Well, you probably won't believe this.

I don't think I believe it.

I had to tell my coworkers today that they are closing the business.

Yes.

This is the seventh job in a row that I have had crumble out from under me. I'm beginning to feel like Typhoid Mary.

Have some possibilities, though. The parent company wants me back in Memphis. Maybe there's something doing around here.

Once again ... I cannot stand the suspense.

Back to the memoirs.

I had a little business in Palm Beach Gardens last week, a conference for environmental professionals. It's always a pleasure to connect with other nerds.

I brought my Toshiba netbook and used OneNote for taking notes - I really like it.

The fun part was that we finished at lunch time on Friday, and having no particular place I had to be at any particular time, I took the scenic route coming home. It was about a 3-hour drive going down on Tuesday, with only a brief pause for supper, but coming back I just drifted along the coast. Didn't worry about staying on the highway. I kept the sun more or less on my left and stopped four or five times at various public beach access spots, and got a nice sunburn on my shoulders from my boat-neck blouse. Rolled my pants up so I could walk in the edge of the water, and of course they got wet above my knees because I can't stay out of the ocean! I got to Melbourne about 5:00 or so, called F in Kissimmee, and met her for dinner at about 6:30, and eventually came on home. What a relaxing afternoon that was. There's actually no reason why we can't do that sort of thing on any weekend. And I have to go back anyway, to get F's picture with the sign at this beach before "On Stranger Tides" comes out.

We are thinking hard about buying the house we are currently renting. The floor plan is kind of different but we've gotten used to it. The cats like it. The swimming pool both terrifies and fascinates them. The previous owner's relatives kind of cleaned it out after she died, including whatever light fixture was over the dining area; they left the chain and wiring dangling from the ceiling, which looked kind of stark. We finally took care of that this past weekend, with this whimsical thing (Home Depot had it for less). We've talked a bit about other plans, should we buy the place - there are only two bedrooms with carpet and I'd like to pull all of it out. The master bedroom has doors that open directly onto the pool deck, so it's stupid to have carpet in there. Well, we'll see what happens.

It is my last day to be in my forties.

Assuming that I will live to be 100, I have hit the halfway point.

My birthday weekend is expected to feature a dinner at the local steakhouse, and a trip to Clearwater.

...

One of the plant operators came by the other day. They've laid off everybody but two people who are finishing the shutdown and closeout operation. The guys did get their severance checks.

The operator said that when "they" came to serve the subpoenas, everyone was told to park on the office side of the parking lot so that "they" would not realize the lab side was part of the company. And that after that was over, a u-haul was backed up and all of the lab contents packed into it - instruments, glassware, computers - and it all went away. He said it would make me sick to see it now. I find that incomprehensibly distressing. I didn't expect to go back there really, but wow. I had previously been told, when I asked if my current employer could purchase some of the lab equipment, that nothing could leave the place because the assets had been frozen. Oh well.

...

Went to Kissimmee on Sunday. F wanted to visit a church; she'd been putting it off b/c she didn't want to go by herself, but she was going to screw her courage to the sticking place and get on with it, and then I volunteered to go to see her in time to go with. It was a nice church that she picked out, with very friendly people; the choir was small but surprisingly good, the pastor was conscious and alert, and the sermon was reasonable. She expects to go back. Afterward we had lunch and then went shopping (of course) and then back to her place for just a bit. Now that her former roommate has gotten the rest of her stuff out, F's had some time to get her place in order for just herself and the cats. She might not have been comfortable striking out on her own in a strange city last year, but she's cool with it now. And I'm enjoying being the mother of an independent, functional, happy adult. When F was small, sometimes she would ask what I wanted for my birthday, and I would say, "You to be a good girl." It would frustrate her and make her mad, but that really was what I wanted. Now I can look at her ability to get on with her life and feel pretty satisfied at my 50th.

Okay, events of the last two months.

There's too much to sum up in the usual narrative way, so I'll try to do this in outline form.

I Housing
A We intended to come here in 2007, rent for a year while we looked around, and then buy a house. But we never bought.
1 My job immediately became unstable and never really settled down.
2 Indications were that housing prices were still falling. I think they still are.
B We were OK renting where we were, but then it turned out that the landlords had been taking our rent money and not paying their note, so the house is being foreclosed on. There's some other stuff that I'm not talking about here but it's pretty irritating.
C Not much luck finding a place to move to, still wanting to rent a bit longer - R says "I don't want to be one of those people" - but then it turned out that the house right next door to us was available for month-to-month rent while the people who bought it (another foreclosure) at auction got the legal stuff straightened out so they could sell. So we moved next door.
D The new house has some different features. Useful to change the landscape now and then so you don't collect stuff you don't need without realizing it. One of the features is a swimming pool. Yes, we have taken advantage and will continue to.

II Job
A Not going to say too much about the current job, except that it's a bit stressful, long hours, and I haven't regretted taking it for even a nanosecond. That's partly because
B The previous place is closing down next week. I actually went in on Saturday to produce certificates of analysis for two last railcars of REFINED GLYCERIN (now it can be told) so the guys will hopefully get a last check. It beats me how people ... well, never mind.

III F
Visited us this weekend. She enjoyed the pool. We enjoyed having her. I'd put brilliant pink towels in the guest bathroom, which she thought were pretty, and then she turned around and saw the BRILLIANT pink shower curtain I'd bought, with rows of flamingos marching back and forth. OMG. She's 23 and I can still surprise her. I put some catfish and buttered rice and fried okra in her a little while ago and sent her back on her way.

IV R
Is doing OK. He actually has come to work for us. I am his boss now. So far it's going all right.

V The cats
...

I reckon that's about it. Long hours, as I've said. Hopefully this will ease up before long. Anyway, am still gainfully employed and that's the main thing.

Wow, it's been a while.

Lots of work. The new job is the challenge I thought it would be.

I went back to the old one one Saturday in May, and again yesterday, because the hapless person they hired to replace me isn't really up to the task of figuring out what he's supposed to do. Now it's true that he wasn't there for me to train during my notice period, and that's neither my fault nor his. But it's also true that I scrupulously documented lots and lots of procedures, and they're very clear, so that a person with decent lab experience ought to be OK.

I spent a little over four hours on that Saturday back in June, and because I was invited to invoice them and the things I found that they were having trouble with were stupid no-brainers (not on the new guy's part, he had only started the Friday before) I did invoice them. Just $50/hour, which is ridiculously low, but what the heck.

Have not been paid, which doesn't surprise me - one of the reasons I wanted to leave was that they were not paying vendors.

The new person asked me to come in last weekend and help him and I declined. He emailed me this week - please - said he'd pay me out of his pocket. Well, I'm a sucker so I told him I'd give him a 50% discount off my usual rate, and went in. Of course, when I got there he told me that the boss had told him not to pay me, they'd pay me, so that's probably more unpaid weekend work. They now owe me $465. I am holding my breath, y'all.

Also found out that they are paying him through that families back to work thing, where the gov't places a person in a job and then pays his salary. I don't know how that could work, since he is a replacement for me and they were paying me. Did they say they had laid me off? Don't feel right about my tax dollars going to keep a business from having to pay necessary personnel their paycheck.

Other than that, I am just really tired. Will try to get back to blogging, maybe about some happy stuff.

I will say this:

When I was a kid, we had World Book Encyclopedia. My parents still have that set. I particularly loved the "B" encyclopedia - it was the Bird Book and I studied those color plates of various birds until I had them memorized. Seriously, I can call them up in my mind's eye.

R and I were returning home from somewhere the other day. It was twilight and rainy, he was driving, and I was looking out the window. We passed a spot where water was running over a shallow thing into a ditch, and there were fisher birds taking advantage of that spot to get their dinner. Storks, herons, egrets ... and then I said STOP! GO BACK!

R did, and we got out of the car to go and look. Here's what I saw:



Here's a closeup:



This is a roseate spoonbill, and it was, like, my very favorite bird in that whole encyclopedia. I remember being a little bitty girl and studying the picture of that bird, and wishing I could see one. Well, there it is.

I went in to work for a bit yesterday, to have some think time without people telling me things or asking me to do things. This will probably continue until I feel that I have stuff under control. It's actually stress-relieving for me, though I do have to have down time as well.

Today we went to Clearwater Beach for a while. I don't know how much longer we have to do that, or how bad it will get. The water and the sand were pristine as always, but every now and then when the wind was strong out of the gulf we caught a faint but unpleasant hydrocarbon smell. Maybe it was from somebody's boat somehow. Have never smelled it there before, though. I looked at little kids enjoying themselves as they always do. The thought that they may be my age before the beach and the ocean are returned to their current state - well, it's hard not to feel helpless rage and almost overwhelming grief. Maybe, MAYBE it won't be as bad as all that - but it will be miraculous if it is not.

And the rage part comes from the fact that this environmental disaster is 100% man-made. The stories that are coming out about fighting between groups on that rig, no clear line of command, corruption in what was supposed to be the governmental oversight agency, safety rules being arbitrarily set aside because they were behind schedule, are - well, I'd say unbelievable, but I know better. You can have the best safety program in the world, and it all comes down to personalities: whether the human beings in charge at the time actually care, what their priorities are, how likely they are to engage in magical thinking when they're under financial pressure, whether the right people are stong enough to push their point until it sticks; and that kind of thing is almost random, I'm sorry to say. I've seen corporate people who were excruciatingly careful about keeping their standards of integrity front and center at all times, and I've seen corporate people who didn't have a clue about integrity, let alone prioritize it.

[Case in point - in the job I just left, I was asked to draft a quality statement for the owner to sign. I refused to do it. That statement has to originate with the owner or it is utterly worthless. "That's our quality department over there" or "that's our safety department" or "that's our corporate ethics department" - that kind of thing is the kiss of death. Why we have to discover this over and over is beyond me.]

So I'm left with memories of one more beautiful afternoon at beautiful Clearwater Beach, and weird streaky sunburns because my spray-on sunscreen had less in the bottle than it had led me to believe; and I don't know how many more of these we'll get, or what the future holds. The beach isn't all there is to Florida, of course, but tourism is going to take a tremendous hit. That has already started. And the local economy, so heavily based on tourism, is about to get slammed.

I wish I thought that we'd learn something from this.

Okay, well, I'm really tired, but I know that the ENTIRE UNIVERSE is wondering how my first week on the new job went.

It actually was about what I expected.

I am managing a small environmental lab. I have a good group of techs but they have not been managed the way I would have done it, so there will be some changes made. Better document control, so that the current revisions of all of the procedures are readily available and the old ones are disappeared. The docs themselves need updating, which will be tedious but will pay off. The docs will be used for training, even on analyses the techs have been doing for years, because their previous training wasn't very in-depth and some details are being skipped over. Two of the techs expressed to me today that they are very happy I'm there.

I'm also going to give attention to customer service: answering questions, working on turnaround times.

Been hearing some unhappy things from the company I just left. I feel for my friends there.

...So, Florida it is.

R and F are thrilled. The cats would be if they knew what was going on. I suppose I am, but I'm still just very tired.

The Iowa people graciously asked me to let them know if I change my mind, ever.

I resigned this morning, via email, and have not heard back yet from the corporate boss. Perhaps he hasn't seen it, ha ha. The plant manager knows. I kept him abreast of developments. He said it would be a race to see who got out the door first. Unless he just doesn't give notice, I win.

So I start the Tuesday after Labor Day Memorial Day. No break at all. Since the next paycheck may not happen, that's probably a good thing. (I said this didn't come a moment too soon.)

It's been a crazy couple of weeks.

As I said, I got a call from a recruiter about a job in Iowa, for a company I used to work for at the Memphis location. Then, an email about a job at a location right here in town, for a completely different company I used to work for in Memphis. Phone interviews for both jobs ensued. On-site interviews were scheduled, first in Memphis last week, then in Iowa this week.

On Wednesday morning last week, the HR person for the Iowa people called to tell me that I'd be starting that interview with a presentation. Only about 20 minutes, she said. (Only!) What am I presenting on?! Anything you want, she said. My work history? What I can contribute to the company? Whatever, she said. I left at lunchtime that day to drive to the Tampa airport and fly to Memphis so I had to shove that to the back of my mind.

The Memphis former boss - and by "former" I mean fully 20 years ago - picked me up at the airport. We stopped to get coffee and start the discussion. Didn't get to my hotel till after midnight Florida time. Interviewed on-site with the corporate folk all day Thursday, flew back here, got home around 1:00 AM, and had a very full day at work the next day. Was too tired to even think about a presentation until Saturday, and I was scheduled to fly out to Iowa mid-day on Sunday.

I asked F what I should present about. She offered to send me her powerpoint presentation about dinosaurs. Now, as I recall, this was a ppt that she had got up for her evolutionary biology class. The paleontologists, or whoever, had measured the distances between dinosaur footprints, and made some other measurements, and compared these to the footprints made by modern land animals like cheetahs, to draw inferences about the dinosaurs' speed and musculature. I'm sure this would have been a very interesting presentation, probably more interesting than anything I could have come up with, but I felt that it was not extremely relevant to the purpose at hand; so while I was grateful for her support, I had to decline the offer.

I tried to write about my work history but I could not stand the thought of talking about MYSELF, with slides already, for 20 minutes. BORING.

What I ended up with, out of desperation, was a series of slides about things I'd learned from people I'd worked with; about integrity, and courtesy and respect, and mercy, and so forth. When I gave that presentation on Monday morning, I used exactly 20 minutes and it was very well received. The rest of the interviews went just fine.

What didn't go fine was coming back home. The flight out of that airport was canceled due to mechanical failure that, happily, didn't wait till we were airborne to manifest itself. The airline put us canceled folks up in a hotel, so that was OK, but whether it was a virus, or the (free) chocolate martini I had with my dinner, I was sick that night. Had to be at the airport at 6:00 the next morning for my flight, with a comfortable layover in Minneapolis and then a very short one in Memphis (had to run for my gate, b/c it was only 35 minutes to start with and then we were late leaving Minneapolis), retrieved my car in Orlando and got home about 12 hours after I'd set out. That day is kind of a blur. I really couldn't eat anything all day and was so tired when I got home I barely spoke to R before I fell across the bed fully clothed and slept like the dead.

And another long day at work today.

Tomorrow I'll meet the Memphis corporate folks at the lab here.

The Iowa folks have let me know that they plan to make me an offer. The Memphis folks plan to as well. So by the end of the week I expect to have made a decision, to stay here in a new job or uproot me and R and relocate to the land of snow and corn; and judging by what happened at my job while I was gone, this is happening none too soon.

I feel like I have had that Chinese curse.

Actually, I feel like I am being looked out for and I am very grateful.

For in the last year she had found that her hostesses expected her to take a place at the card-table. It was one of the taxes she had to pay for their prolonged hospitality, and for the dresses and trinkets which occasionally replenished her insufficient wardrobe. And since she had played regularly the passion had grown on her. Once or twice of late she had won a large sum, and instead of keeping it against future losses, had spent it in dress or jewelry; and the desire to atone for this imprudence, combined with the increasing exhilaration of the game, drove her to risk higher stakes at each fresh venture. She tried to excuse herself on the plea that, in the Trenor set, if one played at all one must either play high or be set down as priggish or stingy; but she knew that the gambling passion was upon her, and that in her present surroundings there was small hope of resisting it.

Tonight the luck had been persistently bad, and the little gold purse which hung among her trinkets was almost empty when she returned to her room. She unlocked the wardrobe, and taking out her jewel-case, looked under the tray for the roll of bills from which she had replenished the purse before going down to dinner. Only twenty dollars were left: the discovery was so startling that for a moment she fancied she must have been robbed. Then she took paper and pencil, and seating herself at the writing-table, tried to reckon up what she had spent during the day. Her head was throbbing with fatigue, and she had to go over the figures again and again; but at last it became clear to her that she had lost three hundred dollars at cards. She took out her cheque-book to see if her balance was larger than she remembered, but found she had erred in the other direction. Then she returned to her calculations; but figure as she would, she could not conjure back the vanished three hundred dollars. It was the sum she had set aside to pacify her dress-maker—unless she should decide to use it as a sop to the jeweller. At any rate, she had so many uses for it that its very insufficiency had caused her to play high in the hope of doubling it. But of course she had lost—she who needed every penny, while Bertha Dorset, whose husband showered money on her, must have pocketed at least five hundred, and Judy Trenor, who could have afforded to lose a thousand a night, had left the table clutching such a heap of bills that she had been unable to shake hands with her guests when they bade her good night.

...Don't you hate when that happens?

House of Mirth

What a world, what a world.

Sigh.

So I haven't posted about my job lately because no one would believe the things I would have to say. I've been looking and looking for another job for months, had a couple of interviews, no dice. There are so many good people out there right now, as I learned last year when I put an ad on Craigslist for a tech and was depressed by the response.

I had a call from a recruiter about an opening with a company I used to work for. The opening is in the Midwest. I entertained the prospect, he talked to them, and they apparently are excited about the possibility of my going to work there. They're still in discussion and have not made me an offer - I am not counting my chickens yet - and of course I don't know what kind of offer it will be. But as much as R and I hate the idea of leaving Florida, hate the idea of snow and ice, and HATE the idea of leaving F here, I think if it's any kind of decent offer I'll have to take it.

There's worse things. Right?

Here's another bit from The Custom of the Country.

Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour."

Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?"

"Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me."

"Asked for YOU?"

The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?"

"Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation.

Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?"

"I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie."

This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table.

"Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own.

Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away.

Time to update this thing, I guess.

My back is much better. The doc was right about needing the heavy drugs. I had a minor setback on the Saturday after Good Friday, when it seemed appropriate to add a stomach bug to the back spasms so the drugs had to pause, but got past that, and am now pain-free and walking normally, although still taking care not to twist or wrench or lift anything heavy.

Apart from that, am doing some (light) spring cleaning, at home and at work.

Oh, and we went to Kennedy Space Center last weekend. F wanted to do breakfast with the Apollo 13 astronauts. We didn't get tickets to that, but she did; so R and I wandered around the rocket garden while she was in there, (she had a blast,) then the three of us spent most of the rest of the day looking at the exhibits.

A lot of money and a huge long-term commitment had to be made for the space program to get going. It was known that there would be a lot of false starts, because pen-and-paper physics and engineering will only get you so far. And they were very patient, and just kept plugging and stayed with the vision. I suppose that without the Cold War and the motive of not letting the Soviets get the upper hand, it wouldn't have been possible. Would it be possible now? Don't know. Obama wants to scrap the space program, and put all the money into airplanes and climate research, as if NASA hadn't demonstrated its inability to separate politics from science there, so that it is basically worthless. I don't think there's anything else he has done that's bummed me out quite so much.

Funny post for today on Zooborns.

I broke down and went to the doctor today, because it's day six of this back thing, it's not getting better at all, I'm tired of walking like a turtle and "I haven't got time for the pain" for those of us old enough to remember that commercial. Evidently I have palpable spasms all up and down both sides of my back. X-ray showed no disk problem or anything, so that's all it is. I told her that I've done this before, but it's always started loosening up after two or three days. Well, you know, (she said,) as we age it takes longer to heal.

WHOOPPEEE. Yay for age.

I am reminded of my MIL (who I sometimes am surprised to remember is dead) complaining that she would go to the doctor about anything and he would start out, "Well, at your age..." She got so tired of that. Forget my age. Fix the problem.

So I've got some real strong pain killers, strong enough to put me in a stupor over the long weekend, and maybe this will do it. And then I'll start doing those back-strengthening exercises I know I'm spose to do, and I will do them every. single. day. for. the. entire. rest. of. my. life.

...Here's a little Wharton, since I missed her yesterday.

...[I]t was now openly recognised that, as a member of the Lunch Club, Mrs. Roby was a failure. "It all comes," as Miss Van Vluyck put it, "of accepting a woman on a man's estimation." Mrs. Roby, returning to Hillbridge from a prolonged sojourn in exotic lands—the other ladies no longer took the trouble to remember where—had been heralded by the distinguished biologist, Professor Foreland, as the most agreeable woman he had ever met; and the members of the Lunch Club, impressed by an encomium that carried the weight of a diploma, and rashly assuming that the Professor's social sympathies would follow the line of his professional bent, had seized the chance of annexing a biological member. Their disillusionment was complete. At Miss Van Vluyck's first off-hand mention of the pterodactyl Mrs. Roby had confusedly murmured: "I know so little about metres—" and after that painful betrayal of incompetence she had prudently withdrawn from farther participation in the mental gymnastics of the club.

"I suppose she flattered him," Miss Van Vluyck summed up—"or else it's the way she does her hair."

Funny story. Read it here.