More Maybe Good News - I got a phone call when I was out driving this afternoon, so I missed hearing the phone ring. But a cold-resume got a call-back today. There's an aerospace company that wants to talk to me about my resume on Monday. So I'm on some optimistic pins-and-needles today and through the weekend. I don't want to get my hopes up too much, but I was *really* pleased when I listened to my voicemail.

My day was fairly uneventful, outside the job possible call-back. Work was work, and although I got ahead on one project, not as far as I would have liked. The one thing I'm noticing is that I'm on that cusp where I'm possibly too experienced to be just joe-anybody on the team anymore. I'm really about to be in that "time to give her a team and make her in charge of some of the decisions" kind of place. The training developer and I have hours of document update conversations on IM (instant-messaging) and often we want to be the ones who say "hey! this is the way it will be done!" but we're not the head of the department. Fortunately, the head of the dept *likes* our ideas and is very *thankful* for our work and expertise. But setting publishing standards and policies is something I'd be comfortable doing.

I never thought I'd go from that little academic publishing house (thanks Dayle!) to a software company in tech support (thanks Kristin!) to a bigger software company in training development... to delivering training on a Navy base, to data analysis at a Marine Corps base, back to training development at a software company, back to analysis at another Navy base, and on to contracting in tech writing for another software company. Because now, I'm poised to get call backs from DoD security-clearance-required aerospace companies, interested in talking to me about my publishing, training, and tech writing skills. Wow.

I do miss my degree in Linguistics, some days. But with my personal studies in languages, I still keep some of that love of mine alive. I wonder often, how many people really get to use their college degree specific knowledge, and how many people end up where they are based on the jobs they've held along the way. Clearly my jobs have been taking me on my current path.

And that's not a bad thing. I'm living close to where jobs like there are located. My little car goes zoom-zoom and I'm now familar with all the interesting alternate routes and side-streets. Google maps on my Blackberry with "Show Traffic" is nearly a magic wand that can shave 30-60 minutes off my travel some days. And being well-paid means I have more freedom in my hobbies and off-time. As much as I would love a career in music and recording, there's something to be said about working at the office, and leaving my work there when I leave to go have fun in life.

Speaking of leaving the office, I headed up to my Shire for the monthly business meeting in the evening. I was briefly caught behind completely stopped traffic in Malibu for a while (maybe 30 minutes?) after which it only broke up when two ambulances raced away from the scene. My only problem with the delay was an urgent need to find a restroom, but otherwise, a fairly uneventful wait in traffic. With the winter darkness setting in early, I couldn't really enjoy the sunset over the water nor see any of the devastation of the Malibu fires, and it's been raining lately so I couldn't smell any evidence of the fires either.

In fact, it's been raining all evening, and it's supposed to rain MUCH more tomorrow. I'm finally feeling less deprived of moisture from the sky.

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And for today's photo report: I didn't take these pictures, but I took copies of Raz's photos from our summer "beaching" trip, and loaded them on our household website:
http://goodshipwhitestar.com/gallery/v/2007/Beaching/... you can see me cooking breakfast at the campsite. Marcos and I had to leave early, to get back to LA to witness a friend of ours going through baptism at his church, so we missed out on the sushi lunch and the gigantic chess board. But the whole "camping in Morro Bay" was much nicer than I had been expecting.

And of course, there's a new candle-lighting photo posted for Shoshana.


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Today's Blessing That I'm Thankful For: Patrick and Mark: I'm really thankful we've had so many nice lunches together, and here's to my fingers-crossed about the job call-back