From Wit’s End

What’s behind is forgotten.
   What’s ahead is eagerly awaiting.
      This is a still point, between
         the here and the now.
      No Sabbath Year, this.
   The Jubilee is come.
It’s a whole new ballgame.

The last Facebook archive of 2009 can be found here.

Here I stand,
Looking for a sign.
Ready, even eager to go
anyside of anywhere.
I will not wait long
where this road divides,
but I will walk forward
when the time is right.
I can do no other.

This month’s Facebook archive can be found here.

Got away for a little while, but now
I feel like I’m in a holding pattern.
Pacing my cage back and forth.
Nothing changes, and that is both good and bad.

Here is this month’s Facebook archive.

No matter how dark it seems,
and no matter how I fearfully try to quench it,
hard as a diamond and bright as a flash of lightning,
my spark of hope lives on.

Here’s the latest Facebook archive.

“…That will turn my life around
Change that will put my feet on the ground
Change that will make everything okay.“

…but meanwhile, here’s the latest Facebook archive.

…of a recursive blog post. This is about the latest Facebook archive page posted here, and also about testing to see if I can automatically post to Facebook by just writing on this blog. Confused yet?

…six words I would have never thought belonged consecutively in a sentence five years ago.

I poured all the bags and drawers of my legos, sorted meticulously by color and shape years ago and left in the closet, all into one big plastic box for Jack. It will help spark some creativity probably, but alas for the entropy! Rachel said, “Don’t worry, he’ll probably want to organize them when he’s seven or eight.” Ouch! Five or six years of utter Lego disorganization. The things I do for my son…

…in the meantime, here’s the latest archive page.

Check out the latest here. This time it is an actual HTML file, so hopefully there aren’t any dialog boxes to deal with.

A couple months ago, I got a first interview with an aviation hydraulics company, but didn’t get a second interview because of a hiring freeze.

Today, I found out that I won’t even get a first interview at a military contractor because of a hiring freeze.

Despite this bad news, I’m in a fairly good mood. Because now I know for sure that the fact that I haven’t gotten out of this weird career situation I’m in is not anything that I can control. That’s something that I intellectually knew, but I hadn’t really felt until now.

It’s quite a relief.

Oh, and can we blame the members of a certain political party for bad-mouthing the private jet industry and planning to slash the military budget of the United States?

Can we blame this certain political party’s union thug supporters for the fact that for the foreseeable future I will be working for a company that supplies parts to two automotive companies that are going bankrupt and will probably be outright nationalized?

Why, yes. YES, WE CAN.

I think Baby Nora really likes her Uncle Dave, and I think the feeling is mutual.

You may see what I have posted there right here, I think. I captured it as a Web Archive file to bring my share of it out from behind the login screen. Here’s hoping that works.

…or a “ca-pitter”, as he calls it.

Can you see this on Facebook?

She slept through the night for the first time last night!

We went to the local Chinese buffet with Rachel’s sister Jennifer and visiting sister Emily and cousin Taylor. They wanted me to take picture of the messy post-ice-cream toddlers, so I did.

Job search heartbreak of the day: A recruiter called me today…

“I’ve got good news and horrible news… The good news is that the company that interviewed you by phone earlier this week liked you and wants to set up a second interview with you on site. The horrible news is that just as they were making arrangements to do so, their corporate executives handed down a company-wide hiring freeze.”

Would it be too petty of me to blame the socialist-democrats directly for demonizing certain industries in the news recently???

(Taken with Grandpa’s cellphone.)

I got an unusual call this morning on my cellphone for Rachel’s Dad, who was visiting Baby Nora for the first time with Rachel’s Mom and little brother Nik. I handed the phone off to my father-in-law with nary a second thought.

A minute later, he was freaking out. Their house burned down last night. That’s the sort of sentence that you can’t help but read at least twice, but it is true. The rest of the morning was spent trying to get as much information from a distance as possible. Rachel’s sister Beka was on the scene fairly quickly, and they also got a good bit of support from their church and neighbors. Over time, we found out that the fire started with some creosote in the chimney, even though they hadn’t had a fire in their wood stove for about three days. Also, both dogs survived and were found, though both are shaken and one got burned on his face pretty badly.

We were thankful that we could love them through the worst of the shock today. We were in the middle of making Rachel’s Family’s traditional Valentine’s day breakfast when the news came in: Peanut butter french toast in the shape of hearts, pineapple rings, bacon, and parfaits made with frosted flakes, cherry pie filling, and vanilla ice cream. Rachel and I roused ourselves from our melancholy after a while and finished preparing these things, and we sat down to “breakfast” at around 11:30am. By the end of the meal, Rachel’s folks were beginning to make wry comments about the situation, and everyone was feeling a little better with food in their stomachs. Rachel’s sister Jennifer took them clothes shopping, and we had dinner at her house this evening with a few mutual friends from church.

All in all, it was a very surreal day but it ended tolerably well. Indeed, the whole situation could have been a lot worse. In their house, the wood stove had been at the foot of the stairs to the second floor, where Rachel’s little brother Nik usually slept. If they had been home when this happened, it would have been highly likely that someone would gotten seriously hurt or even killed. As it is now, we all have a lot to be thankful for. Rachel’s family got many offers for a place to stay from families in their church, and her dad’s work associates will be putting together a collection for them. They’ve often talked about building a house on a more scenic part of their property, and now Rachel’s Mom can get the new kitchen that she wanted but couldn’t do without the old kitchen long enough to get. You never want something like this to happen, but the love that can flow in the aftermath of such a tragedy is truly a wonderful sight to behold.

Well, like I said, I had a pretty bad day last week. Strangely enough, the bad day was providentially reversed today:

Last week, we found out that our company was cutting our pay NAFTA-wide by 5% as a defensive austerity measure in this bad year in the automotive business. Today, I had my annual performance review, which went better than I thought it would. Consequently, my pay will be going up about 4.5% for the year. So I’ll only be getting a net half-percent cut in pay.

Also, last Friday I lost my wallet somewhere in the medical park when we were taking Nora to her first doctor’s appointment. I was pretty frantic and canceled all my credit and debit cards. Today was the day all the replacement cards came in the mail.

The ironic thing about all this is that today is Friday the 13th.