If parking next to your car for five minutes with my windows closed makes the inside of my car reek of cigarette fumes, it’s a good indication that you smoke too much.

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(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.

OK we have the loudest doorbell in the world. As in, “full-on surround-sound chiming song that reverberates throughout the house and makes the windows rattle” loud. (By the way, why is it that every doorbell always rings the same chime? Who came up with that and decided “THIS is the tune that will forever announce that someone has arrived?”)

Little Button is napping in our bedroom today, which is right off the entryway and the FedEx man just showed up. I was unsuccessful in my attempt to beat Mr. FedEx to the door, so he rang the doorbell.

DIIIING DONNNNG DIIIING DONNNNG! DONNNNG DIIIING DONNNNG DIIIING!

And then I opened the door and the security system (which is located in our bedroom) sounded: BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP!

Somehow, Button slept through it - even with the door open. She’s still asleep.

Perhaps I should let her nap on my bed more often.