July 2009 Milestones of the life of Charlie Knight

Charlie Knight
and
his milestones for

July, 2009

contact him by
email at ni_ck@ymail.com or ceknight@student.stcc.edu or
U.S. mail at 32 Byers Street, Apt. # 101, Springfield, MA 01105
if you can offer help or assistance in any way.

All hope of additional work seems to have been gone, and I still have over $600 still to pay on the taxes in New Marlborugh (where they have a new Tax Collector, but do not seem to update the town website that often), the family homestead where I hope to build a place to live or fix an existing structure to live in, at least in the summer.

But most of July was spent at Springfield with many meetings of the Tenants Union, I was elected President once again after 9 years abscense from that position.
We are trying to have rules that are more humane and that the tenants establish, not something imposed upon them by the property management hirelings.

Lately I have been riding my bicycle for longer trips and have gone up to Amherst to attend the Amherst Lodge ( IOOF) meetings. I have always loved Amherst and U. Mass. and the other 5-college towns. It is country and culture all together, perhaps I am a bit jaded.

I expect to attend the Northeast Organic Farming Association's very wonderful Summer Conference as a worker and have the cost paid for by my labors. This conference addresses many of the issues I knew as and "environmental technician" (see education timeline at the previous link) in the 1970's and as a Grange member in the 1950's-1960's. I joined the Grange when I was 14 and for the next 10 years or so I was out about 6 nights a week at various Grange meetings. I enjoy delivering the Springfield Republican but had wished we had ceased the delivery at Springfield Technical Community College this summer (where I am enrolled as a Architecture COC student but not doing well due to narcolepsy and other infirmaties) . There were not enough students on campus to justify it and I could not hitch hike back to the Berkshires to do work at the family home when I was down here as well. I am looking for employment and the monday after the NOFA summer conference (August 10th) I hope to go to Springfield Partners in Community Action ( I was a board member when this was called the Springfield Action Commission) and see about a job posting they have open and a friend I trust has said she thought I could do well.

I have concluded the work on an "air brush" course (I observed). It is a fond hope to also see the professor the first week or two in August to see about getting my stuff and setting up an air-brush "shop" here at my apartment. I did air-brush a stool for someone here and she liked that a lot.

I hope I can get some things out of the family home, cut down the trees in front, and get some help to tear down the portion of the house I grew up in and then maybe make habitable the portion my Uncle Harold lived in so I can return to my home to die, if not to live for a long time there. Maybe after I "retire" on social security, but I fear that will give me less mony than the $400 a month I earn delivering newspapers. I am so worried. I thought I could not pay Social Security Taxes until I earned over $400 a month, now I find out it is over $400 a year and I now (changed to reflect Nov. 2009) owe near $5,000 in back taxes and fines and fees. I do not know how I will ever get this money. I am certain I will need to borrow to pay for the taxes if I ever lose the "newspaper delivery" job without getting something else to replace it. The Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission is going to help me find a job, but I guess they will not be able to do anything for me until August. I think I have an appointment with them the 2nd week or so. I just want some sort of employment. I have received from STCC the following:
Desktop Publishing COC (1999)[this program is no longer offered], Liberal Arts Transfer Fine Arts Option AA (2001), Webmaster COC (2002)[this program is no loner offered], Graphic Arts Technology, Commercial Arts Option AS (2002), Computer Information Technology, Web Programing Option AS(2005) and can't seem to be employed at a rate as high as when I had finished only the Massachusetts Career Development Institute's Offestt Printing and Computer Graphics training (which they no longer offer there). Note my mention of it in this ritch text format resume from years ago. I worked afer MDCI at the InfoBase Corp. but they refuse to acknowledge the 5 months I worked about two shifts a week for them trying to get the colorization in Photoshop verion 2 and the inposition using Quark's XPress for the Christ Centered Life-Pac home schooling materials that was at that time part of Alpha-Omega publications, a sub part of the Break-stone Multi Media Group. I started that job, InfoBase Corp, just a week after my Mom's memorial service, which I officiated at. This was to be a good job and I put off payment until they got the who contract done and received their "balloon payment" but instead I was "let go" as I tried to learn skills to help the company get more contracts using the PageMaker document production program. Formatting could be kept using PageMaker (it is rich text based as is MSWord), but it is lost at that time using Quark's XPress when text is input from a microsoft Word document. I can't find much of anything about these versions. PageMaker was still part of the Aldus Corporation, before it went back to MacroMedia and then was swallowed up by Adobe. Photoshop had just released version 2 while we were working and I think we found out how to do some of the things on that version. Quark's XPress program might still have been in its first version in 1995. At any rate all of this has changed and folk often use InDesign to do the work now. Isn't technology fun, just listen to me say what replaced what and you get a head ache, much less actually learn the versions since many times a new version is like a new program, features you were using daily are gone and you need to learn how to do it now, all overe again. Microsoft's Word 7 and the new Windows 7 and such is like this. It is a step back from what we have had before, but it is Microsoft and you do it their way or the highway. Many of us are taking the highway with Unbutu (a Linux distribution Computer Operating System) for the FREE operation system and Open Office as the FREE office software. The link is for a windows based Open Office you can download to a flash drive and run from there, never having to have it installed on an office computer, but you can save it in a Microsoft ".doc" file. Long Live Open Office!