Coffee heat rising

Angst

Work Life: Movin’ On

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A middle-aged man of my acquaintance — early middle age, but still: no kid — recently lost his job. Canned for no great fault of his, but you may be sure the ex-employer will try to foist blame on him by way of minimizing post-employment payments.

{sigh} I think what would I do if I were in his work boots? 

Well: obviously, my goal would be to move on in the most efficient and effective way: a) to get into a new job ASAP, and  b) to land a salary that would be as much as I was earning in the former salt mine — and preferably more.

Whew! We don’t ask much, eh? /eyeroll/

First thing to do, IMHO, would be to give myself a couple weeks of vacation time, simply to decompress. And during that time, think about what I’d really like to do and how to pull it off. Continue in the same line of work? Change careers? Go back to school for a degree that might open new doors? Apply for a job as a dog-catcher? Or…what?

This would be the time to look carefully at what’s out there: what kinds of jobs are available in your area, what openings exist, and what qualifications do you need. Also it may be a good time to consider whether you want to get a new degree or course of vocational training that would aim you in a new direction.

Next would be to network…network…network. Let all your friends know you’re in the market for a new job. But also join trade and professional groups (if you’re not already in at least a couple of them), show up at their meetings, and let those folks know you’re looking for fresh work, too.

Neither of these strategies, of course, guarantees that you’ll get any new opportunities…but sitting on your hands certainly will guarantee that.

Another avenue might be to go back to school: get into a graduate program or sign up for a new vocational training course. Several obvious advantages here, above and beyond keeping yourself busy: strong potential for networking opportunities, easy way to spiff up the résumé, and something constructive to keep your mind off your troubles.

Then…just keep on keepin’ on!

If you’re wanting to get hired by a new employer, start applying for jobs and keep on applying.

If you think you might like to start your own business, join a couple of networking and business groups. Show up: make friends, tell them what you can do for them, follow any leads they give you.

If you want to change careers, figure out what you think you want to do next, learn how to establish your qualifications for it, and dive in!

As you might have guessed, none of the options will be easy. But all of them are better than sitting on your hands. So…  Forward! Head on down that lonesome road…

Pain, Pain, and More Pain!

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Omigawd. Wanna hear about hurt?  Lemme tellya HURT. 

For reasons unknown, my right hip is massively spavined. Seriously: I have no idea why or what caused it: must have twisted around funny in my sleep. All I know is that the joint hurts SO MUCH that I’d classify it as about the worst pain I’ve ever had. And I delivered my baby without anaesthesia….

Yeah, no kidding: labor doesn’t hurt as much as this old bat’s monthly periods. Nowhere near that much. So I didn’t realize I was in labor until we got to the hospital and the kid was hopping out into the world.

😀  😮 😀

ohhhh welll…. Just now we are enjoying a bit of palpable pain.

M’hijito is working. Doubt if it registers with him how much the old bat is hurting.

Doesn’t matter, anyway. A spavined hip joint ain’t fatal. If I show up at the ER going wah wah! my leg hurts!!, I’m gonna get ignored, ignored, and then ignored some more. So…shee-ut! Why bother?

 

 

Weirdness!!!

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Jayzuz!  Last week ended weird and today — Monday — starts weird!

No clue what’s going on, but whatever it is…it’s weird.

We’re coming up on 8:00 a.m.  I’ve been charging around since dawn, searching for the source of weird noises.

One of these is a strange thump-thump thump-thump that sounds like it may be coming from the plumbing (?????????). In fact, I suspect that’s not its source, but I can’t echolocate on the damn thing…unless it’s coming from the roof, which would suggest the HVAC system is the source.

But I don’t think so.

Whatever it is, it’s definitely coming from somewhere in the house.

At least…I think so. 😮

Now it has stopped. So…uhm…is it from the central heating unit? that’s gone off. Hmmmm…that would tend to support the suspicion that the HVAC system is out of whack and emitting some sort of weird noise.

Uh oh…there it is again, and the unit’s not on.

***

Okay, the vent is turning around. No wind to speak of. AC is off. Why it would rotate at all is a mystery. But that NOISE! Whack-whack whack-whack whack-whack…  Helle’s  Belle’s!

Who to call to get it fixed? It’s 8 a.m. now…I need to find a workman ASAP.

***

Okay, I call my handy-guy. NATURALLY he’s not answering the phone. Probably driving to a job, or to breakfast.

Meanwhile and just to make everything perfect, I’ve put my right hip out. Must have slept cattywampus during the night…and Man, does that HURT!  

Holeee shee-ut, it hurts!

And naturally, because I’ve left word with Handyman Dude, now I can’t hear the crazy noise.

Heh…

This is gonna be One of Those Days, ain’t it?

Here We Go Again…

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Speaking of the glories of the Middle of Nowhere (as we were yesterday), this morning a fine cop copter is buzzing the low-rent district just to the north of us — right across Main Drag North.

Nine times out of ten, these little dust-ups (“copter-ups”?) amount to nothing. It’s the times when they chase the guy into your yard, where he tries to break into your house: that’s the tenth time out of ten. And it’s what makes the Middle of Nowhere look good.

Seriously: if we were out on the ranch and some jerk were running around out there, the mule and a couple of horses would be charging nervously around the corral. The ranch dawg would launch into Full Assassination Mode. And we would have plenty of time to get our shotgun.

😀  O’course, because the ranch was the Middle of Nowhere, chances are the perp would not be running around out there. He might run through the MofN, but believe me: he’d keep on going. Especially when he got the glimpse of our blunderbuss.

Very, very tired of Big-City Life. Gosh, but this stuff is tedious. Seems like some stupid Event occurs almost every day.

The wee corgi figures I’m gonna give her a piece of the cookie I’m munching for sorta-breakfast.

She’s right, o’course: I wanna live.

Weird, hazy, icky day, the sort of weather the newspaper climatologist calls “partly cloudy.” Clouds?  Well, OK, if you say so…  But I’d say not. I’d say “icky.”  Or “let’s go back to bed.”

Y’know…I’ve about reached the point where I’m sick and tired of life in Lovely Uptown Phoenix. Spare me the daily (hourly?) cop fly-overs, the poor neighbor terrorized because he saw (ooo gawd!!) a coyote ambling across the park; the whitey-white neighborhoods (no coloreds need apply…); the crime-laden school and apartments across the road; the endless ambulance and fire sirens, the…how long does one have to go on?

I fear I was not born to live in the Big City. 😀

Which Phoenix decidedly was NOT, when my parents moved here and dragged me along with them.

What is it now? Decidedly urban, we might say.

And y’know…I don’t much like it.

Yes, I truly loved living in San Francisco. {But San Francisco, Phoenix ain’t…)

And yeah, I tolerated living in Long Beach, within reason. (Yeah, this place is ticky-tacky in a way reminiscent of Southern California, but…California it ain’t.)

Phoenix, weirdly, is another matter…for reasons that aren’t altogether clear.

It is very Southern California. But really, it’s…what?

* architecturally dreary
* culturally boring
* intellectually…nonexistent
* too hot for life in the summer
* too smoggy for life in the winter

Given half a chance, I’d escape to points west, north, east, or south. In an instant!  But…I ain’t leavin’,  because my son is here. And besides, it’s too darn much work to pack up the castle; tote a lifetime’s worth of furniture, dishes, clothing, artwork, and whatnot across the country; unpack it all; and find new places for all that junk.

Guess you can’t complain about what you can’t complain about…

Tromping, Endlessly Tromping…

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For reasons unknown to The Olde Bat, this afternoon my right hip is spavined. And Boy! Does it hurt! 

No idea why: don’t recall slipping or tripping or sleeping cattywampus. All I know is…I can barely hubble up the damn sidewalk!

Needed to make a grocery-store run this afternoon. The Albertson’s is close: only a few blocks down the road. But man! By the time I got there, scooped up a bag of loot, and headed out of the store, it felt like I’d traipsed halfway to China and back. And I still had to get home!

Finally made it…after seemingly endless limping and limping and limping and limping… Whew! 

So here we are, hunkered in out of the rain (water hasn’t started falling out of the sky yet, but it soon will), chowing down in the company of the Hound, and thinking it will be tomorrow morning before we hobble into the kitchen to load up the dishwasher.

Hmmm…  Here we have news of some monster Gmail hack. Helle’s Belles, I don’t even know what they’re talking about, much less understand what to do about it. Afraid I”m gonna have to shut down all my google mail accounts. And that’ll be the end of that.

{sigh} No question of it: I’ve come unstuck in time. And so I no longer live in our society, with our contemporaries. Not only can I not follow this kinda kee-rap, I don’t want to. That, I think, is the operative feature: I just no longer want to hassle with whatever new monster headache is rolling up the pike.

Y’know what I’d like to do? 

Go way to hell back into the boondocks and buy our ranch back from whoever has it in their grimey hands now. Shut down everything in the flickin’ city. Pack up the car and the clothes and the riding boots and the little dawg and MOVE BACK into the FLICKIN’ MIDDLE OF NOWHERE.

Yes.

The Middle of Nowhere looks better and better with each passing day.

* You don’t need a password to get into your mail, because your mail lands in a tin box on a stake at the entry to your ranch.

* You don’t need to hike half your life with a bag of groceries, because you drive into the next town up the road to get to the store.

* You don’t have to keep up with the latest brain-banging technology, because in reality you’re living in the late 19th Century.

* You don’t have to deal with a crazy-making Mayo Clinic staff or a berserk solo practitioner, because there are no damn doctors out there in the middle of nowhere.

* You do not have to cope with a swimming pool that will have to be cleaned (again!!!) tomorrow morning after tonight’s pending storms, because no one in their right mind would have a pool on a ranch in the middle of Wonderful Nowhere.

* You don’t have to figure out how to drag your dawg to the vet, because the only vets out there deal with cows, not corgis.

Gawd spare me, Lord!

Pool Dude!

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ARF! we say. ARF ARFETY ARF! IT’S POOL DUDE DAY!

Darned if I can imagine how Ruby the Corgi knows when it’s Pool Dude’s day to come over and shovel out the hole-in-the-ground-into-which-to-pour money. But by golly, she sure does! 

And she’s out there lurking by the gate — or in the house by the back door — waiting for him to show up.

Ohhhh how that dawg loves that Pool Dude!

So does the human… Bless’im, he relieves me of an annoying job. And, because he does the job SO much better than I can, he keeps that pool just spotless. Looking gorgeous. Free of casually growing sheets of green stuff.

Yeah: we’re both in love with Pool Dude. I’ll tellya: that guy is worth his weight in dollar bills.

Do hafta say: in the unlikely event that I were ever to buy another house, it almost surely will NOT have another swimming pool in the backyard. I do love having the puddle of cool water out there in Arizona’s gawdawful summertime. But..y’know…a shower will do the trick. 😉

Unless you have kids who play in the pool every day, owning one is hardly worth the cost. The pool really is an expensive nuisance.

It also poses a health threat that most people don’t think about: it’s a puddle spreading some very scary communicable diseases.

My next-door neighbor apparently decided she was done with maintaining and paying for her hole-in-the-ground, so she let the water drain out and then just went on about her business. Problem is: when you open the drain at the bottom of a backyard pool, not all the water drains out. 

Result: she had a nice little puddle sitting on the bottom of the plaster hole…and the mosquitos found it.

This created a fine mosquito nest, jacking up our buggy population handsomely.

Meanwhile, her other next-door neighbor, a European immigrant, had no clue about stale puddles, swarming mosquitoes, and their consequences. She liked to sleep with her windows open, and apparently had never heard of a window screen.

Next result: the skeeters flew right into her bedroom and made themselves to home, where they bit the bejayzuz out of her…and infected her with a fine case of encephalitis. She almost died from it.

Fortunately, she did recover after some time…even though her doctors had told her dad that she probably would not.

So…Ruby and I do not loaf around the backyard without being amply covered in clothing. We do have a mosquito-zapper out there. But most of the time, I stay indoors!

Therein lies one of the many drawbacks to having a swimming pool in your backyard…and it’s not even your pool!

Here in Phoenix, you’d have a hard time dodging mosquitos bred in one of the local holes-in-the-ground. Just about everybody does have a pool. You could probably evade the bugs if you lived in a high-rise apartment. But most houses…not so much.

If your pool is maintained properly, well then…no, it’s not breeding skeeters. But to take care of a pool properly is a PITA of the first water. You have to keep it steadily chlorinated. Sweep down the walls and steps. Vacuum out any debris that blows into it…. If you’re doing pool maintenance right, it’s pretty much a daily task. Or a stiff bill to a guy who comes around and beats back the dirt and the bugs.