Month: November 2018

Wrap-up

The Saints lost to the Cowboys last night.  I don’t know if anyone could have, to be honest.  For the game, I’d give the Cowboys a D+, the Saints an D-, and the officials an F.  In the disgusting hypothetical of being a Cowboys’ fan, a win’s a win.

Somehow I’ve misplaced some of my entries.  More.  Again.  It’s as if I really suck at managing things.  But two wrap-ups — 2012, and 2013.

I don’t really know if the separation between the mood of the two entries is evident.  Though I was a bit discontented in 2012, things really sucked in 2013.  In 2012, my future was really uncertain after there’d been a big change to the contract I was working on had been substantially modified.  In 2013, I was fully suffering the effects of that.  I got laid off towards the end of January 2013, and signed on with the four-letter company for roughly 80% of what I’d been earning previously.  Since I wasn’t able to travel, either, my salary had really been flat since 2010.  2009 was the year I earned the most money, but I spent probably eight of those twelve months working 60-hour weeks.

In no time at all, that was all gone.  I didn’t help matters by drinking away my discomfort.

I haven’t, and there’s a good chance never will, recovered.

What’s weird, though, is despite my conversion to cleaner living, I still lack time and energy to do things really enjoyable.

Or maybe I don’t care about that because I am actually busy doing things I find interesting.

But I do need a break.  And a shave.  And a haircut.

What are your holiday plans for Christmas?

To quote Jeff Spicoli, “I don’t know.”

I’m kind of bound where I am, and there’s nowhere I really want to go.  We’re supposed to go to some friends’ place for a short celebration for St. Nicholas’s Day.

I do still have friends I want to see.  Family, *shrug.*  There’s a variety of reasons for that.  Instead of making an issue with disagreements, I just go away.  It’s how I operate.

I think we’ll probably head in to the District one night to see the National Christmas Tree.  Maybe have dinner somewhere nice.  Day of?  I don’t know.  I’d be okay just spending time with my wife.  We actually had a good time doing that last night, keeping each other warm.  Maybe that’s the way things are supposed to work.

I will say that watching the Christmas special she’d chosen was a bit strange with the emphasis on kids.  We’re not having any.  The make-believe world has one Butters Stotch;  a real world incarnation isn’t needed.

Somewhat-unrelated, though, I do need to rap a bit about work.  It’s been an endless stream of job inquiries lately.  At first, I attributed it to lag from my unemployment in Norfolk in 2017.  Now, though, I’m seeing it as mainly laziness from the recruiting assemblage.

First thing — recruiters really don’t know what to say when you refuse a lucrative contract offer.  If it is contract-to-hire, I counter with something along the lines of, “you will make a full time offer during the first six months, or the contract terminates, and you owe me another six months’ contract pay.”  When unemployment was 8%, maybe you could have gotten away with that shit, but it doesn’t work these days.

Second.  Because of the way your clients are operating, I am no longer adhering to whatever you learned in your point-and-click recruiting seminar.  No, my resume isn’t going to be two pages.  It’s going to be as long as it needs to be to cover my twenty years’ experience.  It’s also putting my few remaining full-time jobs up top, and my contract positions in a subsequent section. Not that I think that matters, as you’re using a fucking automated tool to search for keywords, but when you actually do look at it, you might notice that I do direct to the applicable sections.

At some point you have to be firm on these things.

Maybe one of those contract positions would be more interesting than what I have now, but I doubt it.

But it’s time to stop for the evening.  Go take pills, and grab a nap before the Saints’ game.

One more day of the eighth year of this.  I have a problem, no?

Once again I had a misplaced prompt here as a draft.  The published prompts schedule, however, says that today’s a free-write.

So, what’s up?

Not a lot, really.  One day after another, and make it through.  I know at some point in time I will have a break.  But that won’t be this weekend, where I’m now supposed to work both days, instead of just Saturday.

Perhaps I should be more reflective about what I’ve done so far, but don’t have the energy.

Tomorrow I have a doctor’s appointment, but at least these time-consuming, frustrating efforts are finished for the week, too.

Saints-Cowboys tomorrow night.  I imagine it’ll be a good game.

Will I have enough spoons to watch it?

We shall see.

What places hold particular allure for you; where might you like to live?

I’ve written a bit before about the allure of NYC.  Is that still there?  Yes.

At the same time, I think I could be interested in just about any city.

Suburbia is so…..sterile isn’t the word.  Uniform, maybe?  Things aren’t as bad as they once were, but I hate that I have to spend 20+ minutes in a car to do just about anything.

If I could still drive, it might not be such an issue.  The ridesharing apps do afford me a bit of freedom (especially since there’s really no paratransit service here), but I like to have, at least, the option to go do what I want to do when I want to do it.

I still might not with my current employment situation, but things like getting to the doctor would certainly be easier.

Would I do more?  Perhaps.

But back to the topic, and New York, I think I could be happy in almost any city that has some of the things that come along with being in a city.

I don’t care about having a yard for kids to play in.  (Though, maybe, there is some temptation in having one to tell kids to get off of….)  I can’t mow one, anyway.

The much-maligned tax bill from 2017 actually eliminates the incentive to rent a house from a bank for the tax benefits, so the push is gone.

It’s difficult to write this without a Budweiser radio commercial running through my scarred brain;  something along the lines of the local deli owner who gets morning coffee.

But, so, while the intrigue is NYC, I think my desires would be fulfilled anywhere where I could find a place to be comfortable.

Even if I don’t have the energy to fully-partake at this point, I’d like to be somewhere that I can participate when it does come.

The goal at this point is DC.  Maybe somewhere else will happen someday.

Thanksgiving leftovers — what do you have, and what are you doing with them?

I had a random thought.  It’s not like there’s turkeys in India, but leftover turkey might lend itself to an Indian arrangement.  I mentioned this to my wife, who also cooked the turkey, and she started looking through the Intertubes.

Turkey Tikka Masala it is.

I think I’m about to go downstairs to get some.  The scent has been wafting up the stairs, now, for about an hour.  Considering I’ve been sitting at this keyboard, pretty much since 8:00 this morning, I’m ready for the break.

Problems with some work stuff.  Ugh.

I stayed up waaaay too late last night, and have been feeling it today.  I actually doubled my typical coffee consumption.  But I’m fading.  So food, and sleep.

I think I was getting tired when I started copping up this month’s prompts into drafts, because today’s showed the following:  Small Business Saturday. Write about small businesses you frequent.

Since I rarely go anywhere these day, and Sarah wasn’t feeling well, we only ordered delivery from a local restaurant.

I have almost a reflexive, at this point, resistance to chain restaurants.  There are some exceptions, sure, but it is a bit of bigotry that I have.  Yes, this is influenced by the podcast to which I am listening right now.

Football

The Saints are the best team in the league.  It’s been awhile since I could say that.

But they’re playing the sort of football I learned when I played in high school in the early-90s.  It is fascinating to see teams that are having linebackers line up in the backfield because they don’t have a fullback on the roster.

The Saints, Patriots, Eagles, and Cowboys are all doing the same sort of thing.  The question is whether one of them can beat the fast-strike offenses and 3-4 teams that are so abundant in the league today.

That Monday night game with the Rams and Chiefs was entertaining, certainly.  But a team that can hold on to the ball for more than two minutes at-a-time can beat either of them.

In other not-so-interesting news, I found a place I really want to look at to live.  The big question is whether parking, or lack thereof, might be a deal-killer.

We shall see.

So, today is a free-write day.  For whatever reason, my place-holder for this entry was, again, that thing I didn’t want to write about yesterday.

I’m still very much driven the past few days on figuring out next steps.

Thanksgiving was okay, though, in full consideration, we are so out-of-sync with what some family members think and/or want.

The only option is to not associate.  With the freedom to associate, comes a freedom to choose to not.  If I don’t meet your expectations, that’s fine.

If I ask you not to tell me how to live my life, I’m free to avoid you.  So, instead, force me to live my life the way you think I ought, and use men with guns to prevent me from leaving.  Venezuela, much?

Got a little distracted reading a discussion about whether passenger rail should be taxpayer-funded.

It is, largely because politicians want to show it off to constituents.

I didn’t participate in the “discussion,” because, well, what I think doesn’t matter.  Because I don’t believe exactly as you do, I’m a Commie, or a Nazi.

So I leave;  I still can.

Sarah kind of shared the same sentiment with me while we were discussing this.

So, what do I envision?  Go hole up somewhere in DC, and just be about each other.  The plan to do that is coming together.  It might take awhile to get there, but that’s where we’re headed.  I think.  Just me and Sarah.

Nobody likes you when you’re twenty-three.

I feel much the same about the prompt I selected.  I need to pay closer attention, perhaps.

For the particular prompt I’d selected, it was something I used this past summer, and originally in 2012.  Do my views change?  Sure.

Some things are more closely-held than others, but, yes, I can see the arguments.  (Note:  that doesn’t mean that I’ll ever say anything good about the 3-4 defense.)

On that note, it was nice seeing the Saints help the Failcons do what they do last night.

Not a ton else to say today, though.  I’m tired by this past week, and am looking forward to a full weekend off for the first time in I don’t know how long.

Apologies for the digression;  the point of the changing idea.  Yeah, I do update my views on things..  Sometimes, an issue will really make me angry, and later I won’t care.  That speaks, however, to the idea that those aren’t the times to make laws.  Next week, you might not care, and you’ve locked things in perpetuity.

Tomorrow is Small Business Saturday.  I probably won’t be shopping, as I’m in a place where I can’t easily get to a small business.

I want to get to a place where I can.

So.  To plan.

Thanksgiving

So, this is going on, and I sorta got to cook a turkey here.  My mom came up, but my SIL’s family cancelled their plans, so it was the five of us here.

Not really enjoying the football;  maybe the Saints’ game tonight will be better.

Neither Sarah or i is excited to work tomorrow.  Thankfully, I probably will only have to do about three hours.  I have two projects that I haven’t been able to do because people are working, and I couldn’t schedule an outage.

One of them is very straightforward;  I will kick it off after I get the tough one started.  There’s a time-consuming step that’ll probably take longer than the whole operation of the easy one.

Wish me luck on that.

But I”m stuffed, and want to go watch football, so that’s what I’m going to go do.

Write a bit about what you do in a “normal” day. What do you do? Where are you? Are you satisfied with your current situation?

Generally, I wake up sometime before 0600.  Bathroom, fill water cup, swallow morning pill allocation, swallow pills, go down for coffee, shower, stagger to the keyboard, and start working.  Sometime around midday, I’ll go grab something to eat.  More work.  Wait for my wife to come home.  Eat.  Watch TV.  Sleep.

Today, though, I only owed three hours for the pay period.  Considering that I probably have about six hours of work to do Friday, I thought I needed to quit early.

I am cooking turkey tomorrow.  We’ll see how this goes.