John's Life Update

[johnpalmer]

Well, as anyone who follows this journal knows, I got laid off just over two weeks ago. This isn't a cause for panic, at least not yet. I had a tax refund of nearly $5,000, and I have a decent severence package (6 weeks), and Washington has good unemployment benefits, and Worldcom doesn't try to pretend that I'm still working for them while receiving severence. (Some companies would insist that I can't file for unemployment for 6 weeks, through my severence period. That's legal in Ohio, or at least it was. I don't know if that's the case in Washington or not.)

The first few days, I spent with Pat, at what I think of as my "home away from home". I got to speak to some contacts who might be able to help me find work, plus, I got to unwind from the springing of the uncertainty. It was a good thing to visit her then.

The next two weeks have been filled mostly with studying (trying to use some CBTs before the subscription that Worldcom gave me runs out, and trying to update my skills, which have stagnated because my job made no technical demands on me), job hunting, and trying to do planning for things.

I did some food experimenting. As I'd suspected, you can make a thick lentil paste that's a good basis for curried vegetables. (I still prefer coconut milk, but lentils have decent protein, lots of fiber, and are dirt cheap.)

My first attempt to make coconut milk was, well, less than perfect. I'm not sure what it's supposed to look like, but I think I either didn't cook enough coconut, didn't cook it long enough, didn't squeeze it from the cheesecloth tightly enough, or something.

I did find that fresh coconut isn't too bad, though... but it's strange. It's never quite *satisfying*. It's like, "this is only a shadow coconut; if you ate a piece of *real* coconut, then you'd be satisfied". Don't ask me to explain this because I can't....

After I made the coconut milk with the parts I didn't nibble, Joy of Cooking suggested toasting the 'milked' coconut in a pan with a few teaspoons of sugar... I'm glad I did. The result is so good that it *has* to be terrible for one's health. (Of course, most of the fat should be gone... that's what goes into the coconut milk.)

My first try at hummus (dried chickpeas are *also* dirt cheap) was... okay, terrible. Edible, but different from every type of hummus that I remember, and completely without any 'good' flavor. It'd be perfect for, e.g., emergency rations. You wouldn't eat it because you wanted to, but if you needed fuel for the machine, you'd have no problem eating it.

I didn't have any sesame seeds, or tahini, and I don't think my method of adding garlic was a good one (I chopped some up, cooked it in olive oil, and added it to the mixture... I don't think I cooked it all the way, either, because there was some sharpness to it.) Still... I know that I can eat *something* with decent nutritional value in a financial pinch.

That's all good, because I just found out that, if I want to get medical coverage continuation, it'll be $815 a month.

Chris is working, and that's good, but she's only getting about 15 hours scheduled a week. That'll pay for nearly half of the medical coverage. This means that the stakes are a bit higher than I'd realized, and I guess I'm kind of glad I didn't learn this before getting my car worked on. (Preventative maintenance, plus a few repairs. It was $750. I could have skimped by not getting the air conditioning repaired, but I need to drive to interviews in a suit... and you can't show up to an interview soaked in sweat. At least, you can't do that and expect to walk out with a job offer. You might walk out with some coupons for discounts on deoderant, but that's not really the goal in a job interview. In any case, everything that got done *needed* to get done, and I might have tried to gamble if I knew how bad medical continuation was.)

(Now I know why they call the continuation 'COBRA', though... the bill strikes like a snake, when you least expect it.)

In depressing news, I think the reality of my pending divorce finally hit home. Chris was talking about "us" moving back to Ohio, and I said that if she wanted to, we should look into it, but that I'd only go back if there was something important pulling me back (i.e.: I wouldn't go back to HUNT for a job; I'd go back because I *had* one). I think that exchange kind of made it real... in a way, it did so for both of us. We talked about things like what to do with the cats (Skitty only comes to me; she'll only go to select other people, and Chibi is the poor frazzled stray I used to put inside my coat to warm him up... so we decided I'll keep them both, because it's easy to get other cats, and it'd be hard to take them across the country. Then we started thinking about other things (splitting the music collection, for example, and finances, and so forth). I realized that suddenly I could end up with two cats I'd be responsible for, without Chris to cover for me when I wanted to go down to Oregon, and I wondered what that would mean about visits to Pat, and such.

But in hopeful-ish news, a company wants to talk to me about a job. They do statistical software and data mining/analysis, etc., and while that's far away from network engineering, it's awfully close to mathematics (oh, right... it *IS* mathematics :-) ).

Comments

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

I know you're dealing with a lot of stuff, here, but you sound peaceful, and I hope that's how you're feeling. (And peanut butter is a decent substitute for tahini in hummus.)

*hugs*