Summer Wanes…

…and with the new season, new things.  Old job gone.  New job to find.  More time on my hands than I am comfortable with to seek the new job.  It is kind of spooky diving back into the shallow end of the job pool at my age.  Especially since I have spent the last four years working for Unemployment trying to cheer people up and lying to them about how there is more work out there and things are getting better.  Embrace the irony of that for just a moment.  I am now trying to collect unemployment from Unemployment.  But at least I know how the system works.

What I do not understand the workings of are this whole job hunt thing.  At my age, I can’t put all of my experience on my resume.  Although it may be wide and varied (how many people do you know that have worked for Walt Disney Imagineering and the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner), if I display too much of that wide and varied background anyone can tell from it that I am well over 50 and therefore probably past my prime.  So I need to figure out how one focuses on parts of the background — the juicy, interesting parts — and leaves out enough that people at least ask you to come in before tossing you out for being too old.

This is an intellectual puzzle that I could have done without right now.  I already have way too many things going on in my life.  My stepmother passed away over a year ago, but I am still struggling to complete arrangements for her estate.  My surgery for my ankle in March did not go as well as I would have liked and I am having to work on recuperating from that.  I have a twenty-one year old son about to start his upper division college work, just as tuition is about to become a much more serious issue than I had hoped.  My car is ten years old.  My house needs a new upper story deck.  I am now looking for work in multiple states.  My cat is getting old.

Oh well.  What does not kill us makes us strong.  But sometimes it is really, really a pain in the ass…

 

Hopefully, happier (or at least infinitely more interesting) adventures to come in the near future.

And now for something completely different — Sandra sticks her toe in the blogosphere!

I have never written a blog.  I have seldom read a blog, other than those written by my friend Brian Lageose (and if you have not read his blogs, you a bloggin’ deprived!).  I am not entire certain how blogs work, but I suspect that they are somehow related to the black magic that makes fax machines work.  My personal opinion of that strangeness?  Little tiny hamsters are quickly taught to write and draw and are stuffed into the fax machines to produce images forwarded to chips in their little, tiny brains by other little hamsters trapped in other fax machines.  Pretty sick, and I say we get some Hamster Rights Organization right on it.

And this will be a major problem with me even attempting to produce a blog.  I get side tracked by strange, twisted thoughts entirely too easily and will lose track of what I was trying to write about.  Other major problems will include things like my childhood guilt at my procrastination that was behind my inability to keep a diary.  I would always start out with good intentions but when I did not manage to make an entry every single night, those blank dated pages would stare at me accusingly.  I would be overwhelmed with guilt and remorse at not being able to maintain the simple discipline of writing down something every single night and get frustrated and always end up throwing away a perfectly good diary with about five entries in it.

But here is where blogging could actually be an advantage.  I don’t think it will intimidate me into feeling I MUST write something every single night.  No empty pages with a printed date staring accusingly at me.  So that part of slowly shuffling into this new technology will be a plus.

So my goal — such as I have a goal beyond getting through tomorrow, finding a regular paycheck and meeting an incredibly attractive man who will not care that I am a somewhat overweight widow in my late fifties with a college age kid still living at home, but will find me fascinatingly brilliant and stunningly attractive (in other words, he will be blind and not too bright) — back to that goal thing again.  My goal will be to write as the Muse strikes me regarding stuff that interests me: film, music, politics, the lack of men in the Inland Northwest that have all of their teeth and most of their brain cells, and my constant journey to find myself.  When did I get lost?  I don’t know.  When did you get lost enough to stumble over this thing?  Perhaps you will find some of it entertaining in a ‘wow, I never knew that’ way.  Others of you may find it entertaining in an ‘Oh God, how can she blather on about nothing for so long” way.  Whatever.  As long as you find it entertaining or interesting or educational or just pitiful enough to want to watch the car crash, I will keep driving fast and aiming at bigger cars.  That was a blog metaphor, and I can only hope you understand that.  Because I am one twisted puppy and will throw some strange stuff out there from time to time.  Hope you will join me ‘cuz hey, it may be a car crash, but even those can be fun sometimes…