As the Tag Says, "Whatever Doesn't Kill Me..."

 

 

Greetings, visitors and any faithful readers.
Endless apologies for the continued delay in adding fresh content. Your patience will be repaid shortly. (Anyone betting you I'd shut up on the 'net very long, take the longest odds you can get, and retire early on your winnings.)

Work is work. To be more specific, it's five nights in a row/60-hour weeks, vs. my former 3 nights/36-hour weeks. And now at a new higher pay rate. It's amazing how hard you can work when the other choice is literal poverty. The paychecks are commensurately effing awesome. The only drawback is that my enforced unemployment came rather unexpectedly, and with my cash reserves on fumes, so I have a bit more catching up to do, but that's happening at 200% of the former speed it would have otherwise.

Cool things:
I now have direct experience with another dozen medium to large ERs locally.
I have met a lot of great folks, and am constructing a short list of places I'd consider making a full-time employment home.
Several of them started pitching me to sign on FT after seeing me for about two shifts.
While trying to keep my head from swelling about that, it's nice to
a) prove that you still have the chops to do the job, esp. serially in front of strangers, and
b) a little ego-stroking after the crotch-kick of getting shoved out the door at an employer isn't a bad thing.
If this is anything like what it's like to be a pretty girl from age 16-45 or so, I can at least understand some of the attitude that goes with it. Without the PMS complications.

That doesn't mean getting pushed into a pool of career icewater wasn't an effing PITA, but the end result will be that I'll probably make enough money this year to move into a higher tax bracket, and suffer the agony of being able to reach some lifelong financial goals in short order. Poor poor me.

A few other observations:
Keep a career back-up plan: a part-time job, small-potatoes self-employment, or whatever, but have a second gig. Something. Anything. Even if it's barely paying for itself, a small cash flow beats none at all, and your car doesn't run on a tankful of canned food or ammo reserves. Ask me how I know that.
While I likes me my firearms, I've always been a more well-rounded preparer than a gun nut, but if you've never visited the local collateral loan merchant (AKA pawn shop) you should be aware that any of Gaston Glock's tactical Tupperware is readily convertible to $250 cash money in most populated precincts, and that's without things nationwide being dire. So, for instance, three or four of them "extra" that you can part with for a few months equal your monthly readies. Again, ask me how I know.
Then imagine what their barter value might be under more dire circumstances. Esp. if you had a few spare magazines and a couple boxes of ammo apiece.
The same is most definitely not true of just about anything else you might think of.
Again, go visit the local hock shop, and chat them up, to get a no-BS idea of the actual value of things you might wish to convert to cash should the need arise. As someone who would formerly never have ventured into the pseudo Arab bazaar marketplace they represent until necessity forced my hand, you'll learn a few things, not only haggling, but you'll also get an idea of what's hot and what's not (e.g., any functional pistol is cash in the bank, whereas a brand new iPhone or high-end camera is nigh on worthless. Surprise.)

Free internet when money is tight is a gift from heaven (and Starbucks/Mickie D's/the local public library). With a laptop and the time, you can do for $0 what would otherwise be a couple of hundred $$ in cell/wifi bills. And if you haven't done a job search in awhile, the entire world is now online. Walking into an office with a resume these days is tantamount to telling an employer that you can take Morse code at 30 words a minute, or type at 80 words/minute, as if that should mean something to them.
(For those of you to whom Neil Armstrong and 8-track tapes are history as remote from you as the Thirty Years' War, Google "telegraph" and "typewriter". Those of us with underwear older than you are will quietly tolerate your confusion until you bone up on such arcana.)

OTOH, showing up on time (by which I mean early) with a good attitude, being flexible, and showing up, putting your head down, and getting the job done without any drama queenery once you get the job is timeless, in every career field since Thag and Og were making stylish saber-tooth cat skin leisure attire and chiseling wheels out of stone.
I save my sarcasm for here online, by and large. Believe me when I tell you it never wins you points at work, unless you own the joint.

Lest anyone think I'm going all Pollyanna, or selling out from financial necessity, let me assure you I've already collected a few choice bucketfuls of carefully distilled snark, soon to be shared here, and even more so over at Shepherd Of The Gurneys in upcoming installments. And then some. Suffice it to say that as much fun and pleasantness as I've discovered in my expanded work universe, the depths of Stupid out there are unplumbably bottomless, and probably incapable of measurement with existing instrumentation.

As an example I'll be explaining shortly, the level of emergency preparedeness even after the recent Ebola outbreak have proven inarguably that things are now not only far worse here than I predicted 6-8 months ago, they are worse than I could have imagined then or even now without the direct experience of seeing them again and again.

Which is a short tease of explaining that, No, Ebola Hasn't Gone Away, And It's Not Going To. Better effing believe there'll be more to come on that front in short order, just for one example. In fact, 2014 wasn't the problem, or even the wake-up call, it was more likely the last whistle stop before the missing bridge ahead. Stew on that, boys and girls.

So whatever you were doing to prepare for the vagaries of life before my hiatus, keep on knocking it out. Life is not going to get more predictable or happy for anyone any time soon, by any reasonable examination of the facts. Plan accordingly, and I'll be throwing out more details in coming days.

Promise.