Over there ===> it says "A day late", but since that's from last weekend, it's more like "a week late". Actually, that TJS post is rather to the point of my current schedule as it's about almost not getting up a "link dump" for the week for the first time since installing that feature there in November. Why? DUH! If I can't keep up with my Twitter reading, I don't see the "good links", and if I don't see (and read) the good posts/articles, I don't have them in my "ArticleLinks.txt" file, and if I don't have stuff in that file at the end of the week ... well, I don't have anything to post, do I? When I hit Thursday last week I had a paltry four links in the file. However, I spent most of Friday trying to get caught up on Twitter (I currently have a minimum of 12 hours worth of old Twitter "captures" on my desktop waiting for me), and was able to fill out that enough to get up the post "a day late" on Saturday.This week was sort of chaotic ... I had 3 networking events scheduled (the first fizzled out on Tuesday), and was really dreading having to drag myself off to the Census following the evening events. Fortunately, one of the guys on our team from the 1st shift had some things he needed to take care of during the day on Thursday and Friday, and asked if I could swap shifts with him. This ended up letting me go home after the evening networking things, which was also good as The Wife was on a business trip, and this allowed me to be home overnight with The Girls, who would have otherwise been left to their own devices for getting themselves dinner, to bed, up, breakfast, and to school for three days in a row.
I know you're sick of hearing my bitching about this, but it's what fills up my every waking hour ... but the situation of working this Census gig is like "out of the frying pan and into the fire". I had a pretty obsessive schedule of working on my job search 12-18 hours a day before doing the Census, coming out of, of course, a 24-hour day. Now my job search has to fit into a 14-hour day, and I can't survive on 2 hours of sleep (let alone a negative four) per day, so I'm constantly trying to figure out ways of trimming time and activities down.
The "saving Twitter" to my desktop is one of these, where I'll take the 10-15 minutes of "capture" the Tweets I can (which is only 800 back from any particular point, and I lose a lot with not being able to get online at work), putting off "until later" trying to find the time to spend the half-hour to an hour it takes to minimally scan through each of those, pulling out good job postings and interesting articles. I also have to save actually applying to jobs for the weekend (usually I do that on Friday, but since I was on 1st shift yesterday, I didn't have that luxury).
I also have pretty much narrowed down my book reviewing time to when I'm up at Dojo with The Girls ... which is not quite enough to keep me current, but is practically all the time I have. I'm worried about today, as the last time I started up my netbook it was telling me about a memory problem (no doubt caused by the latest update to XP!) and I'm hoping it's not going to be an issue today. I would be very, very, very unhappy to not be able to use that.
The really bitterly twisted ironic part of all this is that I find myself reflecting on working at the Census and thinking "Man, I really need to find a REAL JOB!", like this had never occurred to me previously. What the fuck have I been doing for the past year? Watching daytime TV and popping bon-bons? I don't think so! But suddenly working at this totally "not me" job for less than half of what I would generally consider for a pay scale has me wanting to spend all my time again trying to find something different. Needless to say, when I catch myself thinking this, it feels like a sick, sadistic trap. I'm only there because my 12-18 hours a day, seven days a week for a year didn't land me a "real job", and it's just rubbing my face into that failure. Every. Fucking. Day.
Anyway, wanted to get in an update. Have an hour and 3/4 to get resumes out this morning before we have to head to Dojo. Please click through to The Job Stalker so I might get some of those half pennies from the local market (I suppose my over-all traffic is important too, at least to the Tribune).