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.

…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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Rachel is holding Nora and seeing if she will latch on. We are all well, as you can see.

Per grandmotherly request, the time is now shown on each post. I was pleasantly surprised that I found the WordPress syntax to make that change, and I was pleasantly unsurprised that it was so easy to do it on the iPhone. (Enter gushing Apple fanboy statement here. )

Rachel and Jack gave me a Father’s Day present today. Jack supplied the homemade wrapping paper, and Rachel supplied what was inside: an iPod Nano!

I’m at the Apple store in Chicago! I’m in the Windy City on a business trip, and I took a pilgrimage into downtown riding a bus, and then the “L” (for the first time!). I came here intending to buy a copy of TurboCAD Pro, but got waylaid by another box with the name ViaCAD 2D/3D. It is half the price, and it looks just as capable and possibly even just more fun. So I have been waffling back and forth wondering which one to buy. I came down to the first floor to see if I could find anything on the internet about the two products. Once I found the internet on one of the laptops, I realized that I had to blog about this, too.

I was going to stop by the Apple store in Charlotte for all this, but now I can just come straight home in time for dinner at Sister-Jennifer-in-law’s house with Rachel’s folks. I hear their going to order stromboli’s.

Well, I’m going to buy ViaCAD, because then I’ll have more money to buy something else some other time.

Wow. This place is amazing. I am basking in the yummy geekiness of all this. Speaking of yummy, its time to go have dinner.

Running Errands: Meeting a contractor at the house, A dentist or doctor appointment, or dropping something off for repair somewhere in town. About once every one or two months.

Out to lunch: Either Stevie B’s Pizza, China Buffet or a local Mexican Restaurant (under duress from manager) with my associates, or No Name Deli downtown with one or two guys from church. About once every two or three weeks.

Allergy Shot: Leave at 11:45am, go downtown, read a few pages of Entertainment Weekly, get stuck once in each arm, stop at Andy & Ellie’s to pick up Jack, drop Jack off at home with Rachel, get back to work around 12:45pm. About once every ten days.

Rachel at the Pool: Rachel leaves to go swimming at the gym around 12:00pm. I leave work at 12:30pm, pick up Jack from Andy & Ellie’s, come home with Jack and have some lunch. Rachel comes home with wet hair and smelling of chlorine, and I go back to work, arriving at about 1:30pm. About once a week.

Staying in: Sandwich, cookies, chips and applesauce, with a healthy sprinkling of internet browsing and blogging. Two or three times a week.

Not only has TulipGirl flattered me by tagging me for one of them “meme” things, but she’s even said it could be interesting. This is my first meme tag, so I hope I don’t disappoint:

1. One book that changed your life:
   
   

   “Lost in the Cosmos” by Walker Percy.

   Sunken in a depression induced by my life circumstances not meeting my expectations about five or six years ago, I found this book on a shelf and devoured it in record time. God used it to snap me out of my funk, change my attitude and outlook on life, and turn me in the right direction.

2. One book that you’ve read more than once:
   
   This one is tied between

   The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (and the Hobbit) by J.R.R. Tolkien
   
   - & -
   
   The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.

   Which is not only multiple books, but multiple series of books, completely blowing away the intent of this question, I guess. I have ended up reading these two series about once every five to seven years.

3. One book you’d want on a desert island:
   

   The Bible

   …of course. Along with pencil and notepad for verse categorization, I hope. I suppose seven colors of highlighters would be too much to ask…

4. One book that made you laugh:
   
   My sense of humor is pretty sensitive, so I laugh at a lot of things in books — some of which aren’t intended to be funny, perhaps — but I have to answer this question with another series:

   The Complete Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz.

   Fifty years worth of classic humor.

5. One book that made you cry:
   
   I’m not very sure about this one, because usually it takes music to make me cry. Hmm… Maybe

   “The Path of Loneliness” by Elizabeth Elliot.

   …but that was a long time ago.

6. One book that you wish had been written:
   

   “Where Abraham Kuyper’s Holland Went Wrong and Why.”

   Have you seen Amsterdam lately?? By many accounts it used to be much much better. To be fair, I haven’t gone looking for a book on such a subject, so it may exist. If it does, I’d be interested in reading it.

   Oh, I just thought of another one:

   “BLACKOUT: Power Hates a Vacuum”

   A Tom-Clancy-type thriller that would explore the geo-political consequences of an EMP bomb going off over North America.

7. One book you wish had never been written:
   

   “The Red Badge of Courage” by Stephen Crane.

   A more BORING book was never written, in my experience. Thankfully, I was being homeschooled when I had occasion to read it, so I was able to talk my way out of finishing it.

8. One book you’re currently reading:
   

   Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson.

   Stephenson, starting with “Cryptonomicon” and continuing with the three-volume “Baroque Cycle”, has deftly merged two of my favorite genres, making a kind of “historical science fiction” that I can really get into.

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:
   

   “Total Truth” by Nancy Pearcey & Philip Johnson.

   I’ve heard a lot about this book, and it definitely sounds like my cup of tea, but it hasn’t risen to the top of my book pile yet. Maybe this fall…

10. Now tag five people:
    • Manila Drive (either Andy and/or Ellie)
    • Curiosita (Sister-Bekah-in-Law)
    • Godward Posture (Dave’s a busy, busy man, but he may respond.)
    • Rednow (my Brother Dave, also pretty busy)
    • Slowmath (my Brother Tom)

P.S.– Answers to questions that weren’t asked:

I’m a big, big fan of the Inklings of Oxford. I got to mention two above (Lewis & Tolkien), but here are the others:

• Dorothy Sayers
• G.K. Chesterton, &
• Charles Williams.

All of their stuff is all good, all the time. Also check out a few of their most direct literary predecessors:

• George MacDonald
• T.S. Eliot

[It may be too soon to say this, but I think I may have the seed of a book or two in my head which could possibly be a literary descendant of the Oxford Inklings, as well as a philosophical descendant of Abraham Kuyper. Indeed, that is one of the reasons that this website exists. It could be a while yet, but I think it's in here somewhere....]

My boss told me at 5:00pm on Friday that I would be going on a business trip this week. So here I am, writing from a hotel room not even a day’s march from Gettysburg. I’ll be attending meetings at one of our suppliers for about a day and a half, and I’ll be home Wednesday in time for dinner. Every once in a while it’s nice to cross the Mason-Dixon line, if only just to visit.

He slept through the night for the first time ever last night! From 10:30pm to 5:30am! Thank you, Jack!