Hi folks, I’m back. Did you miss me?

So it’s been almost a month since I last updated my LiveJournal. What has gone on since then? Well, here’s the short version:

• Still unemployed, still looking
• Still trying to sell the house
• Getting ready for Midwest Furfest
• Working through a mild bout of depression

Then we have the long version:
Yep, I’m still shiftless and unemployed. I’m feeling a lot better about things, though, after I had a chance to talk to a couple my cow-orkers last month. Basically, sometime about a year and a half ago, my boss decided that he wanted a particular kind of engineer – someone who would do his bidding uncritically, who would ask how high when he said “Jump”. Well guess what, that ain’t me. If I’m part of a project, I’m going to look at it critically, see what my part is in it, and see what the value of my contribution will be. I find doing work for the sake of checking a pointless box off on a piece of paper and no other reason to be a waste of my time and I have no problem saying so. So anyway, after they made that decision, I was pretty much hung out to dry, and when the time came for layoffs, well, there I was.

In the end, though, I don’t feel so bad. I’m headed for a better-paying job somewhere, and it’ll be somewhere closer to Chicago for certain. There’s going to be some interesting times between here and there, but things are definitely going to be better when we get there.

As for the house: well, we had one serious buyer. Unfortunately, he tried to lowball me and after several days of negotiations we were still $7,000 apart. He broke it off then (there’s a lot more to the story, but I don’t need to go into it here). So now we’re back to square one with no immediate prospects. This isn’t the end of the world, though; we can cover the mortgage and all of our other bills for the foreseeable future if we’re careful in our budgeting. We’d certainly be saving some money if we moved to an apartment, but in the meantime we can hold out. Given that nobody wants to move around Thanksgiving or Christmas, I don’t really expect anything to come up between now and the end of the year, but I wouldn’t mind being pleasantly surprised if an offer materialized.

Then there’s Midwest Furfest. In a lot of ways, preparing for MFF has become my job for the last month or so and I’m not unhappy with that. It’s kept me busy and not fretting about sitting at home useless or anything. We’ve got a terrific con lined up, and I’m very happy with the goodies I’ve gotten for sponsors. Takaza has done a fabulous job with the con book and pocket program – I think people are really going to like the finished products.

We leave for Chicago at 4 PM on Tuesday, the 21st. Yes, that’s just six days from today. Eek! We’ll crash for the night in Morehead, Kentucky, which is a good halfway point for us. Wednesday afternoon, we’ll get in to the hotel and relax for a bit, then that night we’re hosting a bag-stuffing party in our hotel room. Then it’s Thursday and the con preparations will start full-bore. I’m really looking forward to this, though. The new hotel is pretty spiffy, and the room layout (and especially the location for Registration) is great. And I’m especially looking forward to spending some time with friends the week after MFF, when we’ll be relaxing in and around Chicago. Hmm, I wonder if we can work in a visit to Clearwater…

And finally, that depression. I don’t get depressed easily – it’s just not something that’s in my makeup, I guess. The combination of being stuck at home without a job and feeling it was All My Fault really got me down. As a consequence, I’ve felt pretty unmotivated in the last month or so to write in my LiveJournal because I just didn’t feel I had anything to say that people would be interested in. Only in the last few days have I thought, “Gee, I should mention that in my LJ” a couple of times, which I took as a sign to get off my butt and get things going again. That, in combination with the aforementioned talks with my former cow-orkers have helped me relocate my motivation, and I should be posting here again semi-regularly.

It’s good to be back!