All the Thanks, Questions, and Answers - Wow, thanks everyone! Your outpouring of congrats and good-wishes are extremely heart-warming! To date I've gotten: 8 personal emails, 9 livejournal comments, 9 journalscape comments, 7 myspace comments and/or emails, and 1 facebook email. You all are so lovely! :)

Now to all the questions in these emails and comments:

* Really? JPL?! As in Jet Propulsion Laboratories? =The= JPL?
* What in the world do you do mundanely?
* What will you be doing at JPL?
* What about the commute?
* Is it permanent? Benefits and everything?

Yes, JPL as in the folks who just landed Phoenix successfully on Mars. *big shiny grin*

I do a combination of Technical Writing and Courseware Development (which is a fancy way to say "I write training materials") and usually for software companies, military and defense contractors, and other engineers and programmer type peoples. They always need someone organized who can speak and write well, and turn all their crazy technical jargon into legible and effective documents and training materials. Sometimes my jobs have branched into librarian-type secondary skills, doing document management and retrieval. Other times they've verged into the data analyst and the inevitable, "So, we have more stuff than we know how to understand: Can you create reports that make sense?" Organize and Clarify. Cross-Reference, Index, and Maintain. These are often my jobs.

They've hired me to be a Technical Writer for their internal IT support -- kind of like "Dev Support." This team is the help desk and IT for all the wild and crazy programs that JPL developers and programmers use to do all their weird and wild JPL things. So I'll be doing some documentation for whatever it is our team does, and possibly even creating and/or maintaining a new portal for access to internal JPL documentation. It sounds very exciting, and possibly has a pioneer aspect to it. "Here, you figure it out." The interviewing manager was excited to see I had a background in Tech Support once upon a time, since that's what his team does all day: Internal tech support.

The commute. Ah. Well, yes it's ridiculously far away when you consider (a) LA traffic and/or (b) the price of gasoline lately. But it's work, it's immediate, and it's a really stable company. How can I turn that down? And I certainly cannot sneeze at the raise, which makes me really happy. Right now, I'm leaving between 5:30 am and 6 am, to ensure I beat most if not all the traffic. And as "queen of the grid" I know how to quickly zip between different freeway routes and the major side streets all throughout LA. I can get anywhere, and avoid almost any traffic snarl, if I'm careful. I love my Google maps on my Blackberry phone! Live traffic updates are invaluable.

Yes, there are major commuter trains in the area, which I'll be looking into as a possible alternative. Commuter trains would mean I can relax and do things on the way (reading, composing music, embroidery, spinning yarn, etc.) but it would mean I'm locked into taking the train back again before going somewhere after work.

Plus, several of my close friends live nearby (Nathan, Nate, Ellen, and Bruce), and Nathan has already offered that if I need a place to crash or hang out, I'm always welcome. I hope I don't become a burden on their couch, but I do like visiting them and their kitty cats. *grin*

The job is currently as a contractor, with a contractor-to-hire kind of possibility. The guaranteed hire happens at 36 months: If you're a contractor for 3 years, you become a full-time JPL employee afterwards if you continue. And JPL requires it's contractor companies to provide the same holiday and paid-time-off arrangements as their employees. They're limited to a cap (from NASA and the government) to how many max JPL employees they have, which is why they supplement their employment through contractors. Right now, this contract is specifically only to the end of the fiscal year-end, which is to say September 30. Then they get their new funding and they can renew contracts.

Nothing in this world is guanteed, actually. And so I'm not the slightest bit worried about my Jun-Jul-Aug-Sep contract range. That works fine for me. I start Monday, so there are no unpaid days between jobs. I get a 9-80 work week, which means I work 9-hours-a-day on Monday through Thursday every week. And I alternate an 8-hour-Friday with every other Friday is off: 9-hour-days for an 80-hour-2-week-span, with alternate Fridays off. I cannot wait to find out which Fridays are my "dark Fridays" ... I'm hoping they coincide with the Friday I want to head up to the Dyestuffs and Fiber Retreat in June. Here's crossing my fingers!

And to answer my Mom's specific note: Why didn't I come print things out at your work, just a mile away from my interview? Well, geez I didn't know what time you got into the office, and I was doing the "I'm a grown-up and I know how to find a Kinko's with all the interwebs-in-my-phone" thing. That's simple enough, right? *grin*

And for everyone who asked So when can we get together for lunch? -- Very soon, my dears. Very soon. I'm making a list of everyone in the area, from Mom [of course you're first on the list] to all the Caidans in the area. I'm sure it'll be a few days at least until I know when my lunches will be, but I'll keep you locals in the loop.

Today So Far
* 5:55 - Enjoying cool morning weather for breakfast
* 8:50 - The joys of new hire paperwork. At least I have my data in advance :)
* 10:29 - I officially work for a new contractor, and have the coffee mug to prove it

So, I went in to meet my recruiter and sign all the HR paperwork with them. I left a tiny bit later than on my interview morning, and can tell that 20-30 minutes later on the road also adds 20-30 more minutes in the "sit in traffic" portion of the commute. The transition from 605 N to 210 W has a light for the *ENTIRE* freeway merge, and even though it's two lanes and two cars per lane per green light, on Tuesday I got all the way onto the overpass before the traffic slowed down. I arrived 30 minutes later this morning, and sat in about a 1-2 mile line for the overpass and the merge lights. Warning taken.

Once I got to town (90 minutes early), I found a local ATM for my bank, deposited a check, then went back to Pasadena and found a Denny's for some oatmeal, fresh fruit, and coffee, while waiting an hour to head over to their offices. Smack my forehead, I forgot my birth certificate at home, but I had everything else I needed for HR. My recruiter doesn't seem to be super computer saavy, and didn't know what I meant by "I have a portable hard-drive with me, so I can print that page for you." He looked quizzically at me and said, "Do you mean it's on your laptop?" and I had to explain that my "portable hard drive" was just a little USB device that plugs in like a thumb drive or having a file on a disk. *sigh* How do non-technical recruiters find people like me for my jobs, without understanding us? *double le sigh*

After all the paperwork, the swag (the coffee mug and pens and pads of paper), I was back on the road, finding out what late morning 110 S traffic was like, back to LAX. (Icky, as you would expect.) Now I have just today and tomorrow left at this job, so I've got lots of clean-up and polish to do on the last training materials, plus a desk to pack up and take home with me.

Whee!

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Today's Blessing That I'm Thankful For: Adam and Jonathan, for belief in me and hiring me