Wordpress is refusing to upload pictures for me today.  Irksome, as I had lots that I was planning on sharing.

(Tap tap tap) Uh… hello? (insert microphone screech here) Anybody out there? It’s um… me.

Have I successfully chased away the 4 readers I spent years accumulating? Probably. You know that phrase “Silence is Golden”? I think in blog-land it’s more like “Silence is Deadly.”

I needed the break though. It’s been nice to be relatively disconnected from the computer for a month.

Hopefully I’ll get the chance to catch up a bit now but my inlaws have been staying with us since the middle of the month and are here until next Monday and they don’t know about this blog. So I don’t do lot of blogging while they’re around to avoid raising suspicions.

So where did I leave off? Oh yeah. I got laid off.

I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. But I can say that the timing took me by surprise. My little company had not had a profitable month in almost a year. The boss’ enthusiasm had dwindled due to outside stresses in his life (among other things, having 3 close family members diagnosed and/or die of cancer within a few months will do that).

I knew the company was headed to the grave. I just didn’t know it was that quickly. I was the first to go because I’m expensive, or so they told me. Strictly a money thing. My confidence and sense of self worth is fragile enough that I’ve made the conscious decision to believe that.

I miss it. I did a lot of growing in that company and I will always be appreciative of the opportunities they gave me to expand my skills, take on projects, be creative and really establish my strengths. I made strong relationships there and learned to work with people and not just for them.

I have a lot of nostalgia about my working days with that little company. But truthfully, the days that bring nostalgia had faded and gone long before I was forced to turn in my keys…

I’ve just realized that I never actually turned in my keys. I guess they haven’t noticed either.

…long before I surrendered my company credit card. Business had been slow and uneventful for the last year or so. You may remember me mentioning my boredom at work a few times. It was almost agonizing. Had I not been so *ahem* skilled *ahem* at passing time on the computer, I surely would have dropped dead of mental starvation long ago.

The job I loved, that energized me and allowed me an environment in which I flourished, was lost long ago. And even though I realized it, I stayed there, clinging to the hope that any day now, things were going to turn around and we would be ramping the company up again. I stayed there, despite the offer to come work for another company. A company that is growing and bursting with energy and … things to be done.

Fortunately, this offer was still dangling at the time I was laid off, so I immediately jumped on it. Because I hate job hunting. Hate it. Will do a lot to avoid the necessity. Such as stay on board a sinking company, for example.

More on that later.  Inlaws are back, gotta go.

I know I haven’t been around much lately, and I’m sorry.  I haven’t been responding to comments and I’ve hardly been leaving comments and I feel like that friend who never returns calls.

I’m just feeling a little…disconnected from the internet world right now.

I hope to be back soon with more scintillating adventures … or at least a new blog template.  Rest assured that things around here are ok.  We’re really enjoying the new house and I’m looking at options as far as employment.

I was going to write something worth reading today because I’m back in the office, where we have that mysterious and highly desirable thing called a functional internet connection.  But my head hurts so bad today that I’m not sure I’m going to make it to the end of the day without my eyes falling out of their sockets.

Sorry.

• I hurt myself from yawning too big.  I think I overstretched the tendon that connects my jaws or something.  I know.  I’m now in competition with Sammy Sosa for lamest injuries.  I wonder if Workers Comp covers that kind of thing.  It was the boredom brought on by my job that forced me to yawn, after all.
• I dreamed that I had an affair.  With J.  No idea who I was actually married to in the dream.  But J’s conscience got the best of him at the last second and he backed out on me.  So I woke up guilty, bummed, grumpy, and horny.  I hate dreams.
• After 4 years, my dog has just discovered that he has a penis.  He has been licking it for 48 hours straight.  It’s driving us crazy, especially since he sleeps in our room and he’s decided that licking himself is more fun than sleeping.
• Don’t buy hair dye that costs less than $10.  Especially if you use white towels and don’t want to see it bleeding onto your towel 4 days after you’ve colored your hair.  Just saying.
• Also, don’t believe the stuff on the box of cheap hair dye that says it comes with highlights and lowlights and multi-faceted color that doesn’t damage your hair.  Bollocks.
• Tomorrow we close on the house we’re selling.
• Tomorrow we’re supposed to close on the house we’re buying.
• Yesterday we found out that the house didn’t appraise for near what we had agreed to pay for it, so now our financing is messed up.
• The appraiser totally discounted the sunroom, which would have made up the difference in the appraisal price.  He refused to count it as part of the square footage of the house (as a previous appraiser had done) because it didn’t have duct work or something.  But since nobody else in the neighborhood has a sunroom, he couldn’t find “comps” so he just didn’t give it any value at all.
• Because, you know, if nobody else has one then it must have been free to install.
• Apparently if you can’t find one just like it then it’s easier just to pretend it doesn’t exist at all than to do some more research and assign a value based on an educated guess.
• Lazy ass.
• So we’ve asked the relocation company to lower the price on the house because it doesn’t make much sense to pay more than a house is actually worth.
• But it’s a relocation company and it will probably take them a week to get back to us because when you have 150 middlemen, things don’t move too quickly.
• And we don’t know what they’re going to say.
• So we don’t know if or when we’ll be closing.
• Annoying, since we’re supposed to move out of our house in 2 days.
• Regardless, we have to disassemble and pack up our computer tonight or tomorrow, so I’ll probably be offline for a few days.
• Bummer dude.