All posts by Mush

About Mush

I want to be a veterinarian because I love children.

I have this red bicycle…

Whining

In which it’s… well, if not the best story, at least there’s a learning curve. That’s always good, right?

Over the last few months, I’ve invested a non-trivial amount of time in reading up on bicycle maintenance. There are all kinds of informative articles and videos on the Internet, and it’s just a bike, right? I’m smart, I should be able to learn how to take care of a bike, right?

Well, sort of. It turns out that while I was interested enough in doing the research itself, I wasn’t interested enough to actually do any of the things I’d learned, so I caved and took the bike over to Allegro Cyclery where it was given a tune-up and new tires by persons who were not myself.

Tuesday morning I walked over – via a stop at the Starbucks on 1st & Main, which had literally been remodeled overnight and was really disorienting and weird – to pick it up. I gave them eighty bucks, and they gave me my bike! In working condition!

My bike has brand new tires!

I walked it a block to the pita place and grabbed a falafel for lunch (falafel travels comfortably in the purse, you see). Then I rode it home. And it was awesome. And fast! Yay, I have a BIKE again! For the first time since, what, since I was dating Vita at MIU? So, probably fifteen years.

I ate, I worked for a bit, I made calls to WorkSource and WWCC. Then I went for another ride! Whee! Bicycle! WHEE! I went to the post office. I rode around in circles. I rode around downtown. I timed the trip back from St. Mary’s because I had an appointment there later. I rode through the insane crazy construction zone that is much of 1st street. Three times.

Which was probably a mistake, because when I went to hop back on the bike (to go get my boobs smashed in an expensive machine at St. Mary’s) it had a flat.

So I jumped in the truck and drove ten blocks (that global warming thing? MY FAULT) because I didn’t have time to walk. And the nice lady in Imaging smashed my boobs in an expensive machine for the first time ever (it hurts, by the way), and then I went back to the bike shop to buy a patch kit and some kind of bike-tire-airing-up apparatus.

Since I hadn’t aired up a bike tire in over a decade, I didn’t really have a way to choose between various bike-tire-airing-up apparatuses, so after the awesome guy showed me all the available choices, I just picked the smallest one. Because, as you know, I love tiny electronics, and I figured a tiny tool is close enough, and there’s a compressor at home that weighs seven hundred pounds so what I really need is a portable bike-tire-airing-up apparatus thingy that I can take with me.

Awesome tiny CO2 bike tire pump!

And when I got home I aired up the tire, just to see if it really had a hole in it.

The Murray, upside down

It did, damn it.

Today, I took the tire off the bike (which required more time than you’d think, since I had to find tools and figure out how to do it) and got the tube out and stuck it in the sink and found the bubbles and patched the hole. (I think that may have been the very first time in my entire life that I’ve ever patched a bicycle tire all by myself.) Then I put the tire back together and took it out to the garage to air it up.

And then I spent a long damn time finding the right attachment for the compressor, and then an even longer time trying to set the bead on the damned tire before finally giving up for a couple of hours because HOLY COW THIS JUST SHOULDN’T TAKE THIS FREAKING LONG, IT JUST SHOULDN’T. (It was hard because the tire is new and has therefore been folded up in a box until just recently, and because compressors blow a lot of air really fast, and because the attachment I was using was kind of awkward to control, and because I’m not seriously mechanical by nature).

The compressor

Stupid flat tire. Jeez. I just picked the freaking thing up yesterday. Hell, I probably didn’t even ride it five miles! What the hell, stupid flat tire!

At least it wasn’t the rear tire. Knock on wood.

When I tried again a few hours later, I got the bead to set and the tire filled up beautifully. And it was still light outside, so I’d have time for a ride! Yay! But when I turned off the compressor, I could hear hissing.

“Oh, no you don’t,” I said, holding the tire up to my ear.

Oh yes it did. The thing was hissing like a snake. “Damn it! Damn it all to HELL!” I yelled, stomping my foot.

No, it wasn’t the patch failing – I’d done that right. It was the valve leaking. I must have broken it somehow, in the course of my learning curve. No bike rides for me today. Argh! This is entirely too tedious for a freakin’ bicycle tire!!!

I’m just going to take the thing back to the bike shop tomorrow and have them replace the tube for me, because I’m not interested in screwing around with it any more. I just want to ride the damn bike over to WWCC and back to see how long it takes!

Oh, well. At least I now have an adorable tiny little tool kit. And I’ve learned how to patch a tire and where the attachment is for the compressor, all stuff I hadn’t known before. So that’s good. Right?

Bike tools toolbox

Yes, as a matter of fact I am keeping my bike tools in the box I got from my manicurist that used to contain emery boards. (What. The stuff fits perfectly!) World’s tiniest toolbox! Whoo hoo!

Ten Days in the Life

Life

In which I haven’t posted in ten days and need to correct that little oversight.

Since my last post, I have

– gone to the county fair:

Wipeout!

– danced at the Stone Hut’s outdoor parking lot fair event thing, which was ended by a torrential downpour and at which I was nearly trampled.

– played at Basel Cellars’ annual grape stomp event.

– attended the Tomato Fare (where I did not sing, because I had laryngitis) and discovered how many lovely heirloom varietals there are:

Tomato Fare

Continue reading Ten Days in the Life →

What I'm Reading

Reading

In which there are books. In various formats.

I’ll start school in eighteen days (if the financial aid office at WWCC ever awards me any aid, that is) and probably won’t read much that isn’t assigned for the next nine months. That being true, I thought I’d share my current reading-for-pleasure list with you.

“Real” Books
As far as treeware goes, there’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-third Annual Collection that I haul out every once in awhile. I’m not sure if I’ve read it before or not, but I don’t remember the stories so it’s just like reading them for the first time anyway. There’s also Eternal Wisdom, Upadeshamritam Part 2. I have read this before, but it was different water then and I was a different bridge.

New Message

Ebooks
The last three items I opened on my Kindle were the October 2010 edition of Asimov’s Science Fiction (the double issue! yay! delivered wirelessly while I wasn’t even looking!), Bright Of The Sky (a loss leader Amazon.com suggested to me and which I downloaded because hey, it was free), and Free As In Freedom: Richard Stallmann’s Crusade for Free Software.

The last three ebooks I added to the Kindle were Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life, Galt’s The Life of Lord Byron, and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

I have fifteen non-fiction items on the Kindle, all free samples from Amazon, that I have not yet begun to read, and I’m on page three of Cory Doctorow’s Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. I guess I forgot it was on there because I buried the ebook in a folder I haven’t looked into for awhile.

I bought the latest Clarkesworld Magazine a few days ago and am about to crack into that, and I’ve been reading Cryptonomicon on and off for months. It’s hilarious and brilliant, but somehow I never feel compelled to read it. (My favorite Stephenson book was Anathem; I actually finished that in a reasonable amount of time. It took me forever to read Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, and forget about The Baroque Cycle; I’ll never read those. NOTHING should require that many words to convey!)

Miscellaneous Book Facts
Total number of ebooks (including magazines and today’s NYT) on my Kindle: 79
Total number of ebooks on my iPod (in five different reader apps): 110 (a few of which are duplicated on the Kindle)
Total number of ebooks in Calibre: 304 (about a sixth of which are DRM-locked to devices I no longer have but most can be re-downloaded for the current device)
Total number of “real” books I own: 113 (most of which are cookbooks, and 6 of which are musical scores)

Eleven. Motherfucking. Pounds.

Health

In which I need to whine and complain. (Don’t read this drivel. Seriously. Go read something else. I am such a baby.)

The boys over at Cocky & Rude nagged me into joining their diet competition back in July, and even though I haven’t really been dieting, I have been weighing myself every Wednesday and from that I have some fucked up observations to share.

For the first four weeks, my weight didn’t change (other than a slight and temporary bump during The Curseâ„¢, which is normal). On week 5, I gained a pound (for The Curseâ„¢, natch); but on week 6, I gained another pound.

Then on week 7, I gained SIX POUNDS. And week 8 I gained another 3 pounds, for a grand total of eleven pounds in four weeks.

I quit smoking during week 6 and ate whatever the hell I wanted in any amount I liked for about ten days, but then I went back to eating the way I normally eat, which pretty much keeps me at the same weight under normal circumstances.

I don’t think I’ve gained much fat because I am retaining so much water that my inner ankles are smooth; there’s no bone protruding where you’d expect to see an ankle bone.

This extreme water retention thing happened to me once before about three years ago and it lasted a cycle or two, if I recall correctly… I wasn’t weighing regularly so I don’t know exactly when it ended, but I remember being ankleless and reading up on edema and water retention. Home care is exercise, less sodium, and, counterintuitively, drinking more water.

Anyway, since this has happened before it’s probably not related to quitting smoking, and I have hope that next cycle I’ll drop all this hideous water OH GOD OH GOD PLEASE.

I’m noticing some other oddities too, in terms of moodiness and fatigue, that could be related to quitting – such symptoms are listed in all the smoking cessation articles – but feel more hormonal to me.

So: is this some kind of event I’m getting to enjoy merely because I’m a girl and This Sort Of Shit Just Happens Occasionally, or is it related to quitting smoking?

EITHER WAY, IT SUCKS! I’m fat and mopey and I have no ankles! Shut up looking at me!

I'm only half as mature as I'd like to be.

Love & Marriage

In which I talk about really old stuff.

The fact that I’m still wasting processor cycles on this pisses me off. I shouldn’t care. I don’t care. I couldn’t care less.

But.

When I left my husband, I moved into town and my good friend AmmZon let me live with her. She even let me crash rent-free for a few months. She was dating Joesus at the time, and she and I commiserated together about red headed men more than once.

Flash back a couple of years:

The very first time I met her, she was dating BoSe and he’d brought her out to the farm. When I saw my husband and AmmZon meet for the very first time, I knew that those two were the best match of any combination of any of us. The Ex flirted baldly with AmmZon every chance he got for the next few years. It really pissed her off because she thought he was an asshole.

Flash forward five years:

After I left Iowa, AmmZon and Joesus broke up (which was no surprise to anybody but Joesus) and a couple months after that, maybe as much as half a year, AmmZon and The Ex got together. The consensus was that it was a rebound relationship, but hey – they’re still together. I think they’ll stay together.

None of that bothers me. I quit wanting my husband a couple of years before I left him, and I hope the two of them are madly in love and having awesome monkey sex. I like him and would like to see him in a good relationship. I like AmmZon too, and she’s probably the only chick I’ve ever met who has balls big enough to deal with a man with a skull as thick as The Ex’s. They have tons in common (OMG I could write you a list twelve feet long), they’re the right ages for each other, and they should probably get married and breed as soon as possible with my blessings.

What bothers me, stupidly enough, is the farm house.

Fifty-eight minutes ago, AmmZon posted a picture on Facebook of her dinner. I clicked on it and ended up looking at her albums, and, of course, there are pictures of the farm in there because, hello, she’s dating my ex-husband.

Apparently she fixed the rotting, falling down old arbor and trained the grapes back up off the ground. I never did that myself because I didn’t give a shit about the grapes. They didn’t produce, I didn’t know what I’d do with them if they did produce, and what I know about viticulture would fit in a thimble.

There’s a picture of something she’d bought on the counter from my old kitchen. My old kitchen. The only kitchen I’ve ever owned. My shitty, ugly, fucked up old kitchen.

There are pictures of the new kitchen and living room. The last time I was at the farm, I’d driven out to get my stuff shortly before moving to Washington. Much of what I wanted was ruined from having been in those rooms while they sat, half demolished and untouched, for a couple of years. He’d just piled all my crap into the future kitchen and left it there, exposed to the elements. My leather jackets were rotted with mold. A couple of computer components were ruined from exposure. Everything was incredibly filthy. You’ve never seen stuff this fucking dirty, and it was inside the house that I’d lived in for years.

That’s the house I moved out of. A house he cared nothing about. A house he’d ripped apart and then ignored. A house whose intolerably uncomfortable, filthy condition he blamed on me, because, as far as I can tell, I didn’t fuck him enough.

No, honestly. That’s not a joke. I don’t know what happened, but we moved out there and began this awesome remodel with enthusiasm and energy, and then the next thing I knew he’d been lying on the couch doing nothing for two years and he resented me damn near as much as I did him. The house was ripped apart and he wasn’t doing anything at all to fix it, and somehow it was all my fault. I was the lazy one.

I gave up my job to wait on him. I had half a dozen miscarriages with him. I washed his socks and cooked his dinner and took his dog to the vet. I paid his bills and ran his errands and he got laid at least twice a week (I know because his accusations were so upsetting that I kept a calendar), and yet he was so unhappy that he couldn’t work on the house.

The house I moved into was funky but livable. The house I moved out of looked as if it should be condemned.

Well, now it seems The Ex has gained the equilibrium he needs to be able to work on the house. The room I rescued my things from is now plumbed and has electricity and is drywalled and has windows and sills and appliances in it. It looks really nice.

The Ex, for all his flaws when I’m around, is a master fucking carpenter. His custom work is gorgeous and if he lived anywhere other than Iowa (and had the discipline and patience to get the licenses he’d need) he’d be up to his eyeballs in high-end custom work.

I knew this had to happen. One way or another, The Ex had to make the place livable because he could never sell it the way it was, and not even a man could live there like that for long. And yet, for some reason photographic evidence of the house’s transformation makes me angry and sad and resentful.

Continue reading I'm only half as mature as I'd like to be. →

Quitting Smoking

Health

In which I describe the awesome side-effects of suddenly halting one’s intake of various toxins.

I smoked my last cigarette in the parking lot of a condo in Joseph, OR on August 14th.

I had been heading toward that moment for months, really, and I was ready for it. I didn’t even want that final cigarette because it was the middle of the night after a gig, I was tired, and I’d been more or less chain smoking for the entire week.

I was acutely aware of how glamorous it is to be addicted: everyone else was inside, chatting, eating, getting ready for bed, and there I was, standing in a ditch, sucking on a cigarette like a total loser. Oh, yes, I planned my quit well. I’ll never forget that last smoke.

For the next seven days I gave myself permission to eat anything and everything I wanted to. I threw out any pretense about portion control or intelligent food choices or calories. I ate Mexican food, I ate entire bags of cheesy poofs, I ate chocolate truffles. I ate brie, I ate huge salads, I ate dill pickle sunflower seeds. I cleaned my plate every single time I had a meal. And on the eighth day, I stopped and went back to my normal, non-dieting-but-still-fairly-conscious eating ways.

Today is my eleventh day of non-smoking. I’ve had many, many non-smoking milestones that I’m really proud of, but this post isn’t about that. It’s about what’s happening to my body:

I’m exhausted. It’s all I can do to keep my eyes open. I went down for a brief nap yesterday evening – I was planning to do some late night QA testing – and slept, without moving, for ten and a half hours.

I’m fat. I’ve gained eight pounds in less than two weeks, but I can’t figure out how a little extra caloric indulgence turned into this. I think I’m retaining water in new and strange ways, because The Curseâ„¢ ended yesterday and the fifth day of my cycle is usually my skinniest day of the whole month.

I can now go hours without craving anything, but the rest of the time I have a vague, itchy, cellular drive to… something. Nothing in particular, just something.

I’ve finally figured out how to use the nicotine lozenges to their best effect, but I only manage to get six or eight miligrams of nicotine into my body each day. (I’m supposed to have eighteen per day for a month.) My quit plan has me using these things through November, and I intend to do that, but I might just forget to use them before that.

They’re great for emergency craving management, such as when I find myself in a room full of smokers, or I get into a vehicle I used to smoke in, or I’m on break in between sets at a gig, etc. but I have a hard time remembering to use them when I’m engaged in something that doesn’t remind me of smoking.

I haven’t begun any lung cleansing yet. I was expecting a lot of coughing and throat-clearing and sinus-draining, but I’ve experienced almost none of that. When I inhale, it’s free and clear and there’s no gurgling or anything. My lungs sound and feel like I just took a decongestant.

I’m hyper emotional today. I’ve misted up about five times about nothing. Again, I’m not in the emotional part of my cycle, so I’m attributing this experience to quitting as well.

Something clicked in my psyche somewhere; I no longer want to smoke. I mean, I have cravings, but I’ve figured out that there’s no such thing as “just a drag” or “just one cigarette;” I spent far too long making too many neuroreceptors for that to be possible. I either smoke, or I don’t. And I don’t want to suffer the long-term effects of smoking, so I can’t smoke.

The last time I quit, my voice responded with great suppleness within days. This time, I was expecting another rapid recovery but I’m not getting it. I don’t understand that, either.

So I’m fat, moody, unsatisfied, AND my voice sounds just like it did before I quit. In conclusion, quitting smoking appears to be just like PMS.

Only me, my babies. Only me.

On weekend travel, the gig, the job, going back to school, and The Secret Backup Plan.

Life

In which I catch y’all up on how things are going lately.

THE SPOKANE TRIP last weekend was, on the one hand, really fun. I enjoyed getting out of town for a couple of nights. The motel bed was far more comfortable than my own. I enjoyed sight-seeing in Spokane, and eating at Frankie Doodles, and shopping (I bought jeans and a belt at Ross), and I loved the club itself to pieces. The staff was great, and the patrons were fantastic. The club comped my fettuccine alfredo even though it wasn’t from the appetizer menu, and the owner went out of his way to give us the cash he had on hand instead of paying us with just a check.

On the other hand, it was 48 hours of sophomoric ego-emo clusterfuck, the proportions of which can be reached only in the poly relationship known as “being in a band.” Nutshell: we were too loud, the club asked us to turn down – five times – and we (where “we” equals Someone Who Isn’t Me) didn’t want to; we had no set lists and Far Too Much Dead Air; and we ran out of blues material and defaulted to a bunch of old rock covers (which is fine in taverns, but not in Actual Blues Clubs that have Live Blues Bands Five Nights Per Week). I blew out my voice and went deaf in my first set. It wasn’t a raging train wreck – I mean, people danced – but we made enough amateurish mistakes to ensure that we won’t be asked back.

THE QUALITY ASSURANCE gig is going really well! The guys I report to are so swamped that I have to wait awhile for feedback, but they seem pleased with what I’ve done so far. I’m enjoying the work, which consists of making sure a software application does what it’s designed to do, and filing bugs when it doesn’t. I can work pretty much whenever I want to.

I have only the vaguest inkling of what I’m doing and how it fits into the Big Picture, but I’ve had just enough explained to me that I’m comfortable with not knowing what I don’t know. I’m a contractor, not a project manager, so I don’t need to know how it all fits together… it’s just my nature to want to fix inefficient or redundant work flows, maximize the efforts of actual human resources, and — right. Not my job!

I scrounged a card table and a folding chair so I’m no longer sitting on the floor while I’m working. My knees are happy about that.

SCHOOL STARTS IN less than a month. The WWCC web site says that financial aid packets were supposed to go out on August 20th. I haven’t received mine, and the financial aid portal shows no awards for me yet.

I can’t pay for school without aid, and if I don’t go to school I will have to pay back three months worth of unemployment benefits. I’m vaguely worried about this situation, but have decided to delay freaking out until September.

I’m hoping I’ll get the aid I need, and that I’ll get to do QA at night while going to school during the day. If it all works out, next spring I’ll have a pile of networking certifications and great references for QA work! And if I can’t get a fucking job then, I’ll switch over to my secret-until-now backup plan, which goes something like, “Uh, Be A Homeless Crack Whore In Hawaii or Something?” I always thought I’d keep my teeth, but sometimes you just gotta take a hint, am I right?

Awesome week is AWESOME.

Life

In which it’s ALL good news, people. It’s like Xmas in August, I swear.

Today is Day 5 of my smoke-free life.
I quit smoking on the 15th. I’m using 2mg lozenges for NRT and I’m “workin’ my quit” (that’s lingo from becomeanex.org) and I’m doing really well. I wasn’t even a little bit miserable on the patio at the Peony with the smokers last night, and I didn’t care when my brother smoked in the truck.

It’s easy because I had to quit. Permanent lung damage ain’t cool for anyone, but particularly not someone who loves to sing. I was noticing issues with breathing in general, I was having a hard time getting enough breath when singing, and my heart rate was permanently elevated (it had dropped the last time I quit, so I know it was the smoking). It had begun to hurt to smoke. Smoking kept me from wanting to exercise. Smoking had begun to try to kill me in earnest.

I understand, now, why people usually have to quit a few times before it sticks: you have to learn how to do it. You have to make your peace with really and truly wanting to quit. I think that for most people, it’s a complicated mental process involving amassing a host of reasons about Why Smoking Is So Bad That You’re Willing To Suffer Through Quitting, Even Though It Totally Sucks And You Will Probably Always Have Smoking Impulses Until You Die.

Working from home is freakin’ cool and I dig it.
The QA gig is great. I love it. I hope it lasts. I work with two guys in California; communication is done via email and IM and the occasional SMS. They send me projects, I log into the VPN and do them. The projects involve logging into a piece of software and testing to make sure it actually does what the build description says it should.

My little netbook hasn’t melted down yet, thankfully, but my boss said he’d send me a laptop or something here pretty soon since so many tests require access to two machines.

I’ve been working in my room, but it’s too many hours to sit on the floor and my knees are killing me. I really need to find a desk (or a desk-like item) and an office chair so that I can set up a workspace in the basement. I need another monitor, keyboard, and mouse, too. I might even need to purchase a second computer of my own so that I can have one for my personal stuff and one for work.

I need to accomplish all this over the weekend, except I’ll be out of town.

Live Music Are Better.
This weekend, I’ll be joining Coyote Kings for a two-night run at a blues & comedy club in Spokane called Bluz at the Bend. Yay hotel living! (I get to crash with the rhythm section. I hope those bitches don’t snore.)

I might take my netbook along; if the motel has a connection I could work… of course, without a monitor it might be too crazy-making. Hmm. We’ll have to see.

The Awesomest Clothing Bomb Of All Time
On Wednesday, I got this in the mail – two boxes of clothes from Sussette. She sent me a silk tank-and-skirt set from India; a silk Chinese jacket and wide-legged pants; a wrap-around skirt made of sari material; two cotton gauze trapeze tops with pockets; a tie-dyed tank dress; Thai worker’s pants; a black tunic; a tube-top half dress; a floor-length sun dress; a pink sari skirt; a black and red top; a white embroidered tunic; a silk halter top dress; and a cap-sleeved batik dress with ties.

IT WAS SO FREAKING WONDERFUL. The items are all new or very lightly used, they all fit, they’re all items I will totally wear… altogether it’s got to be hundreds of dollars worth of clothes! And all because she needed to clean out her closets!

I’m the luckiest girl ever.

Sweating and moving around and stuff.
My drummer woke up the other morning with a wild hair about fitness. He’s been texting me every single day about going walking or jogging, so today I went for a walk with him. I was going to do the first installment of Couch-to-5k (brisk 5 minute warmup walk, then alternate 60 seconds jogging with 90 seconds walking for 20 minutes, 5 minutes cool down walk after) but we walked around the reservoir instead. Halfway around, my heart rate was really high – probably too high for any real cardio benefit – and my hands swelled up like sausages.

I think these symptoms were a result of the following facts: I have avoided exercise my entire life because I don’t like it; The Curseâ„¢ is due today and I’m bloated; I haven’t been drinking enough water in general; I smoked for 25 years; it was 94 degrees F in the shade; I am 41 years old.

The good news is that I no longer smoke, The Curseâ„¢ will pass, summer will end, and I now believe – from the 200 Situps, 200 Squats, and 100 Pushups programs – that I can build up to an hour’s worth of interval training.

I’ve given up on wanting the results of physical activity to be my looking trim and cute, however. Now I just don’t want my fucking heart to explode.

Update: In conclusion, you can always tell when I’m not reading much because my sentence structure gets weird.

Did I mention that I'm a QA contractor now?

Music, Work

In which there are two good things.

Good thing the first is that yesterday I signed an NDA and a contractor’s agreement and filled out a W9, and Monday I start breaking software for money. Yay! I know no details at all about the project’s expected longevity, but who knows – I might get lucky!

Good thing the second is that today is the Bronze Blues & Brews festival in Joseph, OR. The festival ends at ten, and Coyote Kings (featuring: me!) will be the only band playing in town tonight. We’ve already invited tons of the musicians who are booked at the festival, and it should turn out to be the Best Jam Ever.

Possible really good news, people!

Work

In which there might suddenly and unexpectedly be EMPLOYMENT.

Right now, I’m literally doing nothing but waiting for school to start in five weeks. I’m drawing EB, and my worker retraining application was approved so I’m not even job hunting, and I applied at WWCC and for financial aid months ago so I don’t even have that to keep me occupied.

At school, I’m slated to take a 1-year curriculum, custom-tailored to help me sit for a bunch of basic tech certifications, like A+, CCNA, and the MSCE. I lit upon this path not out of any great desire to collect paper but because the job market is still in the crapper and I’m pretty certain that the last two jobs I didn’t get were because the workforce is overqualified and the other applicants had certifications I lacked (even though very, very few can match my experience). I figured the community college would be a good way to keep myself off the market for another year of economic recovery while simultaneously making myself more hire-able.

Now a good friend of mine has threatened me with employment. He’s just started a new job at a VoIP software company and needs to build his QA team, stat. He told me today that work might start as early as Monday, and in point of fact he’s off in a meeting right this minute finding out if he has a budget for contract help yet.

As a contractor I wouldn’t receive benefits, but the pay is adequate for having to file a stupid Schedule C. Since the dev team is in another state, I’d be working from home. Hours are what are euphemistically called “start-up hours,” meaning well over 40 per week. (I’ll probably have to redesign my computer area to incorporate a chair, since not even I can sit on the floor that much without having my feet go to sleep.) Software testing should not only be interesting and engaging work – halleluia! – but here’s the icing on the cake: no dealing with end-users! None! I’d be testing and reporting and logging all day! No idiotic support calls, no billing, no metrics!

If the work proved to be permanent, I’d have to pay back the UI money I’ve received since June 20th, drop out of school, and close my financial aid application. But you know what? That would be fine with me! In fact, the only way this could suck would be if the work proved to be contract-only and temporary, and ended only after I stopped filing my weekly UI certifications. (I should be able to keep my claim open for months if I have to, as long as I’m not officially offered a permanent position as an employee.)

Anyway, if you know of any employment deities, could you please take a moment and send up a thought for me? I’d sure appreciate it!