Thank You Notes

First off, I'd like to thank the Job Seeker Gods for getting Nat her third interview for a possible job. Today. I'm probably more nervous than she is.

I'd also like to thank those same deities for friends and connections that help me see there are organizations out there that are not only less toxic than the misleadingly named Cal/EPA Department of Toxic Substances Control, but that operate on philosophies so much like mine.

Well, Shoot

A day of mild anxiety turned out to be for naught yesterday. I heard back from someone on Elance. He wanted people to write ebooks for, "North American Middle Aged Women." I shot off a proposal starting with the fact that I am one. Maureen later corrected me, saying, "You're a little long in the tooth to be considered a middle-aged woman." Jeez. Can't catch a break.

The dude wanted to Skype with me after 7 p.m., and sent his address to add to my contacts. Okaaaaayyyyy. I haven't used Skype for a long time; in fact, since before I got this laptop. First, though, since some Russkies had figured out how to steal something like a billion user names and passwords, I changed my most important ones. Modern Internet security protocols dictate that we create passwords that no one, short of someone having an eidetic memory, can remember them. I'll worry about that tomorrow (hear deep Southern accent and see on me long, billowy dress blowing in the gale winds of war).

I fired up Skype. Confession time (again):  when I got this laptop, lo unto many years ago, the world and, therefore Toshiba and Best Buy, had "upgraded" to Windows8. Even Bill Gates hates Windows8. I gave up on its Start menu from the beginning, operating instead on my familiar Windows desktop. This old dog grows weary of change.

I found Skype, eventually, and cranked her on up. Nope. "Trouble connecting." Sigh. Light another cigarette and switch from Maureen Blend shakes-inducing coffee to water. An hour passed as I downloaded applications I neither need nor want, having to look up my new unbreakable passwords along the way. I succeeded/won eventually and tested the audio and video, taking care that the background of the video of me wasn't distracting or scary. I added the dude's address, which meant that Skype sent him the request. I reset all of my sleep and shutdown so they wouldn't interfere with the transmission. Congratulating myself, I waited.

And waited. No reply to my request to add the dude to my contacts list, no response to my reply, and, ultimately, no Skype contact. Well, shoot. 

I did, however, spend the intervening hours being productive. With Maureen's assistance, I finished The Great 2014 Guest Bathroom Paint Project.

Corner that was a gaping crack

I also finished patching the major sheet rock cracks in the basement. Despite the job-seeking disappointment, I had a productive day and, therefore, can't complain.

Holy MotherOfGod

That and, "Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!" were my mother's go-to comments when my brother and I misbehaved very badly. Which wasn't very often. Not when she was in visual or auditory range, anyway. She was a fallen Catholic, after all. She left the Church when Pope Paul VI opted to squash all hope of the Church getting on board the contraception bandwagon created by Pope John XXIII's promising direction in the Second Vatican Council by issuing, "ON THE REGULATION OF BIRTH, Humanae Vitae, ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF HIS HOLINESS POPE PAUL VI."

An alternative headline for that encyclical could be, "Pope Paul VI Poo-Poos the Pill." See how easy that was? But nooooo. The OneAndOnlyHolyRomanApostolicCatholicChurch 

is the mother of all bureaucracies. It didn't invent acronyms but I'm quite sure that that it gave rise to the need. 

In fact, I posit that government created acronyms and a dizzying array at that. Logically, that means that government is the daughter of all bureaucracies. The Internet, IMHO (LOL) is its niece in that respect.

And all this has what to do with job hunting? From the Internet, we got the magic of Facebook, reconnecting us to so many friends of times long ago. One in particular, with whom I served as a Cold Warrior in the late 70s, has encouraged me to pursue seeking a job in federal service so that I could acquire the requisite service years to receive a pension. I resigned my Air Force commission after nine years.

No, I wasn't a pilot. I was a Public Affairs Officer (PAO), a DINFOS Trained Killer, here pictured in a borrowed flight suit sitting on the steps of a hangar queen B-52 on the Boeing Wichita tarmac. I served mostly at intercontinental ballistic missile bases. One particularly zany numbered air force commander decided that all of his PAOs needed to experience going on a B-52 low-level bombing training mission. I squealed, I begged, I said I'd do multiple tours in an underground launch control center in god-knows-where Kansas, but to no avail. I had to go to Enid, Okla., of all the god forsaken places, for a flight orientation course featuring being shot up a rail in an ejection seat trainer (even though my means of emergency egress was to follow the navigator through a hole in the belly of the plane), and experience both hypoxia and sudden decompression in an altitude chamber. 

Fun times. But not as much as the pre-dawn takeoff in an actual B-52 to fly at 500 miles-per-hour, 500 feet off the ground, over the hot expanse of Texas with the big old wings catching every updraft. I can't remember if I threw up or just wanted desperately to do so. Per the general's direction, I wrote a piece for our base newspaper.

Today, my Facebook friend sent me a link to a job in the San Francisco office of the USDA, listed in USAJOBS.gov. I loved being a PAO and this job looked fun, even if across a bridge, so I decided to apply.

That's where the Holy MotherOfGod part comes in. Just creating an account was an hour-long nightmare of successfully entering the same convoluted password twice and failing to find all of the hidden required fields. It wanted dates of my Air Force service but would only show a calendar that had all the months of 2014.

Still practicing, "Excellence in all we do," one of the three core values of being an Air Force officers ("Integrity First," and "Service Before Self" being the others), I persevered and achieve mastery over the over-designed headache of both USAJOBS.gov and the agency's application page. 

You have to really want it to apply for federal work online. I suppose, given the unmitigated fiasco of signing up for Obamacare, I shouldn't have been surprised.

Cold Foggy Sunday

We're not going to let that stop us, though! Us being me. 

I'm not great at reading directions before I dive into something. Or testing the water, for that matter. On an EPA-paid trip to Hawaii to facilitate and lecture that state's environmental protection agency employees on risk communication, I found myself at the beach with other instructors. My favorite co-instructor, now owner of San Francisco's Pet Camp, and I decide to try out snorkeling. I donned the mask and snorkel, then dove in to the chest high water. Arising coughing up water, I turned to see Virginia, carefully submerging only her face to take measure of the activity and plan her approach to it. Another instructor, observing from the beach, opined that this one simple act spoke tomes about our respective personalities. She didn't say, "... spoke tomes...." She's an engineer, you see, so whatever she actually said was totally literal.

I've been getting email alerts from the freelancing website Elance. I submitted a couple of proposals, having no idea what I was doing. Yesterday, I took the time to go through the tutorial. Interesting and informative, and left me feeling like a very small fish in a very large pond. Enough of that! Followed by meditation/nap outside.

Despite the dankness of the morning, I performed the ritual of going through job listings that had come through email. I found a couple that I've tabbed to get back to later today or, more likely, tomorrow. Painting the bathroom looms large on today's agenda.

Niece Nat informed me that she applied for a couple of jobs in Oregon this week. I'm glad for her. As you can tell, her Tempe, Ariz., experience is less than satisfying. She also made a "zonie" friend with whom she was hanging out watching an awful documentary about eels. "Zonie" as in Arizona inhabitant, although Nat noted, "But he's not a native, praise be." 

Loved that kid since the very beginning.

Remote Printing

My work and play space is in the living room where, from my desk (a gift from Mom and Dad when I was stationed in Montana decades ago), I can hear the garbage and recycling people, and sometimes the neighbor chickens, the sound of Annie's Corgi nails clicking on the kitchen floor as she looks for food scraps, and the distant neighbors using their chainsaws and leaf blowers.

You can't really see it, but among the books behind my laptop is the AP Stylebook. Once hooked, there's no going back.

It was a productive morning in an applying-for-jobs kind of way. I found two, both part-time and both through Craigslist, worth throwing my hat in the ring. 

 DISTRACTION ALERT!

Curious about the origin of that phrase, I find that it began in the 1800s, the action being a taking up of a challenge in the boxing ring. I'm no boxer, but I do remember throwing my hat down in the barrel racing arena before starting the course. We all did it. Whether that was a protest of the protocol of  having to have a cowboy hat on to enter the ring or a misguided assessment of aerodynamic is lost in the hoof-generated dust of history.

Back to the jobs. One was to be the remote "right-hand gal" for a marketing woman based in Mendocino, up north in redwood country. Another was for an outreach manager for a non-profit that trains and stages productions with 50+ aged people. I thought I was pretty clever in my application transmittal email to note that, not only do I know how to work with old people, I am one.

When I apply for a job, I often send the advertisement to the printer, located next to Maureen. From her computer quadrant, she hears everything I do and more. The more being the sound of the printer coming to life all on its own. I holler back to her before committing the job to the queue to avoid startling (aka, "Scaring the shit out of....") her. She's taken to looking at what comes out of the printer, ignoring the recipes but typically saying something positive about the job and my perfectness for it. 

In the immediately previous post, I did not remember to comment about how unusual it is to actually hear back from a hiring person in response to a job application. With the growing stack of jobs I've applied for, I've only heard back from two. Whether that is a function of the utter decline into chaos of basic professional manners or a sign of the applicant-saturated times, I do not know.

Heard Back from Someone!

After probably three dozen resumes sent out, I finally heard back from a potential employer! And actually signed with a human-like name!

"We have reviewed your application. Unfortunately, you are not the right fit for the position at this time. I wish you the best of luck in your job search."

No, not the kind of email you want to read first thing in the morning. Yes, one can (and did) descend into the, "No one is going to hire an old fart like me," and worse places. But one can rise above it all!

One can spend an hour creating a crock pot dish (aka 'slow cooker' if one is sensitive about the other name being a brand name having come into accepted American lexicon, not unlike, "Kleenex," "Coke," and, "Google," the latter of which can be many forms of speech, which is remarkable if not unique in linguistic evolution). I made a version of Julia Child's Boefe Bourguignon without even attempting to pronounce it. Tasty in the taste test.  The Maureen, "Yum!" will determine if the recipe makes its way into my recipe notebook.

Not satisfied with going hungry for six to eight hours, I made myself chili cheese dogs for lunch. No small wonder my jeans are getting tight. Finally, after exhausting all other far more entertaining options, I got to work fixing the corner joint in the bathroom so I could add sheet rock repair to my professional portfolio. I can tell you this:  The YouTube tutorial was informative and helpful but it must take some time to develop the touch. Good thing the dried mud is sandable.

My First Proposal

That would be freelance writing proposal, just to set all you clever, if somewhat dirty-minded people straight right off the bat.

 *** DISTRACTION ALERT! ***

From whence came that particular idiom? I figured that it was from baseball but had to find out. Wikipedia comes through for me again with its entry for, "Glossary of English-language idioms derived from baseball." Fifteen, count them, 15 mouse wheel scrolls of American literal and metaphorical baseball references. Including, for you aforementioned lovers of sexual innuendo, "In interpersonal relations, an individual who can't get to first base with another person is unable to achieve some initial goal or to establish a relationship. A kiss might be first base in a romantic relationship." Mercifully, neither Wikipedia declines to define either second or third base in similar fashion. 

Somehow, in some previous yarn ball unwinding distraction, I came upon a website called Elance that connects clients to freelance writers. I put together a profile and filled in the other recommended information, including signing up for a daily email containing Latest Job Recommendations For You. Every time I see that subject line, I hear the end of an, "As Only Seen on TV," ad - "But wait! There's more! Order now and you get two of these probably worthless devices...."

Clearly, focusing is an issue for me this morning. So. Back to Elance. I rapidly developed for myself more filters; lenses, if you will, through which to distinguish what scares me and what does not. For instance, working for someone on a distant shore, whose cultural values I know nothing about, appeals to me not at all. Nope. No Nigerian princes for me.

I found a job yesterday that appealed to me. Blog writing. I kept the tab open for 24 hours, as I often do for potential jobs, to let my reptile brain process the possibility. This morning, I went for it.

The site has you make a proposal. Slightly intimidating to a life-long bureaucrat, even one who has many friends in consulting. So it took me a couple of hours to construct what I'm guessing a viable proposal looks like. So satisfying to hit, "Submit."

Now it is time to stop thinking about fixing the bathroom wall and do something. It is going to be too hot to play outside, anyway, much as Merlin enjoyed watching his Shorter Mama and me Sawzall pruned branches into green recycling bin friendly lengths.