Weekend Work in Seattle

Leigh and I drove from Rock Island to Seattle last Wednesday morning, unpacked our trusty car Betsy and settled into my grandparents' house in West Seattle, where we will call home for the next two months. It's so nice to be back here. This is a great city. It has everything we love: nice scenery, mountains, trees, good food, good music, lots of stuff to do, chilled out people (mostly), good shopping, not overly capitalized (this is debatable, but I'll claim it here), etc, etc etc. It's great. We haven't started working farmers markets yet, because the fruit isn't ready, but next weekend we're going to help out at one so my grandpa can walk us through set-up and such before things get crazy. Then we'll be ready to roll when the fruit is ready to be eaten.

This weekend we got a gig working a promotion for a cable TV show. It paid well and was two days of easy work, so it seemed like a good deal. Every time I do a promo I get really excited about making some quick money with little to no responsibility, but then when I actually start working I quickly remember why I hate doing these things. The level of commercialism is so intense that it's suffocating. It's sad to watch people spend their money on stupid paraphernalia without giving it much thought. They get caught up in the event and next thing you know they've dropped $50 on something worth $10 or less. We give away stuff that's worth about $0.35 and they get super excited about it. Those "prizes" probably end up in a junk drawer at home. Plus it never fails that I work with a project leader who talks down to people, tries to be a "cool boss" and then at some point gets snippy with the promo staff.

Then there's the permanent crew, the ones who travel from city to city throughout the whole tour. On a rare occasion you get a crew that works their ass off, but typically you get a lot of recent college grads who are overpaid on an over-staffed tour who stand around sipping Starbucks and barking orders and the promo crew while they do NOTHING. Today I got stuck doing the job of two people for about 30 minutes, no big deal, but meanwhile three such permanent crew members literally stood and watched me work my ass off while they gossiped about the celebrity guests rather than help me for about 90 seconds and make my job 50% easier.

Anyway, the weekend is over and we should get paid soon. That'll cover the June car payment and will put about $200 into savings. Not too shabby for 2 days of easy labor. Hopefully we'll start working 4 days per week at the farmers markets soon. The more we work now the easier things will be when we get to Anchorage. We need an apartment, furniture, and we both need all new work clothes (thanks to a combination of wearing out everything we owned whilst in France and losing a notable amount of weight) plus we have the travel expenses of driving to Anchorage. We'll be fine, we just need to keep our eyes on the prize.

This week should be fun with little or nothing to do, but if given the chance to work we'll definitely take it.