From Wit’s End

Each hand is on a ring.
Each ring is at the end of a chain.
Stretched, I will let go of one.
Meanwhile, I must say:
the view up here is spectacular.

February’s overdue Facebook archive is here.

The line I followed has fallen from my side.
          When I find it again, the horizon,
                    still half-hidden, is yet completely new.
                   I want to learn these different stars.
                  Someday I will enter the city, but for now
                 I will continue to follow this wall in hopes of finding
                a door.

The first Facebook archive of 2010 can be found here.

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.

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.

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.

…slowly but surely. It seems like everytime Jack wakes up from being asleep, he’s a little more reconciled to the idea of having a little sister around. The first morning at home was the most harrowing: he threw such a crazy tantrum that he fell into his toy cradle in his room, which is how he got that bruise on the side of his face. But he’s getting better: he likes to give Nora kisses, and he’ll get one of the baby shower gift bags from Nora’s room and bring it over to “give Nora a present.”

Another funny thing that has happened is that all of a sudden he plays by himself a LOT more easily. Something about a baby coming home has sparked his imagination in all kinds of ways, apparently. It’s kind of cool.

Wow, just look at that. She’s a little miracle.

This was my first day back to work after Nora was born. I went to an associate’s desk to catch up, and he asked me if I had heard about the All Hands meeting that was held the other day. Another one? Yep. This one outlined the NAFTA-wide austerity measures that the corporation will be rolling out starting March 1st:

• an across the board 5% cut in pay for everyone,
• a termination of 401k matching for the rest of the year,
• and the company is telling everyone when to take their vacation days. If one’s PTO gets used up, then the mandatory days off will be unpaid leave.

So that was nice to hear on my first day back. I was kind of thankful that I had only come in for a half day.

In the afternoon, I drove Rachel and Baby Nora to Baby Nora’s first doctor’s appointment. Jack fell asleep in the car, of course. Instead of wake him up, I carried his entire car seat into the doctor’s office, propped it back against the wall with some seat cushions, and let him sleep comfortably while I filled out Baby Nora’s doctor paperwork, fiddled around on my iPhone, and generally tried to not reel from the bad news of the morning. I pulled my health insurance card out of my wallet so that the office assistant could make a copy of it, and then stuck it in my pocket when they gave it back. Jack slept the whole time Rachel and Nora were with the doctor, and also while I carried him back to the car. He only just stirred as I was pulling out of the medical center parking garage.

When we came home we all assumed our newly-typical positions. Rachel nursed Nora on the couch, Jack was playing in his room, and I sat down to the computer. I think I may have thought about buying something online, but when I felt for my wallet, it wasn’t there. I got a little frantic, and after a while Rachel called the doctor’s office. They hadn’t seen a wallet. When it occurred to me that I could possibly have dropped it in the parking garage somehow, I decided to drive back to the medical park (Yes, without my driver’s license. I did the speed limit the whole way.) I checked the parking garage floor, walked into the doctor’s office, searched to no avail, and the office lady called the medical park security officer, and I filed a report with her. I went home feeling pretty bad (but still doing the speed limit), and I decided there was nothing else to do but cancel all my cards and figure out how to get a new driver’s license. Thankfully, there is a DMV office open in Lexington on Saturday, and my Mom offered to drive me over there the next and take Jack with so that Rachel could feed Nora undisturbed.

So yes, it was a pretty bad day.