Waiting for my breakfast to digest until I head out to the gym so that I won't throw up all over the floor, I pause to write a much delayed entry.
After I finish with the gym today, there are more errands to run, goods to buy, and things to prepare for as a result of E's visit.
* At least three comfortable pillows need to be purchased for the bed the both of us will share. When I was still in DC, my little sister stole my good pillows for her bed when she moved back into my parent's house. I'm going to take a look at a pricier store and if pillows there prove to be a bit too rich for my blood, it's on to Target.
* The engine of my car has been sputtering, which means new spark plugs needs to be bought. Fortunately, plugs aren't terribly expensive, nor terribly difficult to install. I'll get better gas mileage too, which will be a godsend since I'll be driving an old car that isn't terribly fuel efficient. It was built in a time of sustained $1.50 per gallon gas and those times are certainly not our own. A five hour beach trip is going to burn one full tank of gas going down there and one going back up here.
* I can wait until shortly before she arrives on Thursday to clean my bathroom thoroughly, vacuum and clean the inside of my car, prepare a space for her clothes in my closet, and cleaning the carpeted stairs going up to my bedroom.
* The ingredients for the meal I will be preparing for the dinner of first evening she is here can wait until later next week. I know what the main dish will be but I'm not certain what the dessert will be. When I talk to her again, I'll ask her what she'd like.
_________________________
In other matters, the people at the college I teach for finally got in touch with me about training to teach classes for them at the end of June. I was beginning to wonder whether they had completely forgotten about me. After begging me to be an instructor...
Waiting for my breakfast to digest until I head out to the gym so that I won't throw up all over the floor, I pause to write a much delayed entry.
After I finish with the gym today, there are more errands to run, goods to buy, and things to prepare for as a result of E's visit.
* At least three comfortable pillows need to be purchased for the bed the both of us will share. When I was still in DC, my little sister stole my good pillows for her bed when she moved back into my parent's house. I'm going to take a look at a pricier store and if pillows there prove to be a bit too rich for my blood, it's on to Target.
* The engine of my car has been sputtering, which means new spark plugs needs to be bought. Fortunately, plugs aren't terribly expensive, nor terribly difficult to install. I'll get better gas mileage too, which will be a godsend since I'll be driving an old car that isn't terribly fuel efficient. It was built in a time of sustained $1.50 per gallon gas and those times are certainly not our own. A five hour beach trip is going to burn one full tank of gas going down there and one going back up here.
* I can wait until shortly before she arrives on Thursday to clean my bathroom thoroughly, vacuum and clean the inside of my car, prepare a space for her clothes in my closet, and cleaning the carpeted stairs going up to my bedroom.
* The ingredients for the meal I will be preparing for the dinner of first evening she is here can wait until later next week. I know what the main dish will be but I'm not certain what the dessert will be. When I talk to her again, I'll ask her what she'd like.
_________________________
In other matters, the people at the college I teach for finally got in touch with me about training to teach classes for them at the end of June. I was beginning to wonder whether they had completely forgotten about me. After begging me to be an instructor for summer quarter starting back in the wintertime when I was still in DC, you'd have thought I might have been given some advance notice of their process. So yes, I really wish they'd have bothered to give me some relative time frame since they sprang this on me at the last minute, weeks and weeks after I had already made plans with E. Then again, they have never been particularly prompt, nor professional, nor especially courteous about such matters. They don't pay us much of anything and consequently we are treated as such.
The training session needed to learn the e-classroom environment by which I will need to structure my lessons is scheduled to begin on Monday. When I got the e-mail informing me of this last-minute arrangement, I threw a minor fit. Fortunately, after I calmed down, I discovered that I will not need to log in every day and will make a point to get as far ahead as I can so that by the end of the week, when E arrives, I will be able to focus all of my attention squarely on her and not on this silly training class. And I e-mailed them to say that three days of the week after next when we are both at the beach that I will be unable to have access to a computer or to participate in coursework. To their credit, I did receive a prompt reply back stating that they believed that it wouldn't be a problem for me to be away for that length of time and that my training seminar teacher had been informed of the matter via e-mail. The session will last roughly a month from start to finish, but if the one I went through last time is any indication, it won't last nearly that long. Training is a formality for me since I have a good reputation with the school and really is my opportunity to learn the new system so that I can plug my assignments into it and assist my students with how to navigate. Others participating in the same session are candidates for employment and by the end, the trainer will recommend to the school the most suitable teachers, in her professional opinion.
______________________
Aside from all this preparation, I continue to apply for employment in DC and to get frustrated at the net result which has been 700 applications, two interviews, and zero jobs. Yesterday I changed my cover letter and resume to include her apartment (where I will be presumably living once I am firmly settled) rather than the current Alabama address where I am living now temporarily. The hope is that it will make employers already pressed for time by a stampede of applicants won't summarily discount mine because I have an out-of-town address. With time, persistence, trial, and lots of error I have learned subtle ways to tweak how I apply for a job that make me much more likely to get an interview, or, for that matter, noticed in the first place. I've also found a helpful resource. A fellow blogger who writes about workplace issues and has eagerly incorporated the questions I've run across in the process into blog posts. It's a win/win situation. I get a professional reply and due to the strength of the questions, she gets more hits on her site.
If I had to guess as to why I haven't gotten many jobs, it's that the market itself is super-saturated with well-qualified applicants and also that my resume is scattershot and the job experience I've had easily applies to a relatively small number of available jobs. I have been applying to jobs as an Online Publication Content Specialist, which is an emerging occupation and so very very new. It's so new, in fact, that there are around twenty different titles floating around out there to describe the same job with the same basic skill set. As an entity, I know it wasn't even in existence a year ago. In short, corporations and non-profits both want to get in on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and the like. They want someone who can write well and they want someone who understands how to blog as well how to network with other bloggers. Furthermore, they want someone who knows a bit about how to construct Web Pages from scratch. It's a hybrid job that pulls in a lot of creative skills, and I have all these talents, but so do many other people. There's really not much I can do about my work history. Several jobs allow one the ability to label oneself as disabled and you can be sure I am always quick to do so. The hope is that any sensible person in charge of reviewing job applications will see my limited work history and link it to my disabled status. Bipolar has worked against me most of my life. The hope is that maybe now it will work for me.
After I finish with the gym today, there are more errands to run, goods to buy, and things to prepare for as a result of E's visit.
* At least three comfortable pillows need to be purchased for the bed the both of us will share. When I was still in DC, my little sister stole my good pillows for her bed when she moved back into my parent's house. I'm going to take a look at a pricier store and if pillows there prove to be a bit too rich for my blood, it's on to Target.
* The engine of my car has been sputtering, which means new spark plugs needs to be bought. Fortunately, plugs aren't terribly expensive, nor terribly difficult to install. I'll get better gas mileage too, which will be a godsend since I'll be driving an old car that isn't terribly fuel efficient. It was built in a time of sustained $1.50 per gallon gas and those times are certainly not our own. A five hour beach trip is going to burn one full tank of gas going down there and one going back up here.
* I can wait until shortly before she arrives on Thursday to clean my bathroom thoroughly, vacuum and clean the inside of my car, prepare a space for her clothes in my closet, and cleaning the carpeted stairs going up to my bedroom.
* The ingredients for the meal I will be preparing for the dinner of first evening she is here can wait until later next week. I know what the main dish will be but I'm not certain what the dessert will be. When I talk to her again, I'll ask her what she'd like.
_________________________
In other matters, the people at the college I teach for finally got in touch with me about training to teach classes for them at the end of June. I was beginning to wonder whether they had completely forgotten about me. After begging me to be an instructor...