Moving Day

Okay, I've moved to a new location:
here. Come on over!

Lettuce Toss

I finally gave up on the lettuce soup. Much as it pains me to do so, I decided to toss it. It doesn't taste very good, is the main reason. I mean, it's edible, and it's probably even reasonably nutritious, so I feel a certain amount of guilt about throwing it out, but it is just . . . Not Good. It was a valiant effort to use up the vegetation in the fridge, but ultimately it's just taking up space in the freezer.

Everything else is tasty, though: I've been eating the curried carrot turnip soup quite happily. I've also been throwing in bits of other stuff--some leftover rice, for example, works very nicely, as would any kind of greens--and of course I add cheese. The next cooking project will need to use some beets, as I have the most of that. And the turnips, of course. I basically have until April or May to get through it all, i.e., until the 2012 crop starts up. I'll probably make some stuff this weekend, so I have lunches for work. (Oh yes, it's so very nice to be able to say that.)

In fact, I'm starting work today. My new boss called yesterday and asked if there's any way I could come in before next Thursday, and I said sure, so long as we work around a few lunch dates I have. So I'll go in this afternoon, most of Friday (Orange--I'll email you to see if you can pick me up after all), most of Monday, and all day Tuesday. I reserved Wednesday for seeing a friend and doing any last-minute chores. One of the things that I think will help is that NewOrg is funded by many of the same funding sources as OldOrg, so the contracts will be familiar, even if the specifics differ somewhat. NewBoss is overwhelmed, so wants me on board right now. Yes, it is nice to be wanted and, presumably soon enough, appreciated.

I keep fibrillating about commenting on the various political firestorms of the day, but I keep staying out of it. For one thing,Charles Pierce does it so much better than I could. For another, the forced-birth nuts are making me insane. Their insanity would be mindboggling if I hadn't spent the past 40 years having my mind boggled by them--though they do seem to get worse.

And Willard? The stripper of assets? The disgustingly rich do-nothing, who inherited most of his money, and then used that pile to make another pile, all without working a day in his life, and whose positions change with the weather? Or Santorum (whom Pierce consistently reminds us is a dick), the hypocritical creep? Or N. Leroy Gingrich, staff-banger supreme and pompous windbag? What can I possibly say? The notion that these assholes are serious contenders for the nomination for one of our two major parties shows just how much we have become beholden to corporate interests and far-right nutcases. The fact that so many of them are campaigning on shredding what remains of a safety net, and the fact that they get votes from people who would be negatively affected by said shredding, causes me to turn away and read whatever novels come to hand. I cannot fathom it, and I cannot stand it.

Also, this blog will be moving soon, to wordpress. I haven't figured out the details of it yet, but I"ll let you know.

On the Right Side of the Glass

I"m having lunch with my new boss and coworkers next week--yes, before I officially start--and I'm looking forward to it. One of the coolest things about this whole process is that there is clearly a group of people who are eager and enthusiastic about what I bring to the table--rather than, say, shoving me out the door because they just don't think I have anything useful to add. Even though I'm not going to bother with the interview with the third organization, and I'm not sure I'm the best person for the job for which I interviewed last Friday, the fact that three organizations were interested enough to want to talk to me is very nice. On top of that, of course, one of the organizations did handstands and cartwheels to get me on board as quickly as possible. The second person with whom I met briefly on Wednesday asked NewBoss how s/he found me, the implication being that it was a great find.

Seriously? I feel like I'm back on the right side of the looking glass, where up is up and people want to use what I know and what I know how to do, where people consider me a valuable find rather than a thorn in the side. I had lunch yesterday with someone from the old place--someone who is also outside the bubble team--and s/he confirmed again what I was experiencing (and is experiencing his/her own version of it). So, oddly enough, my ex-boss's original statement, that s/he thought I would be a better fit and would be happier elsewhere, is accurate. The problem, though--for the old organization and for ex-boss, not for me--is that the reason that is true isn't because of some deficiency on my part.

But I don't want to spend any more energy on the old place. I have an opportunity here to continue building on what I've learned, and I'm excited to get to do that. The things I ended up doing at the old place because there wasn't anyone else to do them gave me the knowledge I needed to be able to step into this new role, and my new boss knows all kinds of stuff, and can teach me all kinds of stuff, that will expand my capabilities even more.

It's all a little surreal, because of the speed and intensity with which it happened. I'm trying to be calm about the success, too, just as I tried (and sometimes succeeded) to be calm about the challenge of being unemployed. So I'm making some bread right now, because that's my default activity these days, and later we're heading off to cheeseland for the night (fab dinner plus college hockey game), and the bread will be something of an experiment, because the final rising will be done in the back of the vehicle (where it will be cool) or in my fridge, i.e., will be a very slow rise. No idea if that will work, but no big deal if it doesn't.

Do a Happy Dance

To answer Larry's question below, I'm basically saying that there were a lot of changes at the senior management level, which is true, and that we were having difficulty figuring out how best to connect my skills with the organization's needs, which is true-ish. I've had a fair amount of practice saying this in the past week, what with two in-person interviews (to which I will return momentarily) and a phone interview, and I'm suspecting that it's asked mostly to make sure I don't launch into a screed of some kind. And, frankly, though I've kept the severance details private, the fact that I can line up people with whom I worked and who are still there is probably helpful, and I can line up ex-bosses back to the early 1990s probably says something,

So I had a phone screen on Monday, and the woman with whom I spoke called me back later that afternoon and asked me to come in for an interview on Wednesday (yes, yesterday), which I did. Just about 24 hours later, the interviewer/prospective boss called and officially offered me a job. The salary is very decent--it's about what I was making before my last promotion at the old place--and the commute is about the same as the old place (it's two stops more on the train, and maybe two more blocks of walking at the other end), so that's all good. Even better, though, the NewBoss is very very excited to have me on board--obviously, given that s/he turned cartwheels to get the references and everything else done in less than a day.

I start in two weeks, so the vacation is nearly over. I have had time to do some nothing, and I'll have some more time to do that--basically, I will have spent what is usually the worst part of the winter hanging out in my apartment with Loaner Cat, and I have ended up in a job where people are enthusiastic about what I bring to the table. It's a bit of a whirlwind--I really didn't think it would work out this well or this quickly, and especially not well and quickly together. Go figure.

And, hey, I still have a freezer full of veggies, and an active sourdough starter, and a cleaner apartment (well, that one needs some revisiting). I'm going to try to get a new faucet next week, and I might be able to get the fabric to make a curtain for the kitchen window, and then I'll be set for a bit. I'm trying to not get too excited, much as I tried not to get to anxious, but I'm permitting myself a day or two of happy-dancing, for sure.

Stuff

Damn, I am exhausted today, and not just because of the copious amounts of wine that got consumed last night. I invited my downstairs neighbor up for pasta with venison bolognese sauce (Friend came along as well), and yesterday I ended up making two kinds of crackers (whole wheat, and a rosemary flatbread), white bean dip (with a buttload of garlic, a shallot that needed to be used up, and some sage), a sharlotka from Smitten Kitchen, a blueberry caramel sauce to drizzle on the sharlotka, the aforementioned bolognese sauce (though I had to use red wine instead of white, because it turned out I didn't have any white wine), a batch of sourdough wheat bread with cracked wheat added to it, and a batch of fresh pasta, which I managed to screw up (luckily I had some dried, so no big deal). And I mopped up the cat hair and cleaned up the bathroom a bit.

The crackers were interesting. The flatbread was pretty good, but needs a bit of tweaking--a bit more salt, perhaps, and probably a lot more rosemary. The wheat crackers had a nice flavor, but the dough was a complete pain in the ass to work with. When I made the white bean dip, I put in what I thought was way too much garlic (which isn't really possible for me, but not everyone has my tolerance for garlic), so I took another can of beans and pureed it w/ some olive oil, then added about half of the first batch into it. Turns out everyone liked the full-on garlic version as well, so it'll all get mixed together for the leftovers.

The bread dough was quite a bit wetter than the other doughs I've made recently, even though I've been using the same baker's percentages. Basically, I take out all but what I'm going to refresh of my levain, and I weigh what I've taken out, and then add dry ingredients (flour of various sorts, cracked wheat, barley flakes, malted wheat flakes, oats--whatever suits my current fancy) and water as a percentage of the weight of the levain. Yesterday's was very active and puffy and wet--the bread tasted just fine--good, even--but I have no damn clue why it was so slack.

The sharlotka was pretty good, though I think I should have used more apples; the recipe gives number of apples rather than weight, and mine wasn't as high as the one pictured. I also thought the apples got too soft. (I reduced the total amount of sweetening, and I used honey for about half of the total--so probably 75 grams of sugar and 75 grams of honey--which might have affected that.) I'll make it again, though; it was a nice tasty dessert, and it's not loaded with butter, so it doesn't feel so heavy. The blueberry caramel was interesting, too. You see this dark purple sauce, so you expect fruit flavor, which is there, but there's this dark caramel flavor as well. Again, though, because it's a caramel that doesn't use cream or butter, it added some flavor w/o adding fat.

In other news, I had a job interview on Friday. The organization's entrance is literally ten feet away from the entrance I used for my last job--it's in the same building, down the same hallway, except you turn left for this place. They're building a new building and so will be moving out relatively soon, but it was still a bit weird to go down that hallway. I had to do a certain amount of la-la-la-ing.

It seemed to go well enough. It's a small organization, and the position is just the kind of jane-of-all-trades thing that I love, and it's a new position for the organization. The ED is interviewing a few more people, and then will ask a few of the interviewees back for a second round with the other senior staff; I don't even know that I'm going to be one of those people. Still, I felt pretty good about it, and felt like I had good answers, including about areas where I don't necessarily have a lot of experience. I also have a phone-screen interview on Monday; that one is for a lower-level position than the Friday interview, but it's a larger organization, so there presumably would be room for advancement.

I'm noticing that I'm not doing cartwheels with excitement for either position, but I think the reasons for that are a bit complex. For the Friday job, I think some of it is apprehension: although I believe that I can do the things the job requires, including the things that I haven't done much before, there's still a certain amount of fear around that, and a certain amount of convincing of others that needs to be done. That aside, though, what I'm sensing in myself is a kind of tiredness.

As I've said multiple times here before, my experience with "follow your dream!" is checkered, at best. I don't feel like rehashing that yet again today, but I also know that the backing and forthing and upping and downing I've done, particularly in the past ten years, has taken a toll on me. Hell, in those 10 years I have had three different careers--the biotech company, the bakery, and the most recent organization--and none of them quite worked out the way I had planned. (Sometimes I think my life course is teaching me to be a buddhist.)

Which isn't to say there weren't good parts to all of them, but that's a lot of change in one person's work life in ten years. I think that's the reason I don't have a whole lot of enthusiasm for any particular thing. I'd like to find useful work, at decent pay, with companionable people. That's it. So if someone is looking for a person with Passion! and Dedication!!ll!, I"m probably not that person--but I also don't think those things are necessary in order to do a bang-up job for an organization, even one with a very specific mission (which most non-profits have). I'm not so stupid that I would say this an an interview, but it also means that I don't have a good answer to "Why do you want to work here at SuperCaring Organization?" Um, because I need a job, and the position you have available fits my skills? So I blather about wanting to share my skills in the non-profit arena and leave it at that.

One of the people w/ whom I worked at the last place was pretty insistent on people needing to be Passionate about the mission. I challenged him/her--as diplomatically as possible--and basically said, I don't care why people take the job, I care that they do it well. S/he didn't quite know how to handle that (and used to insist that I do have the passion, even if I say I don't, because s/he liked me and couldn't square it all up any other way), but in my experience, passion doesn't mean someone can do a job well, and doing a job well doesn't require passion, it requires competence.

Anyway. I'm certainly not going to go into this in an interview--and let's hope there are more of them, and that one of them leads to a job offer.

Better, with Mustard

Well, that was fun, wasn't it? I know that Doing Stuff--just about any Stuff--helps somewhat, but I also know that it's possible to do lots of stuff and still keep sliding. Whatevs; I also know that Doing Stuff has its own virtues and rewards (I don't just sit around, and Stuff Gets Done), so I'll just keep hacking away at it and see what happens.

The two Projects I have in mind are getting back to the paint removal in the sunroom and making a curtain or shade of some kind for the kitchen window. Neither will happen today--today's tasks were applying for a handful of jobs I've saved from this week's search and getting my health insurance squared away, and, later in the afternoon, getting my hair trimmed. ( I had thought to put this off, because the place I go isn't cheap, but it's looking pretty ragged, and if I do get an interview, I don't want to be stressing about that. Yeah, I know, it's unlikely I would not get a job because my hair isn't at its best, but it will need to be done sooner or later.) Nothing extreme, but all of it useful and at least some of it involves not sitting on my ass; I may even work out.

For today's amusing story, I must relate my entry in the Most Ridiculous Injury contest. Last Friday I was making beer-and-mustard-braised cabbage with venison ring baloney (an incredibly simple and incredibly tasty dish), and, as I twisted the lid off the jar of mustard, I sliced open my finger. On mustard. Yes. There was some dried mustard on the jar, and it was sharp enough to slice open my finger. I've heard of cutting the mustard, but I haven't heard of cutting BY the mustard.

Anyway. The discussion of job application processes will have to wait for another day--but I didn't want to leave that depressing whine at the top of the heap. I'm a bit better yesterday and today, and I seem to have stopped sliding, at least for now. No telling how long it will last, but I'm trying to stay focused in the present. It's not necessarily safer here, but there's a good bit less anxiety.

Tumble Down

Now I been lookin' for a job but it's hard to find
Down here it's just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line
--Bruce
"Atlantic City"

I can feel myself sliding down a ravine. It's happening kind of slowly, and I keep thinking I should grab a boulder or a tree or a clump of grass and haul myself up, or at least pause the fall until I can get my bearings, but instead I just keep slowly sliding.

Oddly enough, the fear of falling is making it worse; I know that it can get very dark and deep and painful.

Back when I finished grad school, I was unemployed for more than a year. I had some temp work, and some small jobs, but it took me 15 months to find a full-time job. On top of that, I realize, in retrospect, that I was seriously depressed for probably two years before that.

It was hellish. I was miserable, and I knew that I was miserable to be around. I was sad and angry and scared. I was unemployed and deeply in debt and being forced to change careers. Despite having spent seven years and accruing the aforementioned debt to do what I truly loved to do, I wasn't going to get to do that, and I had to find something else to do, and I had to pay off all that debt.

When I finally got a job--literally weeks before I would have run out of money--I immediately set to healing myself. I worked through the shit, as best I could (pretty well, actually), and slowly rebuilt a new life. As I left that job, four years later, to work at the startup company, I got involved with Chuck. And despite the many, many good things that came out of that, nearly eight years later, once again, my life blew up: the company for which I worked went out of business (and the companty for which Chuck work moved, so we were both in dire straits there), my marriage blew up, and I was working in a low-paying, grueling job that had been intended to be an apprenticeship before I started, yes, something else I loved to do.

And then I pieced things together again, and quit the bakery, and found a new job, where, over the nearly four years I was there, I was promoted twice, and left the job making 60% more than when I was hired.

None of that matters.

What matters, right this minute, is that I have no fucking clue what's going to happen. I have some capacity for dealing with uncertainty, and some capacity for rebuilding, or moving to a new plot and building something else entirely. But will I be able to do it this time, before my money runs out? I'm over 50. Unemployment is at record levels. The jobs that are out there are either back at the level I was at in 1994 or they're just enough above my level of experience that I don't think I can do them; there's no guarantee that I can talk someone into hiring me for the former, and I don't see the point in trying to talk someone into hiring me for a position that I don't quite know how to do and don't think I can figure out in time.

Even that, well, something could turn up, or I could maybe get one of the lower-level positions that pays enough and, once again, work my way up (or not; there's a lot to be said for not).

But I'm sliding. I've spent the better part of the past two days sitting and doing not much of anything. (No, computer cards does not count as any fucking thing at all, except an exercise in mind-numbing.) I managed to work out Monday and Tuesday, but today, I managed to miss a train and I got off at the other end 15 minutes too late to get to the rowing class I had signed up to take, and I just turned the fuck around and got back on the train and came home. Otherwise, I have done almost nothing.

I was supposed to meet an ex-co-worker tomorrow, but it turns out that there's a board meeting s/he must attend--which added to my funk, as I was required to attend a board meeting in, what, September? maybe? And that means, if anyone I met remembers me, there will be questions, and my ex-boss will be making shit up or badmouthing me--most likely the former, about how I "chose" to pursue other options. I'm fucking UNEMPLOYED. Who the fuck would choose that? All I can say is that I hope s/he breaks out in suppurating sores and bloody pustules every time s/he says something about me that's bullshit. I'm trying very, very hard to keep away from the anger--I know, from the above-mentioned experience, that it is not a good path, and will only lead to more tears--but I think I can ask that bad karma rains down upon those who spew bullshit about me.

Then again, maybe no one will even notice.

For the ones who had a notion,
a notion deep inside
That it ain't no sin
to be glad you're alive
--Bruce
"Badlands"

(Yeah, sorry, Palladia is showing "Live in NYC" at the moment, presumably in honor of Clarence's birthday, and, as we know, Bruce is my personal deity. Or, at least, he keeps me going, and I'll take what I can get right now.)

So I know I have to find a way to stop the slide, to grab a boulder or a sapling or just dig in my heels. Because i just do not want to go back down into that ravine. I lived there for maybe three years, maybe more, in the early 90s, and revisited briefly five years ago, and I do not have the energy to drag myself out again, and the farther I fall the more dragging out of it I have to do. I have no fucking clue how I'm going to do it. But there it is. Drag myself out of it, right the fuck now, figure out a way to hold on and stop sliding.