All in all, a good trip to Portland. I got a lot of encouragement from the employment consultant, and new leads to follow. “Justin” the big desktop PC got fixed (bought him a keyboard as a “welcome back” present). Got new business-card software, T-shirt transfers, and T-shirts. Got to look over the square dance caller’s equipment—I think I have a lot of what the “job” requires—and he’s interested in teaching me! (He’s teaching another caller-wannabe, too.) We’ll get together after Thanksgiving week.

And the Relay for Life summit was both productive and interesting. Lot of rah-rah, which isn’t at all bad; I’m fascinated by what motivates people, and these folks are both motivated and motivating. It’s not the fund-raising, I think (though they do raise millions for the American Cancer Society in the process); rather, they’re a gigantic mutual support group for those who either have had or have cancer themselves or know someone who has and had to deal with it. It’s a nasty experience by all accounts, and treatment (which is sometimes successful, and sometimes not) is as nasty and debilitating as the disease itself. For those who’ve lost somebody to cancer, the loud, positive, occasionally outrageous, and very, very active Relay is a way to heal; for those who have survived, it’s a way to celebrate.

I guess I fit in there, too, after a fashion. Dick Ackerman, who was both a close friend and neighbor and one of the best blues harp players it’s been my good fortune to know, died from cancer; after months of painful and exhausting chemotherapies he’d been pronounced cured—but I don’t think he was, and I think he knew it. He died a year later while on a cross-country RV trip with his wife—something they hadn’t done in a while. I think I knew it was going to happen, too. I wrote “Crosses by the Roadside,” my kaddish for his wife, months before Dick went on his last ride. (I hate being prophetic.) “Everybody’s got a story,” I was told over and over again at the summit. That one’s mine.

I was there as the Entertainment Chair for the Tillamook County Relay for Life, and I did pick up a number of good ideas I think we can implement. (“Cowpie bingo” is real popular in some places, for instance—it was one of the main events at the Union County Fair when I lived in Union—and we could definitely do that here. We have lots of cows.) Visiting other Relay events to see how other people do things was recommended, and I would like to do that; none of those will happen before summer, though, and by then preparations for our own Relay will be mostly complete.

It occurred to me as I was driving to Portland that job-wise I may actually have gotten what I wanted (a little belatedly, of course). When I quit the City of Garibaldi in 2004, I really wanted to get out of city-manager work. I kept doing it because having done it for 11 years, I couldn’t seem to get interviewed for anything else. That’s changed now. Some of the major recruiters have been on a campaign to “raise standards” by requiring a bachelor’s or (better) master’s degree in “public administration,” and to the extent their campaign’s been successful, it leaves me out—I’m simply a computer programmer with 17 years’ experience as a city manager, and I don’t get called for interviews any more. But isn’t that what I was asking for—to get out of city-manager work? True, I wanted it earlier than now, and I really did want to have a replacement job doing something else. I think what I’m being told is to focus my job-searching on something else. I’ll do that.

Music at the Rapture Room Sunday (meeting with the marimba band, too). Practice Monday night for the Leftovers Day show on Friday. Gonna be busy.

Joe