Stephanie without a job, mine not terribly inspiring, little hope of finding or forming a game group, not much to do in this town if you're not into camping, hunting, or drinking, so we need to find another way to amuse ourselves between bouts of job hunting. We'd been kicking this idea around for a while, and the other day I just looked over at my wife and said, 'Let's do this'.

We're going to collaboratively write a dark fantasy trilogy over the course of the next year.

We'll try to maintain a NaNoWriMo-like pace of around 1700 words per day, write for four weeks and then revise for two, have a rough draft of the whole trilogy done in six months and spend the next six on a complete rewrite. The goal is to publish, or at least feel publishable Our start date is June 1, which gives us a little over a week to do world building, plot outlining, and character setup. I also really ought to finish typing up my NaNo novel so that I don't get confused. I can tell you right now it will not be set in the Stone, Steel, and Steam 'verse. We will be making regular public updates.

It's amazing how having a job really cuts down on your time and inclination to look for a new job.

The more we've researched, the more it seems that the library board is untouchable. They followed enough procedures accurately enough to cover their collective asses and left too little evidence for us to get an investigation going. We're almost definitely not getting Stephanie's job back, and that's fine; we wouldn't want to work for these jokers after what they've done. However, I still feel like we have a civic obligation to fight them: they're acting against the best interests of Glasgow, and they need to be held accountable. Our only good move may be to start a petition to have the mayor dissolve the current board and appoint a new one. Law of Mordor: the power by which it was made is the power by which it can be unmade.

For the past couple weeks, Stephanie and I have been hitting the job boards, both locally and nationally. ABCTE still hasn't graded my essay, so I can't apply for my state teaching license, and I don't want to apply for most teaching jobs until that's at least pending. There are a lot of library jobs open, many of which Stephanie is more qualified for than she was for Glasgow. (The Moscow, ID job didn't pan out; we're still waiting to hear from Taylorsville, UT, no other interviews scheduled yet.) There isn't much locally - little full-time and little over $10/hr. We're confident that between Stephanie's library applications and my teaching applications, we'll have a permanent job away from Glasgow by September, and a temporary job here while we wait will keep us afloat until then.

I applied for every local job that seemed even close to workable, and I got hired as a guard at the county lockup after a 30-second interview. For the first couple of days, having this job seemed substantially worse than having no job at all, especially since it has prevented me from going to job interviews for better jobs. The building seems permeated by despair and fatigue, and it doesn't seem likely I'll get a lot of meaningful camaraderie or fulfillment on the job.

There seem to be jokes waiting to be made about the parallels between being a high school teacher and being a prison guard. 'Being a jailer is a piece of cake; I used to work in a high school.' 'Do you have any experience teaching in a high school? Not really, but I used to work in a prison. Close enough.' But I don't want to be the kind of person who thinks of school and jail as analogous, and I don't want to work for an administrator who does, either. Then again, our prisons and our schools are our two most embattled institutions, chronically underfunded, understaffed, and overcrowded. Everyone is constantly wringing their hands about their statistics, and yet no one ever wants to increase their funding, and the few times we do throw money at them, their problems only seem to get worse. And I think in both cases, we as a society haven't really decided what we need these institutions to be, but we're unwilling to acknowledge that, so we ask these institutions to do the impossible and then blame them for their failure. And, in a certain sense, jailers and teachers are both trying to help people that often don't want to be helped.

I hope that something better comes up and I don't have this job long enough to feel obligated to put it on my resume. But it is better to have a poor job than no job. In the meantime, I'll learn from it what I can.

I have never been much for politics except for a generalized anti-nationalism, but I'm noticing that my peers have become increasingly politically vocal and active, so I figure it's time for me to take my stand on the issues. The thing is, though, that there is no party or candidate that I'm aware of that matches my views closely enough for me to wholeheartedly support. So here's what I've been thinking, this is what I'm going to ask the people who are supposed to represent me to do, and if anyone is aware of a candidate with similar views, I'd be happy to vote for him, her, or it.

Some of these are opinions I have considered for a long time and fire will not melt out of me. Others are ideas I've just been kicking around for a few weeks and would be curious to see how they would play out, and I would welcome the input of an expert as to why this might be an incredibly good or incredibly bad idea. And, in the incredibly unlikely event that I might someday run for office, I'm not going to tell you which is which. If you have any questions, comments, or ridicule, please reference the item number(s).

1. Metric system FTW.
2. Stop minting pennies, nickels, and one-dollar bills and gradually remove them from circulation. Increase circulation of the millions of dollar coins we already have.
3. Require all retailers to print the total price with tax, not the net price, on all stickers and displays.
4. All copyrights and patents should expire 20 years after first publication or upon the death of the author, whichever comes later in the case of an individual author, or 20 years after first publication or upon the dissolution of the corporation, whichever comes sooner in the case of a corporate or collective author.
5. Penalties for copyright infringement should be tiered to differentiate between individual downloaders and large-scale, profit-oriented bootleggers, similar to the difference between the penalties for speeding vs. vehicular manslaughter.
6. All new laws should be required to have a sunset clause built in to them - 20 years by default.
7. All elected officials should be limited to three consecutive terms in the same office.
8. Increase the size of the Senate to four Senators per state.
9. All U.S. territories and protectorates should be either converted to states or let go entirely.
10. End the death penalty.
11. All income, inheritances, and capital gains should be taxed at the same flat rate, but there should also be a very high personal exemption, making the entire tax scheme simple, yet effectively progressive.
12. Either end Daylight Savings Time or make it permanent.
13. The federal budget should never run a deficit - in fact, the federal budget should never be more than 90% of revenue and the extra 10% should be earmarked for paying down the national debt. It may be permissible to run a deficit to finance a particularly urgent war or deal with an economic crisis, but all three branches of government must sign off on it. I'm not sure what the process is now for approving deficit spending, but it needs to be more difficult.
14. Any future economic stimulus packages should be more carefully monitored so that funds are used for one-time costs to improve infrastructure, not for recurring costs.
15. Increase teacher salary. Decrease teacher job security.
16. Tobacco should be made illegal.
17. Repeal big chunks of No Child Left Behind and the Patriot Act. Severely cut back the powers of and/or disband the Homeland Security Department and the TSA.
18. Support a Palestinian state.
19. The 'War on Terror' and 'War on Drugs' are ridiculous abstractions that need to end. There do need to be some in international protocols for conducting finite warfare against specific stateless actors.
20. End hate crime legislation. Not that I'm a fan of hate crimes, mind you, but unless racism itself can be made illegal, whether a crime was racially motivated should have no bearing on the penalties.
21. Eliminate the electoral college. Or at least winner-take-all voting schemes.
22. The U.S. should unilaterally, without any treaties, negotiation, or strings attached, reduce its stockpile of nuclear weapons to about 100 warheads to be kept as a deterrent and invite international observers to oversee the decommissioning of the excess. If the other nuclear powers choose to match our reductions, we will agree to make further reductions, with the goal being total world denuclearization.
23. The FDA should regulate anything intended to be put in a human. Maybe not to the point of verifying claims of medicinal efficacy of herbal remedies (though it wouldn't hurt), but if someone is selling St. John's wort, I want to know that some governing agency has verified that it is St. John's wort and not mercury-laced dandelion leaves.
24. There should be a tax on lawns.
25. It should not be legal to oblige the person who buys your house to belong to the Home-Owners' Association any more than it would be legal to require the person who own your house to convert to your religion or join your fraternal order.
26. The U.S. armed forces should be integrated into a single armed service to reduce redundancy, and the whole operation should be massively reduced in size and cost. We should close most of our overseas bases. We should increase the number and capabilities of our special forces and increase the spending per soldier in equipment and training by reducing the size of our conventional forces.
27. Comprehensive civilian handgun ban.
28. There should be an increased purchase tax and annual registration fee on low fuel efficiency vehicles, the funds of which are to subsidize tax reductions for high fuel efficiency vehicles and energy research. This increased tax would apply only to vehicles purchased and owned by private individuals, not businesses or non-profit organizations.

Stephanie was invited to apply to the position of Library Director at the Glasgow City - County Library in Montana. She applied, was interviewed, was hired on a six month probation, moved with her family to Glasgow, and started work. She was given no training other than what she set up for herself. She was give no formal or informal feedback or evaluation.

Then, after a little over a week on the job, she was fired.

The Library Board refused to give any reason. They gave no indication beforehand what, if anything, she was doing wrong. They gave no warning.

So, here we are, having turned down four other job offers and moved halfway across a continent to a strange, small town, and we're back on the job hunt with a lease hanging over our head and a whole bunch of furniture we're going to have to move again.

Aside from the, 'wow, that sucks', aspect of the story, let me walk you through why this is so very, very wrong:

[I'm about to say several accusatory things about the Library Board as a whole. We do have intel, however, that there is at least one person on the Board who seems sane, responsible, and human. I hope that this is not taken personally by anyone it shouldn't be.]

The Fundamental Problem of Library Boards
Library Boards, at least in this neck of the woods, are not elected. They are appointed. Some of our sources suggest that they are appointed by the mayor, but other sources suggest they are appointed by existing members of the Board.

There's also no clear way to appeal their decisions. The whole point of America, I thought, was that government is supposed to be accountable to the people, and if they're doing something wrong, they can be removed from office. Sure, it's easy to be cynical and dismissive about that on a national level, but in theory, that's how it's supposed to work, and it shouldn't be that hard to implement on the small scale.

So, you've got a bunch of unelected people, who don't necessarily have any knowledge of how libraries work, and you give them near unlimited control over the library with no check or balances. Yeah. That's going to work out.

The Library Board May Be Breaking Several Laws, Procedures, and Ethical Guidelines
We gave ourself 24 hours after the firing to just go, 'what the hell, what the hell, what the hell, what the hell', but then we started going through policy manuals to find out what went wrong or how we could fight this. Turns out, the Board is doing a lot of things wrong:

• Probationary doesn't mean what they think they mean. When we asked why she was fired, a Board member said, "She's in a probationary period, which means we can fire her whenever we want and we don't have to give a reason." Actually:

  "A probationary period of six months to a year is common practice for new directors. The Board should informally evaluate the director’s performance midway during this period, and then do a formal evaluation at the end of the probationary period to determine whether to retain or dismiss the director. Future evaluations should be done on an annual basis." [Montana State Library Trustee Manual, July 21, 2011, p. 33, emphasis added]

  [Edit: Turns out they may actually be safe on this one. Montana has some unique exceptions in employment law. Source]
• They plotted the firing in secret. Boards can have closed meetings, but the reasons for them and the procedures for calling them are fairly specific and restrictive. A former Library board member is quite certain the current Board broke Montana closed meeting law.
• Discrimination my be at play. After the firing, several people have come up to us and said, "You need to talk to the Women's Resource Center." "You need to call Montana Civil Liberties." "If you decide to go with an attorney, make sure to get one from out of town." We didn't pick up any discriminatory vibe, because they stonewalled us on why she was fired, but the people in town know something fishy is up.
• Board members are not supposed to attempt to secure library resources for the personal use of themselves or their friends. But one has.
• Board members are not supposed to issue directions to the Director as individuals, only as a whole Board. But some have.
• Library Board members are not supposed to talk about Library Board stuff outside of official Library Board meetings. We have information that several do.
• The Board is required to give Stephanie a letter of termination. They haven't. Stephanie had to pester them for a week to get one.

The Glasgow Library Board May Not Even Understand How to Do Their Job

• We've learned that previous Directors have been fired or threatened with firing for weeding the collection. Weeding is the process of removing books that are outdated or haven't been checked out in over three years to make way for new books, and is a normal and necessary function of all good libraries.
• We've learned that they offered the previous applicant a higher salary than they offered Stephanie, then they gave out Christmas bonuses and realized, woops!, we can't actually pay the Library Director that much with our actual budget.
• The whole Board put together took over half an hour to figure out how to use a webcam, and yet they'd rather write the Library's technology policy themselves rather than let someone who knows about technology work at the Library.
• One of the dodges they used to explain without explaining why they were firing her was that she 'didn't share our vision for the Library.' Except that the Board never told her what their vision was, and she never had the opportunity to tell the Board what hers was.
• It's taken almost two weeks for Stephanie to unravel all the budgets, grant statuses, database subscriptions, and software license renewal deadlines. Right now, she's the only person with the knowledge and authorization to keep a lot of the Library's essential services running. By firing her without first hiring and allowing her to pass all this stuff on to a replacement, the Board is shooting the Library in the foot.
• They offered Stephanie a severance package. Then the thought occurred to them that they should check with the city to see if they had the authority or the funds to do that.
• They're just going about this firing the wrong way. If they decided not to hire Stephanie and didn't give us a reason, we'd have said, "Oh. Okay." But they offer her the job, wait until we move out here, and then try to pull essentially the same stunt, and they think we're going to take 'we don't want to tell you' and a pat on the head? That's not how you treat grown-ups. Here's how this works: if you hire someone, and if they're not doing what you want, you tell them what to do differently, and if they don't change, then you fire them.

The Real Issues
Let's pretend, for a moment, that Stephanie was really wrong for this job, or that she somehow misrepresented herself. The Board dropped the ball by hiring her. Or, more likely, the Board is too incompetent to understand that Stephanie knows more about librarianship and library operations than this whole town put together, and they are making a big mistake in firing her. Either way, our family suffers and the Board gets to keep playing at Lord of the Library without any one of them being held accountable.

What do we want?

• We want her job back as it was promised to her. Fire her after six months if you can't own up to your mistake; we'll be glad to see the back of you.
• AND/OR we want to be compensated for the costs of moving here, getting out of our lease, and moving to our next job, not some arbitrary severance.
• We want to see that this never happens again. Whether that means getting the Board fired or warning off future victims applicants, we're ready to go to the mattresses.

How can you help us?

• Share this. Maybe it will get to someone in Montana who can help us fight this.
• If you're in Montana, write someone in government, make some noise, demand justice.
• Any relevant legal advice.
• Job leads.

Elsewhere on the Web:
Fired Librarian's Tenure a Short Story
Blindsided in Glasgow

We've got more than one job offer now, a couple more interviews in the next 48 hours, and still more leads in the pipe. So, we have the delightsome chore of choosing which one will work best for us.

Job	Status	Pay	Location	Other
C	Interview Scheduled	?	:)	?
I	Applied	:)	:)	work from home
G	Interview Scheduled	:)	:|	furthers both our career goals
U	Conditional Offer	:)	:|	does not further career goals
W	Offer	:(	:)	may further my career goals

I had two job interviews lined up before I returned to the US. The first went great, though the job itself isn't. I took a computerized assessment, had a five-minute interview, was hired and scheduled to start training on Monday. Then they started doing the background check and told me it will take over 30 days, which seems like something we could have started 30 days ago since the interview was scheduled in December. So, a job, but not yet. Pay is poor, maybe not even enough for us to rent a place of our own, hours not fantastic, but decent opportunities for training and advancement that would feed into a career in IT.

The second interview has a weirder story. The first phone interview went really well, but I was later told in an email I was not going to be hired for the position, but then I got a call and was invited to a second interview, but I had to file a second application online for the second interview, then when I showed up I had to fill out a third paper application, and when I finally got into the interview, it was for a position I never (and wouldn't have) applied for - they do have openings and interviews for the position I did apply for, and they're willing to interview me for it, but they don't know when, they'll call me.

So, while I'm waiting for the people who already want to hire me to figure out what is going on in their own corporations, I'm going to go ahead and tack on an English language arts certification (which may be the first education/career decision I have made in the past 18 years that makes any sense at all) and get an Idaho state teaching license as long as I'm here. The certification should take me about a week.

Everyone who reads this should know by now that I think Avatar: The Last Airbender is the best thing to happen to television, ever. What you may not know is that the creators of the original series have been hard at work on a follow-up series set in the same universe seventy years later: The Legend of Korra which premiers on Nickelodeon on April 14th. I've never been much of a 'fan club' person before - I don't usually sign up to mailing lists or websites or talk to other fans about how much I squee my fandom, but I did with Korra and it paid off: I got to see the first two episodes today, weeks before the official release.

It's...acceptable. The title card reads, "Book One: Air," which stirs the hope that this won't be just a one-season affair. The look and feel is very nice: a bit sharper, meatier, more mature and realistic, less stylized, very dieselpunk, which was a bit disconcerting at first, but then you figure that A:TLA already played around with anachronistic tech, it is seventy years later, and these people have access to rather commonplace magic, so why not skyscrapers and radio?

The writing and voice-acting was somewhat lacking, but then the first half of the first season of A:TLA suffered in that department, too. What really bothered me was that the first two episodes were far too frenetic and cluttered.

In the first tow episodes of A:TLA, we met six named characters: Katara, Sokka, Aang, Zuko, Iroh, and Gran-gran (who doesn't show up after those first two episodes, though she comes up in conversation). I think only one kid without a name has a couple lines. We set up the core conflict of the first season and the core nature of the main characters; what it lacks in depth and nuance, it makes up for in clarity. We don't go a lot of places, we don't accomplish a lot of things, we just get to know the characters that are going to be driving this story. A much more complex story unfolds over the course of the season, with multiple subplots and added dimension to all the characters, some of which is still unresolved, but those first two episodes of A:TLA laid a solid foundation.

The first two episodes of Korra by comparison, are a blur of characters, locations, and activities. We've got Korra, Katara, Tenzen, his wife and three kids (can't remember their names), Lin Bei Fong, a revolutionary leader (can't remember his name), several pro-benders (at least three named), and a seemingly influential street-gang. Lots of unnamed characters have lines, so it's hard to say who will be important. About a half-dozen potential plot threads were set out, hard so say which of them will be important. A lot of time was spent running from one area to the next for no apparent reason. Maybe it's intentional to reflect the frenzied pace of a more modernized, urbanized world, but it just feels contrived and confused. This show hasn't decided what it wants to be yet. Is this politics? Mysticism? Crime-fighting? Public relations? Professional sports?

That's all general film criticism and storytelling complaint - I think anyone watching the series premier would feel the same way. As a fan, I'm a little disappointed that metalbending seems to be commonplace, when it was only discovered by Toph late in the last series, and she was a unique earthbending genius, so I kind of thought it would die with her.

It's been interesting to see the exclusive interviews with the series creators on Korra Nation leading up to the release. Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko are not really well-spoken; they're nerdy fanboys just like me, trying really hard to explain why this is cool and constantly fearing that their listeners just aren't getting it.

So, this bears watching. It's not tear my eyes out bad like the movie, but I hope it gets better. Looks like I may have to get cable, though.

Raising a child continues to be a challenge, moreso of late with nasty colds all around and what might be night terrors. This is further exacerbated by being in Japan, where a problem that arises on a Sunday night that could easily be solved in America on Sunday night by a quick trip to the Wal-Mart medicine aisle cannot be solved in Japan until Wednesday afternoon because you need a prescription for anything as strong as Tylenol yet the doctors who write said prescriptions are only available a few days a week.

External challenges aside, there are times I think I'm just a very bad parent:

• Half of the time Emma approaches a hazard, I think, you know, the longer we keep this kid, the more attached we're getting, and the more painful it's going to be in the future when she inevitably puts the wrong thing in her mouth and chokes to death; we should probably just kill her now and save ourselves greater sorrow and heartache later.


• I was exposing Emma to ketchup and Tabasco sauce before she was weaned, but every time Stephanie goes to turn on a light, I have a twinge of worry about exposing Emma to too much artificial illumination.


• I go around using phrases like 'sexually dimorphic' on our morning walk without even thinking about it. I just know that Emma's going to pick that up, and no later than third grade all her peers are going to think she's insane and/or perverted. And this is unintentional; there's plenty of stuff that is.


• A lot of times, I feel like I can't teach Emma anything yet. It seems like we're just stalling, keeping her occupied/contained until she becomes a real person. Okay, just stay in this corner and chew on that teething ring and I'll pick you up in four years to start your ninja training.

---

I've speculated that this is the best time in history to be a parent with a cranky baby. For most of human history, a parent had nothing but darkness and folk songs. Our parents may have had late-night infomercials. I can cue up episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender or A Little Snow Fairy: Sugar! at will. When a baby is so congested she can't sleep any other way than upright on a daddy chest, I take one for the team, have Stephanie plug me into some earphones, and chalk the consequent sleep-deprivation up to baby sleep problems and not to irresponsible movie marathoning.

The Mummy (1932), like other 'classic' 'horror' 'movies' was rushed, shallow, and dull. I was rooting for Imhotep the whole time. 2-.

One Million Years B.C. (1966) - I finally understand why MST3K exists. The claymation scene was the only good thing about it. 1.

Anonymous (2011) - If I could have bothered to sit all the way through it, I would have hated it. 150% speed was not fast enough to outrun the stupidity. 1.

1612 (2007) - Russian historical fantasy is apparently a thing. Kind of like A Knight's Tale, but with Braveheart-level violence and brief nudity. Interesting, but I wouldn't really recommend it to most people I know. 2+.

As probably comes as no surprise, I'm still looking for work. I'm not getting offers, interviews, or even leads. What I am getting is a lot of ideas about how to make the process easier.

This will be one of those posts where I need some feedback, because I'm not sure who is more out of touch with the realities of the typical job seeker: me or employers. Every sentence in this post comes with an implied, "Is it just me or...?" written before it.

I've written before on how job sites need to be more like dating sites and dating sites need to be more like job sites. This is still true. You fill out the exhaustive personal profile on the job site, ask it to match you with jobs that you meet the qualifications for, and it somehow thinks 'I have a bachelors degree in humanities,' and 'This job requires a masters degree in quantum computer analysis,' are the same thing because they both contain the word 'degree.'

I have a lot of work history, and it gets really time consuming having to manually enter that information every time. Some online job applications can parse that information from an uploaded resume. Few actually do it well. The thing is resumes are by definition a format for humans to read. You trim them down, simplify them to make them as machine-readable as possible, but in the end there's always going to be a screw-up. The best thing would be for everyone to agree on a format that supports some kind of meta-tags, so it can be both pretty and human-readable, and easily computer-readable with no guesswork because every field is marked. The next-best thing would be to have it try to parse your resume, have the form populate and ask, "Is this correct? Y/N" and when you press 'N' it shows you your resume and highlights the fields it's trying to populate, and where it's trying to find that information. "Is this your name? No? Okay, show me where your name is. Is this your address? Yes? Okay, good..."

A lot of these applications ask for information that I can see no possible way how anyone would actually use that information. You want my reference's address? What, are you going to write them a letter?! I'm filling out this form on the Internet, which means I know you know how to do things online, can't you just ask for their email address or their LinkedIn ID? Many of the jobs Stephanie is applying for are worse: you have to mail in a paper application, which sometimes isn't even available to download and print. And yet the job is posted, and we found out about it, using this mysterious electronic communication system.

Emma was deported...for about 30 seconds.

We went to Immigration this morning for Emma's hearing. They had the lights turned on and everything. This time, they had the person who speaks English on standby, my boss came, and an actual human being was managing our case this time.

It went a little something like this:

All right, today we're going to have your case examined by an immigration enforcement officer. Sign this form that shows you've been examined. Okay, now the result of the examination is that your daughter is in the country illegally and you have to come to a hearing. Sign this form that shows that you've been to the hearing. So, the result of the hearing is that your daughter needs to be deported. Sign this form saying that you want to appeal this result. Okay, I'm now approving your petition to appeal and granting her special permission to stay in the country, since she's a dependent minor and all. Right, so, the visa will be processed in a couple of minutes, and we're done.

I'm not sure if that was awesome or stupid, but since it worked out in our favor, it's hard to be too critical of the process.