually changed. My Harley-riding, karaoke-singing neighbor has only had the music on a few times in the last few weeks and has noticeably turned down the volume. He does seem to be big on Friday night parties and for tonight's party they set up the karaoke machine and the kids were playing with it. According to my neighbors, this is a regular summer thing. Hmmm.

Name that Bird

These gorgeous birds come around all the time and I finally got a picture of them,




They are shiny with a rainbow of color from head to toe.

My neighbor was wondering why her cat, Pierre, keeps sitting and staring at the fence. I told her it is because he is having a stare-down with Spit. Here is Spit on her side,


Cruiser is less tolerant and has tried to dig a hole under the fence at that spot. He also sticks his whole arm through that knothole as if Pierre is going to just sit there and let Cruiser scratch him.

The flowering pear are all in bloom here and I think that is a variety of magnolia in the background,


This is week 9 of The Artist's Way. I have to read all the morning pages I wrote since last December. The Artist's Way is set up to be done one chapter per week, but we are meeting twice a month. That means more than twice as many days of morning pages and reading them is taking a long time and is super boring. Many of the previous chapters talk about creative u-turns and I have two really terrible ones. Two times where I ventured out as my creative self, had a devastating experience, turned around, and tried to bury myself in something I decided was safe. (Which is sounding too much like the last few months.) One of the tasks in week 9 asks me if anything from those u-turns can be salvaged.

Along with the idea that I did not get those last three jobs because I needed some information from the experience to be ready for that right job, I'm wondering if it was also a message, you are going the wrong way! I came here with such optimism and then everything seemed like it came to a halt in December. Recently I was feeling like I was headed for another u-turn, so I asked myself, what can be salvaged? What am I resisting that one of those jobs would have helped me resist?

So, yesterday, I went to Ronald McDonald House and talked to the receptionist about my idea for portraits of children and left some cards. I wanted them to commission me to do some portraits of their success stories, either for the parents or for display in the house. One of the SCORE counselors shot the idea down last Fall and I shelved it. Doing the commission for Mary Jo made me fired up about it again. The director of Ronald McDonald House called me back today while she was looking at my website. She loved my work, asked me what I was thinking of doing, and she got fired up, too.

I called the Department of Labor guy and set up an appointment with him to look at my performance reviews and talk about what to do about references. This morning I went to the Department of Labor job club in Meridian. (Boise, Meridian, and Eagle are like Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, and Newbury Park in proximity and size, except that Boise and Meridian are two out of the three largest cities in Idaho.) One of the people that I interviewed with in the one interview for two jobs recommended the job club in Meridian. (Funny, her recommendation made me think I wasn't getting the job.) There is another job club in Boise on Friday and I think I will go. Then I bought a fat book on Internet Marketing.

It is easier to stay focused and calm when you are busy.