Good news on the home front

Well, my long period of sustained unemployment is ending at long last: I have been hired by one of the local supermarket chains. I will literally be the guy doing the clean-up on Aisle Three, but that's fine: this particular company has made the Fortune 500 List of Best Companies To Work For several years in a row, even cracking the Top Ten. I won't be making much, and I'll be starting off on the bottom again, but it will be with a good company, a growing company, a local company at that. I could have made more money working at a call center, but quite frankly, I'd rather chew my own arm off than work at a call center. The "local" thing is important to me, as well; I'm glad I never got hired by Wal-Mart. And I think I can reliably say that if they ever figure out how to outsource grocery store jobs to India, well, we might as well shut the whole thing down anyway. Less money plus time to write plus job security plus a schedule that doesn't require us to resort to daycare four days a week seems to me, just now, a pretty decent formula.

I don't know how my blogging schedule will be affected by working again. Hopefully, not by much, although my postings will no doubt start appearing later in the day, and I may drop back to a five-day posting regimen. But I'll have more peace-of-mind, so my postings won't be so caustic and bitter. (Except for when I'm responding to Nefarious Neddie. He gets all the causticity and bitterness I can muster.)

One last item on this whole topic: the job offer really couldn't come at a better time, because I happened to exhaust my unemployment benefits this week. (No, I feel no shame in drawing unemployment. I've been a worker, and will be again, and I've paid my taxes for them.) But, since the new job doesn't start for another nine days (the earliest available orientation session I could attend, what with the wife's work schedule) and since I won't start drawing pay until nine days after that, well, I'm in a momentary tight spot. So, if any of you wonderful readers out there have ever felt inclined to drop a shekel or a gold sovereign or a few Galactic Credits or whatever the standard currency of Gondor happens to be in the tip jar at left, now would be a most welcome time to do it. No, tipping a certain amount won't get you the PBS mug with the coffee stains scrubbed out before shipping, but it will help us buy food and pay for the bandwidth for a couple of weeks. (Yes, Blogger is free, but my image hosting and dial-up connection aren't.)

Thank you all!