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The window washers came yesterday. I had no idea they were coming. I woke up to the sound of clanging balcony furniture. I hid under the covers. Having random people show up at random times to do your chores is one of the perks of our building.

I didn’t notice the effect until this morning. Dust no longer coats the skyline. For today, at least, the sun came in clearly.

I also noticed that the sun rises to the north. It used to rise just behind the Sears Tower. If I wake up at the right time tomorrow morning, I should be able to catch it as it rises behind Skybridge.

My dad called yesterday. He’s looking for someone who understands marketing and the web to quintuple sales on his company’s web site. I couldn’t think of anyone who would do that. The closest analogue in the tech world is an ‘evangelist.’ I have no idea how you hire for that job, especially if you yourself don’t spend time on the web.

I ended up telling him that anyone who had the business and the technology skills he wants has already started a company. By ‘business and technology skills’, I mean someone who’s articulate, can code, and has a sense of what people want.

It’s odd to not know whom to hire. I can think of jobs that already exist and wonder how you get them. Just the other night Caroline asked me if I’d ever thought of joining a political campaign. I told her I pay a fair amount of attention to politics but suspect that it’s mostly dumb. I also said that if I could do nothing but make speeches all day, I’d be a happy man. I love talking in front of crowds. At least, I love talking in front of crowds when I get to write what I’ll say. When you know where you’re going, it’s easier to take detours. Anyhow, neither of us knows how you become a speechwriter or a speaker.

I can think of specific people and wonder what it would take to get them to leave whatever they’re doing. I’ve made one brief run at starting a company. Unfortunately, most everyone smart I know works at Google. Between this summer and next summer all the options should vest. Until then, it’s a real problem.

I’ve never heard a job description and thought, “I don’t know how you’d hire for that.” My dad’s looking for passion. That’s the one thing you can’t interview for. You can fake enthusiasm. You can’t fake a portfolio, but just because you’ve done good work in the past doesn’t mean that you’ll like what you have to do in a new job.

We’ve been back from Hawaii for two weeks now. It was seventy degrees and humid the morning we landed. Chicago has seen a few cold days since then, but nothing like before we left. The moisture has moved in. If it’s at all warm, expect a thunderstorm around 5:30 p.m. If you can step outside in shorts, you might as well wear a rain jacket.

I liked Hawaii more than I expected. We consider it our first successful vacation. Iceland and Norway were intriguing but stressful and expensive. We picked the right itinerary for this trip: three days in the tourist strip of Honolulu, three days camping on Kauai, and three days at the Grand Hyatt resort. At the end of each part of the trip, we were happy to move on. Camping also alleviated my guilt for staying at a resort. It may have helped us score a sweet room, too. Caroline told the guy at the desk that we had spent one night at Haena and two nights on Polihale. He chatted us up and then gave us a top-floor, ocean-view room. We paid for the garden view.

I didn’t touch a computer or turn on my cell phone for ten days. I didn’t read a newspaper either (though I did cheat on the way home and read the Pennsylvania primary results on a paper lying upside down). I felt liberated. I used to think that procrastination hurt in two ways: you lost the time spent reading useless stuff on the web and you split your productive time in two. But that’s not the whole story. You think about whatever you read. So if you kill time reading about politics, you’re going to spend some of your time away from the computer thinking about politics. The secret to not wasting time thinking about useless stuff is to read less useless stuff.