Today wasn’t really about job-hunting, exactly.  I got word that two of my classes have been accepted for Art Unraveled in Phoenix next August — Dynamic Digital Collage (like last year) and the new Digital Distressing class.  No Pajama party, which was really helpful last year for my day class students to retain what they had learned.  This time I have two full day classes, each requiring a fair amount of prep, so I’ll need to allow time and energy for that.

I helped out at my kid’s school during the gardening section.  It was pretty fun to watch all the kids get into rooting through compost to pluck out the worms to seed our new compost bin.  Some of the kids refused to touch the worms, painstakingly gathering them one by one with sticks and trowels, where other kids harvested handfuls at a time.  There was no pattern — boys girls, whatever.  It simply varied from kid to kid.  The best part was seeing them squeamish at first and then get the hang of it, enthusiastically.

My amazingly flaky plumber showed up to look at a few problems around the house.  No results yet, but finally we’re underway.

Ah, geek update: My iPhone magically started syncing to MobileMe, merging it with the stale data on the phone.  So I had to go through MobileMe one more time to prune the contacts, 264 in all.  It did a lot of weird things like re-merging matching phone numbers so that there would be two identical entries, and the Web site does not always display the data fields that can be seen in the address books on the phone and the Mac (making it hard to figure out which duplicate entry to nuke), but whatever. It’s all sorted now and I’ve now synced the address books of all the Macs in the house.  I’ve done the same for my wife’s iPhone too.  She uses Thunderbird as her mail client, which does not currently sync to the Mac address book, so all that data is orphaned in Thunderbird, but the way she uses the Mac and the phone it probably won’t matter.

I had a lot of trouble staying awake today, and took I guess five little catnaps.

Big trauma in the house:  I killed HBO and Showtime, then killed the upper block of channels (110 to 570 or something) to get the cable bill from $150 (!) down to a still-horrifying $80.  That block carried National Geographic (Lockdown and Globe Trekker) and BBC America (Graham Norton, Being Human and — ouch — Torchwood).  That block is an extra $17 a month and I really don’t think it’s worth it.  But Shoshanah showed me how many shows on the TiVo were from that block and is begging me to add those back in.

OK, bedtime.