Well, that was quick. Went in to interview at the district office today, got interviewed by the District Manager himself, and sat through the obligatory PowerPoint presentation on what they're expecting out of us Customer Service Professionals this year. I asked him as the session was breaking up whether I'd be going back to Foxchase, and he replied that he'd probably be basing me out of there but also having me work at the Beauregard and Landmark Mall offices so I could get my forty hours in. This gave me a warm fuzzy feeling, and I felt even better when I found the offer letter in my e-mail when I got home after shopping and mailing out books people bought from me. (I screwed myself by sending them all out Media Mail, but too late now.)

Unfortunately, the job doesn't start until January 10. I'm still behind the eight ball on a number of bills, both bank accounts are in the red, and I don't see any other income happening this month. Even if I did get a couple more sub assignments, I wouldn't get paid for them until January 15. Hard to remember that despair is a sin, sometimes.

P took me out for late-night Korean at Ye Chon yesterday after exhibiting her poor navigation skills and wandering down Columbia Pike, but the bulgogi and sushi were excellent as usual even if the service was a little sub-par. Eh.

No work today either, but I gave the printer a good workout cranking out forms and coupons in between doing a bunch of online surveys, some of which will actually earn me a few bucks. This afternoon I'm going to hit the bank and get quarters for laundry, drop my reporter agreement with STATS in the mailbox, and finally fax off my DD214 to another Federal agency. That, and actually doing laundry, should eat most of the afternoon.

Supposed to be going out to P's for chili tonight using the last of Mom's chilies; was originally going to make it myself at home with the arbol peppers I bought at Walmart, but after a hilariously misplayed round of rock/paper/scissors last night in which P and I chose the exact same items three times running I agreed to let her go ahead and do it. Since the Kia's driver seat is wobbly and my fuel budget is nonexistent, I'll be taking the Metro and the bus most of the way out there and the same on the return trip. Should be interesting.

So far I'm not really all that impressed with Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong. It doesn't really cover any new ground, and I suspect that in their dismissal of Catcher ERA they're missing something, but it's not costing me anything, and someone not familiar with sabermetrics may well find it useful.

Well, time to quit writing and get going.

No sub assignment, no temp work either. I did get called by an agency which apparently has me in mind for a couple of temp-to-perm positions, and we'll see how that works out. (I'd like to at least get the $1.25 I spent on parking back.) Also got my stuffed Kid Bean in the mail from Hanover, which is cute and cheered me up a little when I got back from the agency in-processing.

Was going to do Hammerbee stuff tonight in EVE, but all the roles I had yesterday went away overnight and nobody who could grant them was online. Lost interest and logged out.

Mildly pleased that I was still pretty competent with QuickBooks after not touching it in a year and a half, maybe more.

Other than this, life continues to be annoying & dull thanks to unemployment.

I'm wondering if the mood I'm has more to do with the situation, the weather, or just spending too much time brooding over the past. It's been a little over six months since I finished training my replacement at Wilbar, and in that time I've not had so much as a one-day temporary assignment -except for one day of substitute teaching here in Alexandria. In that six months, I've liquidated what little remained of my retirement funds, had to be helped by friends and family so I could make rent and truck payments, and gotten no closer to getting any kind of paid work - again, with the exception of the Alexandria substitute teaching job, and at the rate assignments are coming up, that's not exactly something I can rely on to keep the bills and the rent paid.

The weather has been overcast for most of this week and rainy to boot. I think it's starting to get to me. I don't recall being bothered by this sort of thing before to this extent, and wonder if it's actually cloudier down here than it was in Minnesota.

Well, nothing I can do about any of it but to keep on plugging. My niece Valerie is leaving for Air Force Basic Training on Monday, and I feel bad that I can't do anything for her to see her off, but that's they way it is right now. Maybe when she comes back in April.

I'm even feeling useless in EVE. I don't seem to have the right skills or timing to really help the logistics crew, and at the moment I'm far enough behind the isk curve that I can't really afford to x up for fleet actions and go shoot things.

Meh. This will all pass, but at the moment it's all weighing on my mind and I'm not doing very well at not brooding about it along with other stuff (in the past) that I can't do much about either. Putting on ten pounds since last month's clinic visit is inexplicable, and I've basically just blown it off as some kind of weird anomaly. We'll see how my waistline and weight match up in January.

Called in to Accountemps (all three NoVa offices) this morning and made sure they were showing me as active. ACPS never did get around to calling me today, so I'm going to follow up with them tomorrow and find out what's clogging the gears. I also headed over to the management office to hand in my lease renewal paperwork and complain about my living room window. It's been nice during the day lately, so I figure I might as well get it unjammed now...what the hell, it's been almost two years, I ought to be able to enjoy it before next spring. Confirmed that there is a DirecTV hookup in the building so I don't have to deploy my own antenna, which would be in radio defilade anyway since I have a north-facing basement apartment. I won't need that until next spring either, but it doesn't hurt to plan ahead.

Saw Game 5 of the World Series down at Shooter's tonight; it went much better than the preceding two games in Philadelphia since the Phillies staved off extermination 8-6, partially due to the awesome pitching of Cliff M.F. Lee and partially due to Chase Utley's two dingers, which moved him ahead of Reggie Jackson on the WS homers list. For once Charlie Manuel remembered that Brad Lidge is shitty, and called in Ryan Madsen to close the deal in the 9th. Madsen made things unnecessarily exciting by giving up hits to Posada and Gojira Matsui before getting Jeter to ground into a double play and striking out Teixeira, but he got the save, so it was all good.

Minor personal accomplishment - got my alt into Goonfleet and out of the Tribal Defense Forces, where he'd been grinding missions for loyalty points. Normally I would have podjumped to Goon space, but i decided to take my little missile boat and run for it. Surprisingly, I managed to run the 56-jump route through Gallente and Amarr space without getting blown up and/or podded. Also, there's some drama involving a friend of mine who's risen to a position of some responsibility in the Swarm and the new spy master/counterintelligence chief, who I used to think well of until he had a major attack of bitchiness at my friend's expense. Maybe next time he'll remember to fuel his own damn towers. :)

I made a bunch of calls yesterday, fired off a bushel of resumes, and filed an app with H&R Block to come back. Unfortunately I missed the window for taking tax prep classes (that needed to be done before Labor Day) but what the hell - three and a half months of part-time work will do my wallet good. I might just be able to scrape enough work together between Alexandria, Fairfax County, and H&R Block to get caught up on some of the bills around here. Am also going to sign up for baseball reporting with STATS again; P thinks I should get more heavily into baseball writing and blogging, maybe revive the Rebel Baseball Review, but I want to take this one step at a time. Whether I'll actually have time for any of this once Civ comes to Facebook next year is a good question. ;)

In the meantme, I'm going to get up and head over to the Blessed Sacrament parish festival today, because, well, I've never been to a parish festival. Also, sitting in the apartment all day is not good for me; I need to get OUT now and again and see people. Maybe even interact with them in meatspace. I know, this is a strange concept for many of you to grasp, but trust me, it does me good.

Getting out will be facilitated by the amputation of the foot wrap part of the Profore bandage, which had largely come unmoored from my foot anyway. This is a Good Thing as far as I'm concerned, since now I can put a sock on my right foot and get it in my regular shoe, as opposed to the Clown Shoe. In a related item, the Clindamycin doesn't seem to be harrowing my GI tract as bad as it was last week. Maybe my intestinal bacteria have grown tougher. Maybe it wasn't the antibiotic to start with. *shrugs*

Oh yeah: Aaron Static has his October Power Hour up and available for download. DO EET.

Finally

Still not dead.
Blood sugar continues to be low (125 this morning) but not in the green yet; blood pressure is pretty much where it has been, so they sent me home with a cuff and will be adding another little pill to the arsenal. Weight is down to 411, off 1 pound from last month. Honestly, I thought with all the disinterest in food I was experiencing during the week of sunburn I would have lost more than that, but I guess I wasn't doing much aside from sitting around, popping Tylenol, and whimpering, and none of those contributes much to weight loss. Well, plenty of time to work it before next month's appointment. In the meantime, I have appointments at the eye clinic (new glasses/sunglasses, maybe?) and the vascular clinic. The latter will be the first time I've seen a wound care specialist in almost a year, and I hope they have something constructive to tell me. In the meantime, I'm finally going to get a VA ID.

P has once again done her best to work herself to death, so we won't be moving anything today. Book and furniture shuffling has been punted to Saturday.

Fairfax County turned me down as a sub since I have zero classroom time, so I'll be going in next week to get processed as a sub instructional assistant. It's better than unemployment, and it'll count towards qualifying as a substitute. I wonder if Alexandria will do the same. In the meantime, I need to find some TB screening results.

Still no word from Don Beyer. Just as well; after paying rent for this month, I can't afford to get the Sportage out of hock anyway.

The Sportage isn't ready yet, and probably won't be until Wednesday or Thursday.

I'm registered for the October Foreign Service Exam, which for better or worse is right down the road from the Ye Chon. Going to brush up on my math a bit; sinec I've been immersing myself in foreign affairs these last two decades I don't see a lot of point in boning up on that.

Sunburns still hurt, and I suspect the burns are doing ugly things to my blood sugar levels since they zoomed up to 298 this morning after being pretty good all weekend. The VA advice line basically said they don't want to hear from me about it unless it goes over 300, so I guess I'm okay by their lights.

Most of my friends on Facebook are going "OMG IT'S THE END TIMES" over the Disney/Marvel deal. Personally, I could care less. chebutykin has what may be the most rational response to the whole thing; she thinks it'll be a good thing for both parties and perhaps for the comics industry as a whole. Implied in this is that the American entertainment industry may be moving toward a more Japanese model, where aspiring artists create comics which then become movies if they're really successful.

In spite of the sunburn, I am heading over to College Park shortly to assist therevdrnye with moving. Because this is what friends do.

So as far as I can tell, this morning's interview for the job in Kabul went well. The guy I'd be replacing (if hired) was the Marine version of a Power Point Ranger; great resume, worked for some high-powered accounting firms and Fortune 50 companies, but just didn't have the skill set to keep the books for a warehouse in Kabul. Whereas I'm exactly that kind of blue-collar down & dirty kind of bookkeeping clerk. We'll see what happens. In the meantime, I called in and got a sub teaching interview with Alexandria early in September, and we'll see how that goes when it comes around. Must remember not to do my Gunny Hartman impression.

While I was out, I returned all my library books but didn't take the USB printer cable back to Staples; probably do that tonight.

In other news, my brother finally got set up with the VA health care (thanks for nothing, IBEW, you fucking leeches, great job taking care of your members) and apparently his A1c is way higher than mine, 9.1 to be exact. Whoa.

Not much else going on; probably head out to staples tonight to get that cord returned, and try to avoid spending any money while I do it.

Bleg: any of you artists out there care to shoop my wombat icon so that it has this antenna sticking up from in back, or maybe as a background? I've had some critter from He-Man imposed on me as a Goonfleet avatar, and it's just not me.

Got a call from a headhunter who wants to see me tomorrow concerning an accounting job in Kabul. Trying to restrain my enthusiasm.

Even though I was arguably awake most of Sunday, it feels like the day vanished without ever really being there because I went to bed at 1800 Sunday night and kind of micro-napped through the game besides. (Nats thrashed the Brewers 8-3, if anyone cares.) Had a disjointed conversation with my brother yesterday, mostly about the house, which is at this point just waiting for the courts to finish grinding their way through the foreclosure paperwork; bottom line is that he has almost all of his stuff out of there and is just reminding me (and P) that we need to finish getting what we want out of there and maybe help him with some of the furniture, which is big solid Ethan Allen stuff that would be a shame to lose.

Today's agenda will include getting laundry done, filling out the VEC form online, seeing if the USB cable I got at Staples solves the printer's problem, and the usual dispatch of resumes hither and yon. Probably some internet spaceships, too.

Despite all the handwaving and flaming in the media, I don't see the economy getting any better any time soon. Unlike my brother, who actually learned a civilian skill or three in the Army, all I have is a quarter-century of questionable office experience with a side order of non-profit business founding. Which will get you a cup of coffee at Dunkin' if you have a buck to go with it. So I'm thinking of going back to college. Originally I was looking at Norwich University, which I applied to in my high school days because it had a reputation for being a big producer of armor officers, and at the time I was much enamored of tanks. Norwich is pretty expensive, though, and I'm old school enough to prefer live classes to internet seminars. So I'll probably wind up going to George Mason and finishing the program I started at St. Mary's while temping and subbing here and there. We'll see what happens, I guess.

Not much to say about this week, really. Sent my resume to a number of local private schools, one of which actually replied with a "thanks, but not now" letter. It's more than I usually get, so I'm more happy with the Paul VI Catholic High School than I normally would. :)

In other work of the day, I ordered more bandages and tape, ate lunch, and caught up on the news. Just another day at the Wombat's burrow.

( meanwhile in EVE )

Right now I'm going to hit the shower and get ready to roll out to Ashburn; P was talking about cooking some chili tonight, and I'm contributing the cheap ground beef. I also want to get out there before the rush hour starts, because driving out that way during the rush sucks.

Spent the morning sending resumes and Praxis scores to various private schools in the area, part of the afternoon in the pool, and most of the evening listening to the Nationals pull of a surprising come-from-behind win over the Marlins, who usually whip the Nats silly without even breaking a sweat. So all in all it was a pretty good day.

Tomorrow, printing and mailing the APAzine and cover will take up the morning and I'll do a little shopping before hitting the pool again in the afternoon.

Out driving with P after dinner last night and when we stopped at Sheetz I found there was apparently no oil in the engine (dry dipstick). So I went in and paid way too much for a couple of quarts of 5W-20 and 5W-30, which is not quite what the manual calls for (10W-40) but evidently this is the new recommended viscosity for getting 1% extra mileage from your gas, so w/e...speaking of the manual, it is apparently lost in the pile of stuff in the back seat, so I had to download a copy into Cowzilla today and page through it looking for important information like recommended oil viscosity, tire pressure, etc. Learned while doing this that the steering column actually is adjustable, and applied this knowledge before heading off to get dinner tonight. Who knew?

Aside from that, did a lot of nothing today. Fired off a bunch of resumes to various jobs on CareerBuilder, but since 90% of the jobs around here just got to have Deltek I don't expect much. Went out for a steak sub at Marino's and am now going to veg out and listen to the Nats while re-reading When The Devil Dances, because I'm a masochist.

Tomorrow I'll spend some quality time hacking on my apazine and the cover...am undecided whether to do a collage of stuff from ADTRW (if I can find enough SFW images) or something else.

So, I'm hitting USAJOBS pretty much on a daily basis, the other job search sites less often. Because frankly, the listings aren't updating that quickly, which isn't too surprising considering the unemployment rates in Maryland and Virginia are 7.3% and 7.2% as of June, and since the economy continued to suck in July I don't expect those numbers will have changed for the better. (DC is at 10.9%, if anyone cares.) As I've said before, the temp agencies have been telling me to call in one a month to let them know I'm available. Quite a change from 2007 and 2008 (during the "worst economy since the Great Depression, LOL) when I was required to call in daily, and there was plenty of work to keep me busy and current on my payments.

I've also submitted applications to Alexandria and Fairfax County schools to fill some full-time and substitute positions. It's been over two years since I sent in applications to those systems, and things have changed. Hopefully enough to at least get me a look and a provisional license. I'm also mailing out a packet of papers to the DoD so i can get on their list as well. We'll see how well I do this time around.

Woke this morning at 0600 after about four hours of sleep and decided to just stay up. Did breakfast, called the various agencies to remind them I'm still out here and still unemployed, and...nothing. Filed a couple of apps for jobs with DoD, ate lunch, and after Rush, I headed over to the city JobLink office. I don't honestly know how much they're going to be able to help me; the impression that I get is that most of their clients don't have the experience or education I do, but I could be wrong about that.

For now, I think I'll turn in early. I'd like to stay up for the Brewers game at 8 PM, but I don't think that's happening.

Spent some time yesterday getting rid of some of the boxes that have accumulated in the apartment over the last couple of years...pizza boxes, shipping boxes, boxes that bandages and tape have arrived in. It piles up over time. Going to do some more of that today and chuck out some other garbage too.

Got lazy last night and ordered in instead of going out after gyros, and wound up with a truly disgusting blood sugar reading this morning. Well, actually, it wasn't too far over 200, but any such readings are Bad. More moderation and vegetables today, plus a little more exercise (see above).

Not impressed by this virtual job fair so far.

I'm on somewhat of a Vietnam War kick at the moment...
( Would you like to know more? )

Got a fresh box of needles today, and just in time, too, since today's outings included a trip to Wal-Mart to get some generic syringes. Stopped by Harris Teeter to cash in my Sub Club points (a fig on thee, Subway!), test their chili (mild, but not bad), and pay the ignorance tax for this week.

The online job fair I thought was today is actually next week. :(

Woke up, checked morning blood sugar, washed hands and rechecked sugar (much better) and had a couple of phone conversations with different headhunters. One of them I'd talked to a couple of months ago, the other not; in any case, they both have possible jobs for me, but we'll see what happens. I'm trying not to be pessimistic.

Need to go out today and do some faxing since the Department of Commerce is still bogged down in the 1960s and can't read PDF files, or some such nonsense. Also need to mail in some forms to the VA to certify that I am a broke-ass veteran, and figure while I'm out I might as well see if I qualify for food stamps. In between all this, more job hunting and...I dunno. Garbage needs to go out, so some of that.