A positive sign...maybe.

Got a call this afternoon from another federal agency [not the one everybody hates.]
I applied for this job a couple of months ago and forgot all about it, but apparently I was deemed worthy enough for an interview next week. Job seems pretty daunting, I am gun shy regarding government job interviews after last time, but maybe things will be different this time, I don't believe this involves auditing so that will help.

Trying to look up info about the agency, the legislation that I may be working with, etc. It was nice to have some good news today. This would be a much better job than the Federal Agency Everybody Hates, much less conflict I would hope, and no travelling around.

A bad anniversary.

Last time I mentioned that an unpleasant anniversary is today. As you might have guessed [and I don't really know who I mean when I say "you," as far as I know no one has ever read this blog outside of my household,] it involves my employment situation.
It was one year ago today that I was finally let go at the Big Firm, ending a really miserable year. My early posts have gone over that whole disaster.

It also means that today [or tomorrow, I suppose] I officially join the ranks of the "long term unemployed." I'm still hoping for a call or some glimmer of hope regarding my federal job aspirations, that I will either be interviewed sometime in July or else they will use my prior interview and I will be contacted in August. The office to where I'm applying allegedly was having a hard time finding applicants, although I find this hard to believe given the unemployment rate here.

I've only had a handful of interviews over this past year. Things aren't good. This area is always economically depressed, and will probably be the last place to turn things around. It's not as bad as, say Detroit, but it's not good either.

I hear the same promises regarding unemployment extensions. I thank my lucky stars that I have an entire month before I'm cut off, even though they will be in recess for a good deal of that time I am still hoping they can get it done. If I am cut off some things will be easier, I can start to consider temporary or part-time work, and I won't have to document my job search. But I'm sure finding temporary or part-time work will not be any easier.

Oh well, I'm meeting my wife today for lunch, and hope to have a pleasant day. Maybe with time I will be able to put a lot of the bad events of the past couple of years behind me.

Same old song and dance.

The Federal Agency that Everyone Hates is supposedly calling people for interviews, they started last week. I'm hoping to get a call soon, but am not betting on anything. Been through this so many times. I've always been able to get at least an interview, but I am getting conflicting stories on whether I will get called to do it this time.

Supposedly, those who have interviewed within the last year don't have to do it again. That's what I heard from the national recruiting person, but when I contacted the HR person who is actually involved for the office to which I'm applying, they told me that I probably would have to do it again. So I guess if I don't hear anything, it won't necessarily mean I'm out of luck, at least until mid-August where I'll know if I don't hear anything that I didn't get selected. This will be my third attempt to get hired by this agency. I've been applying for other things each week, but haven't had anyone show any interest since the whole fiasco with that casino back in May.

In other pleasant news, right now it doesn't look like much is going to be done to extend unemployment benefits, so being cut off in August is a very real possibility.
I knew things might not go well when I quit seeing coverage about the legislation on the news. Right now if it isn't about Michael Jackson or the oil spill, nobody seems to care. At one point I thought that maybe the unemployed should dress up like Michael Jackson and slather themselves with oil, and maybe someone would be interested in our concerns.

Bad deal for everyone if they end up not being extended---obviously, those who lose benefits will have a bad time. Many are already making huge compromises regarding the work they are trying to get. I'm a CPA with a master's degree, but have been applying for accounts payable jobs that normally don't require more than an associate's degree. Still no luck. Even when these people are fortunate enough to find lower paying work, that pushes the people who would be better suited to those jobs down a level. I don't know why people don't understand that unemployment compensation helps to prevent this type of mass job displacement which ultimately means more people going on public assistance when they are pushed out of the job market altogether.

I'm still hoping they might get it together, and that it's just a political ploy to for each side to make the other look bad, but over this entire month I've heard nothing but assurances that it would eventually pass, that it was sure to pass this week, etc., but here we are, nearly a month later and no extension. I have about a month to figure out what to do if we end up losing out.

Another thing that troubles me is the unfairness of the system. If I do end up being cut off, I will have had around 46 weeks of benefits. That's less than half of the maximum 99 weeks available. It's all because of the timing of my unemployment claim.
Someone who lost their job a few months ago will be cut off at 26 weeks. I don't understand why they can't just have each person get a set amount of benefits instead of it all depending on when someone filed.

I'm in a sour mood in general this week, a very unpleasant anniversary is coming up on Wednesday.

Oh well, going to tag along with my wife today, she has a long distance work thing, so at least that should be fun. It's so important to get whatever pleasure you can out of life when things aren't working out.

Thriftin'....

I haven't mentioned that my wife and I are thrift store addicts. We generally go at least once a week. I check out books, my wife is into various vintage items [btw, in case you don't know, the rule is that if something is less than a hundred years old, it's vintage. Antiques have to be at least 100 years old. No joke, I think you can get in trouble if you have an ad for antiques that aren't actually old enough to be considered such.]

Anyway, over the years it's funny to see what pops up over and over in thrift store book sections, there are titles and authors that are almost always there, and you can definitely tell when a popular title is beginning to wane based on when it makes its debut at Salvation Army, Goodwill, etc. I see a lot of Dan Brown these days, and the occasional Harry Potter book.

Stephen King: Thrift store mainstay, usually his titles from the Nineties and later. His appearance certainly doesn't mean a decline in popularity, I think in his case it means the opposite, that the average household that has books to donate probably has at least one King title. I don't know if I've ever been to a thrift store that didn't have at least one King book. The earlier King is not as prevalent, but can still be found.

Garrison Keilor: Almost as prevalent as King, although for different reasons.
I think people get his books as gifts. Also, by now it's a cycle where people buy his books from thrift stores and then donate them later. I actually like his books, usually. I guess they don't lend themselves to long-term reading, and thus take up residence in the donation pile. Maybe NPR-demographic households are more likely to donate to thrift stores. Someone should do a study.

Rush Limbaugh: Sort of the book equivalent of a pet rock [and about as intelligent], his books are almost always there too. I guess it's hard to get excited about Nineties-era conservative talking points these days. Look out Anne Coulter, I've been seeing your books quite a bit over the past year, which may mean your time is up, probably for the same reason--no one cares about ranting from decades past. Wouldn't be surprised to see Glenn Beck here in a few years. I guess anything topical is doomed for the thrift store, along with copies of FUTURE SHOCK and THE POPULATION BOMB, and the Nineties books about how the Dow was going to hit 30,000.

Tom Clancy: Same as King, I guess. Probably when old military guys [or those who pretended to be such] take off for the Big Casino, their survivors dump a ton of these off onto the thrift stores.

When I lived in the Bay Area I'd find much better books at the thrifts. Those stores were more like going to a library or regular bookstore as far as the variety of titles available. But the old standbys like the ones on this list were always there too.

Generally, the better finds I have where I'm at now [city that is much more working/lower class, lower education level on average] are non-fiction, the fiction all tends to be the same stuff.

I don't like Mondays....

Not feeling good today. Just a lot of stuff piling up.

Starting to not look good as far as unemployment benefits being extended. Apparently they actually only have the end of the month before they go into recess for the summer, and I don't know where they are at. The media no longer seems interested, so it is hard to find information, even online.

Don't know if things are ever going to start happening with the one government job I am best qualified for. I participate on a message board for federal hopefuls, and no one has had any kind of interview scheduled. I guess that's better than hearing that others have had things scheduled and that I have been left out. Still, it has been a long while since there has been any kind of activity as far as jobs go. I've had one agency express interest but all agencies always express interest initially.

Not sure when this is going to end. My wife and I discussed the possibility of my moving to another city to work. This is something I did a few years ago and was a huge mistake, which I've written about extensively. I swore that I would not do anything like that again, but I may not have any choice if it comes to the point where it's either move or never really get back into the job market at all. Not sure what to do. My wife has a job here so if I did move it would mean living apart for years.

Just feel like there is not one single area of my life that I feel happy about right now.

The Thin White Duke

No real logic to that post title, other than I'm reading a bio of David Bowie by Marc Spitz [no, not the swimmer.] An internet friend recommended it. I'm just hitting the Brian Eno portion of his career, which of course leads me to the library in hopes of checking out some Brian Eno CDs. I'm sure they will be all scratched to hell, but who knows, that might make it even more interesting.

Reading that, reading THE LAST STAND, about Custer. Backed off on fiction for a bit, but I have a lot of books in the backlog. Just finished THE STRAIN, excellent scary vampire novel by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. I've had nightmares for about a week related to it, which is funny because books rarely do that to me. It's an excellent antidote to all the dreamy tortured vampires in the media these days. [disclaimer: I really enjoy TRUE BLOOD and the Southern Vampire Mysteries, even though the latter make me think of a mullet-wearing good ol' boy bloodsucker with a Dale Earnhardt sticker on his casket.]

Giving up on THE BEANS OF EGYPT, MAINE yet again--I am probably too addled by attention deficit disorder or whatever to appreciate it, just too many characters, although I think some of that is intentional, the Beans are sort of a collective mass. Reading MERRY MEN, by the same author. Nice thick epic length book.

Absolutely positively have to get going on my continuing professional education, I have about six weeks to finish two self-study courses, although I guess if I have to I can register Inactive until I complete them. Absolutely no movement on the job front. Waiting on the Federal Agency that Everyone Hates, hoping to hear something sometime this month. That's pretty much all I have going. And my unemployment benefits may end if Congress doesn't work something out over the next month and a half. I'm still not too worried about it, I lucked out this time as far as timing goes. Back in February I was stuck for a few days while the Republicans threw their usual temper tantrums and phony fiscal concern [they don't seem to care who's paying for something when it makes companies like Haliburton rich, but if it goes to help unemployed/working Americans then all of a sudden they want to know where the money's coming from.]

Everything ravaged, everything burned.

Ended up devouring this short story collection by Wells Tower. Carnies, Vikings, angry brothers, just really engaging stories. I ended up having to drop all my other books to finish it. I didn’t want to like it because he seems like one of those annoying MFA writer types, but it was pretty good. Of course, Bonnie Jo Campbell also has an MFA and she is not annoying. I think it’s his name that bugs me. Who names their kid Wells Tower? It’s either a pseudonym or another case of horrible parental name choice. He seems young enough to be part of that whole “last names as first name” generation of kids who came along over the last 25 years or so.


I have not talked about Carolyn Chute and I should. Years ago I tried to read THE BEANS OF EGYPT, MAINE and it probably fell victim to library book overload, which is the book lover’s equivalent to getting too much food at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Anyway, I saw her mentioned on another writer’s website and decided to check out more of her work…read and enjoyed her most recent, THE SCHOOL ON HEART’S CONTENT ROAD which supposedly is a portion of a larger work. Confession: I like reading things about militias and people who live off the grid. It probably appeals to my fantasy about “dropping out.”

I am waiting anxiously for another longer novel of hers called MERRY MEN. I started BEANS but got distracted by EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED. Now hopefully I can get back to it. I’ll write more about it later. I grew up in a rural town where people sort of just did enough to get by. Sometimes that still appeals to me. When I was younger I wanted to be a high achiever type person, and I am proud of some of the stuff I’ve been able to do, but I’m starting to really think you can take the boy out of the slacker rural town, but you can’t take the slacker rural town out of the boy. Of course, Chute’s characters are far from slackers, slacking being more of a comfortable middle-class or government subsidized type of existence.

Bummer....

Looks like my wife got stuck at the airport. She missed her connecting flight because her first flight ended up stuck on the tarmac for nearly two hours due to rainstorms. It was literally a case of if they had waiting maybe an additional ten minutes she would have made the flight. I don't know why airlines can't give a little extra time when it is a "last flight of the evening" situation. After all, it is nighttime there, and it isn't as if the people on the plane are in a hurry to make some kind of business meeting or anything. I don't know why they couldn't extend that courtesy, because I have seen them do it in the past, I've been on flights where they waited a few extra minutes because it was the last flight to that destination until the next day and there were passengers racing to get there due to a delay at their originating flight. But I guess that's the key, that was in the past. It's even more ridiculous though, because they have cut so many flights now so there is less likelihood of there even being a later flight.

I guess my lousy air travel luck has passed on to her, I have rarely been able to travel anywhere by plane without there being some major delay or problem and often I will end up missing a connecting flight due to weather or other B.S. Crappy thing is that these days airlines expect the travelers to more or less fend for themselves unless it's a very specific set of circumstances, and weather is not one of those.

Her employer should cover whatever additional expense there is, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a fight over it.

I think she's probably going to pass the next time they offer to send her anywhere unless it is within driving distance or doesn't require making a connecting flight.
The way things are these days, you pretty much have to always budget an extra day's worth of expenses in your travel budget any time you fly because it is so easy to end up stranded at the airport.

Last time I flew I had a miserable time trying to get home--there was heavy fog here and all the flights were cancelled. So I spent the night [on my dime] at a nearby hotel [where you had all these ghetto people talking as loudly as possible as they walked down the hall at one AM--"I'M GOING TO THE FOURTH FLOOR!! I'M GOING OUTSIDE NOW!!"] Had the first flight the next morning, but that too was cancelled due to fog, as was the next flight, until they finally put me on another airline that was able to get me there with no problem. And I'm probably going to have to fly again at some point this year and go through the same crap all over again, although if it is summer or early fall it will probably thunderstorms rather than fog.

I actually used to enjoy flying when I was younger, but I think that was because I didn't really have all that much to fly home to.

The Culinary Front

Had In-N-Out Burger yesterday….I have a funny association with it. The last time I had In-N-Out was for my “celebratory” meal immediately after getting fired from the Big Firm. I had a 3 X 3, which is a triple meat triple cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate shake. Delicious, but wish I’d known more about what to order back then. Animal Style double double is the way to go, and the fries must be eaten ASAP or they get a weird texture [they are more like fried potatoes, not processed stuff] so you should only get those if you’re dining in. Gordon Ramsey says that a double double animal style would be his death row last meal, and I agree.

I should backtrack. I don’t eat a lot of beef. My wife is a vegetarian and I’ve become a lot more aware of things in that arena over the time we’ve been married. That’s part of it. Also, back when I used to eat whatever I wanted all of the time I was in the heart attack high risk category at age 31. I had triglycerides of over 700. So I gradually changed my diet over the years, and also took a few medications. These days my triglycerides measure around 70-80. I had lab work done last month and for the first time ever every single lab value is normal. Good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, triglycerides, liver functioning, blood sugar readings, everything just fine. I am technically diabetic, but I think if I lose another 20-30 pounds that may end up being a thing of the past, although over the past few months I’ve been hovering at the same weight, gaining and losing the same ten pounds.

But sometimes I have vacations from eating right, usually on occasions where my wife is gone and I’m left to my own devices. My wife is not some dictator who controls what I eat, but I tend to be more mindful about what I eat when she’s around. When she leaves, I tend to fall into old habits. Anyway, that’s what I did yesterday, and today I’m going to a Mexican joint to get some nachos. I enjoy reading the paper and eating my lunch, one of the Spanish stations blaring in the background. I’ll probably start to “de-tox” tomorrow, usually if I eat right and exercise I am in okay shape again in a few days. Oh, I drank booze last night too, actually a little too much. Ended up drinking a couple of Stone IPAs [22 ouncers] while watching a DVD of old beer commercials. That is one of my big interests, old commercials, safety films, etc. Have been tired all day since I only got the "fake sleep" you get when you drink.

Alcohol has always equaled freedom to me--I grew up in a teetotaler household and was taught it was Evil, although my family loosened up on this quite a bit once the kids grew up. One thing I love about where I live now is the relaxed liquor laws--I can buy quality beer in a supermarket pretty much anytime I want. No crazy laws about having to go to a liquor store to buy anything other than Budweiser, no crazy laws about liquor stores not being allowed to have anything cold or to not be open on Sundays, holidays, or Election Day. I know it's only booze, but it would take a lot to get me to move someplace where my choices about things like that were more limited. That may end up being what happens, though.

Time for a nap.

Incommunicado

Sorry for not writing. I do have stuff to talk about, been reading a lot, but I guess I just can't seem to organize my thoughts. This is the longest I've gone, I think.

Guess this is where blogs often die. I will fight on.

I decided to go ahead and renew my CPA license for this next 2-year period. Of course, that means I have to do about 20 hours of continuing education over the next couple of months, but I already have it on order.

I had seriously considered going inactive [basically paying a lower renewal rate just to avoid delinquency] but I will give this another a couple of years. If it's 2012 and I'm still in basically the same position as now, or if I'm in a situation where I'm not really using any of my accounting background and don't plan to, I will consider going inactive then depending. I think they are working toward lowering the cost of renewal by 2012, so I might go ahead and stay active if it is not too expensive, although the biggest expense involves the continuing ed courses. We are technologically challenged here as far as internet connection goes, so a lot of the online stuff is out of the question at least right now, unfortunately those are often the cheaper solutions for CPE. I did find a company that has hard copy courses available, so I'm doing that. Even then, to keep the license going will probably run me a few hundred dollars a year just for the various courses. At this point, I guess it's still worth it.

I just don't want to reach the point where my CPA license essentially amounts to a very expensive hobby.

My wife is at a work conference this week, so I'm left to my own devices. Have a huge backlog of books, right now I'm focusing on UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN by Jon Krakauer. It's nominally about a murder case in Utah, but the meat of the book is about the history of the Mormon church and the uneasy relationship with the "fundamentalist" groups that operate outside of it, the groups that believe in polygamy. I got interested in the whole subject from watching BIG LOVE along with reading THE LONELY POLYGAMIST by Brady Udall [which incidentally is doing good business in Utah...]

Also writing a bit, encountering something that used to happen when I was doing writing courses in school--my work is really starting to seem geared to the "young adult" market. Wondering if that's what I'm going to end up doing. Of course, I used to work at Borders and saw a lot of the YA books, and that's actually a pretty wide field with a lot of room to do different things, so I don't know if that's a bad thing anyway.