Filed Away

I am trapped in my basement office with my HEPA air filter running full blast. Why? <a href=”http://www.wmur.com/video/23740979/”>I blame Canada</a>.

Seriously, we could smell it when we woke up, but it wasn’t until we went outside and saw the haze and the brown horizon that it hit home. A few minutes after that and my eyes were swelling, my chest was filling up and i had to use a rescue inhaler for the first time in years (I happen to be pretty badly allergic to most trees- usually wood smoke doesn’t bother me, but this is the worst part of the season for me and I think it was the proverbial straw).

Under the fold is an excerpt from the novel Methuselah’s Daughter: Warrior. Calling it an ‘excerpt’ is a little pretentious because while we have the plot lines and characters all figured out the actual writing action has been minimal to say the least. Dean and I are both pretty pumped about this sequel, but neither of us are really in a position to spend lots of time writing it, so instead we have some bits and pieces and some good outlines and ideas. So to hell with it. Whenever there’s something we like, it’s going up here.

For those few of you who were fans of the original blog and may have even read the first novel (bless you), the story has been moved more than a thousand years into the future and our girl is a Gunnery Sergeant in His Majesty’s Imperial Marine Corps, an organization she has belonged to for a very, very long time…

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This is my last weekend of unemployment- the new job begins Monday, February 1st.

What does that mean? It means No cell phone, no Blackberry, no worries about being yanked out of bed at 3:00 AM because a customer  did something “that shouldn’t have affected anything!”

And believe me when I say that is the ONLY thing I’ll miss about being unemployed- quiet weekends. And I’ll deal with it. I did before and  I will again. At least at this job all the customers are local- no conference calls with Hong Kong, India, Singapore or Australia… not yet, anyhow .

There is an offer letter on the way and this 9 Month, 3 week long adventure in unemployment will be coming to a close. It’s an interesting company and a good group of people so I’m pretty psyched up about it. Of course I’m also apprehensive as hell- that’s just how I always am with big changes like this. It’ll pass by the end of the first day at the new job, and the relief I feel at just knowing I’ll soon be earning my pay instead of collecting unemployment far, far outweighs anything else.

Strangely enough it wasn’t like that when I was laid off. Instead there was a 5 second bout of “You said what?” followed by a sudden sensation of relief, mostly because I had seen it coming and was glad to get it over with. It wasn’t until October ended and I realized I’d probably be out of work at least the remainder of the year that I started stressing out over it in a big way. Until then I was a guy between jobs. After October I felt unemployed… but not anymore.

For no particular reason I found myself thinking about speeches delivered by fictional presidents in movies and I realized this was hands-down one of my favorites:

I address you tonight, not as the president of the United States, or as the leader of a country, but as a citizen of humanity.

We are faced with the very gravest of challenges. The Bible calls this day Armageddon, the end of all things. And yet, for the first time, in the history of the planet, a species has the technology to prevent its own extinction. All of you praying with us need to know that everything that can be done to prevent this disaster is being called in to service. The human thirst for excellence, knowledge, every step up the ladder of science, every adventurous reach into space, all of our combined modern technologies and imaginations, even the wars that we’ve fought have provided us with the tools to wage this terrible battle.

Through all the chaos that is our history, through all of the wrongs and the discord, through all of the pain and suffering, through all of our times, there is one thing that has nourished our souls and elevated our species above its origin. And that is our courage. The dreams of an entire planet are focused tonight on those fourteen brave souls traveling into the heavens. And may we all, citizens the world over, see these events through. God speed and good luck to you.

Video

It is from the movie Armageddon, an action movie of moderate entertainment value so long as one does not insist the science in it make any sense, but the thing I always remember about it is this speech. I’m sure there are others- I always thought the speech in Independence Day was a little forced, and the various speeches in Deep Impact were too numerous for one to really stand out. I also note my choices seem to focus on End of The World movies… probably just my frame of mind these days .

Anyone have other great fictional speeches that come to mind?

Time to make some decisions, I guess.  I haven’t been able to update the MD blog in a very long time and it bothers me to have it sitting out there in limbo. Renewal comes up in March and it may be time to let it go. Dean and I are working on Book 2, but quite frankly there’s nothing there appropriate for the blog given the plot line and time frame within which it takes place. That means little to nothing in the way of cast-off ideas suitable for posting, which is what most of the blog was when it reappeared at 3500years.com.

It should be an easy choice to make, but it’s not. Methuselah’s Daughter truly was one of, if not THE, first fiction blog on the internet when it appeared in 2002 and on that score alone I’d hate to see it go. The BlogSpot site will stay up of course, but only until Google decides to send it to the bit bucket.

So, what’s been going on?

I had an excellent interview up at Dartmouth Hitchcock in Lebanon, NH. The position didn’t pan out, but they were a great group of people and at least I was able to sit down and talk shop for a while. A few other nibbles have been popping up, but nothing that’s led to a face-to-face interview. I refuse to get depressed about it, though- there’s just no point.

Now, speaking of things to get depressed about, the Chapter 7 hearing is on November 5^th. I was hoping to avoid this- if a job had been forthcoming it could have made it unnecessary, but at this point it’s unavoidable. I really didn’t expect to be out of work this long, figuring on three or four months, tops. Instead it’s heading into seven months and that’s a little tough to swallow.

On a happier note the new book is proceeding apace. It’s still pretty disorganized, mostly because Dean and I have been just brainstorming and spitting out short pieces we intend to weave together later. We’ve also reversed roles to some degree in that last time he was the organizer and driver and this time it falls to me. Personally I like that, but his life situation is so chaotic it makes it hard to get the kind of dynamic in place that we rely on to make things move forward. Hopefully he’ll be back online in a week and we can make some more headway.

More regular postings should resume (yeah, where have we heard that before?), mostly because I either use this blog or get rid of it.

I was going to write something about 9/11/2001, but I still find it hard to put into words what I felt and experienced that day because regardless of what I did feel or experience it can never be more than a pale shadow of what was experienced by the people who were there; those who survived, and the nearly 3000 who did not. Via Instapundit I found the video linked below. It is not for the faint of heart.

“Never Forget” Means Never Forgetting

Or not. Nonetheless I am back at this again and will probably be updating more often now that I finally have something to say other than ‘Unemployment Sucks!”

Unemployment Sucks. I never said i wouldn’t say that, just that it wasn’t all I had to say.

One of the benefits of all this free time is that Dean Esmay and I have finally started work on a sequel to Methuselah’s Daughter! It’s surprising to me how easily this is flowing out, particularly since we have essentially tossed aside certain things we Vowed We Would Never Do simply because the story we’ve developed is so compelling. Take my word for it:).

If you would like to be on our exclusive reader list (only requirement is feedback, positive, negative, creative, political, anything) you can email me at xias-AT-jaeddy-DOT- com.

As to employment, the summer was a bust, but having seen the way work dropped off during the summer at my previous job I was not at all surprised. Once summer was done the contacts and interviews started coming in and things are looking if not hopeful, at least better. The work is out there, I just need to go ferret it out. I had a three-and-one-half hour interview just yesterday and it seemed to go quite well, but they openly admitted they had many applicants. Not being a developer or scripting guru I can see where I might get edged out, but I remain optimistic- despair is for pussies.

On a bleaker note I’ve filed Chapter 7 Bankruptcy. I hate to do it, but there just isn’t any more money and I can either pay the consumer debt or pay the mortgage, not both. In the end I vote for keeping a roof over my and my family’s heads. Things plod onward. I’ll be updating more frequently now.

Well, it certainly has been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve been unemployed two months at this point and the initial rush of applications, resume re-makes and whatnot are complete and we are heading into the long slog known as summer, where job opportunities, already semi-scarce here in New Hampshire, really dry up. That’s not to say there’s nothing, but there’s certainly no low-hanging fruit.

I finally got my butt in gear on updating my Microsoft Certifications- no excuses there, just a reluctance to spend hours in my basement office reading prep books and building VM’s. Now I look at it as my job, since the actual job search takes me all of an hour a day unless I have interviews. I check Monster, JobsinNH, Career Builder and one or two other sites, e-mail off to anything that looks tempting and I’m done- so it’s back to the books.

Another possibility is some programming classes- that’s an admitted weak spot in the resume seeing as I have always been primarily a hardware and OS guy. I harbor no illusions about becoming a programmer, but a solid grounding in the basics seems like a damned good idea. That and working on my scripting- I was getting good at it when I was let go and simply haven’t practiced since then and that’s absolutely vital, so it’s VB and PowerShell scripting for me.

Last thing on the agenda is to write more. I can’t spend all my time with my nose buried in textbooks and the blogs have been fallow since THAT DAY. I see no reason not to indulge in more scribbling so both this site and Methuselah’s Daughter should see more action. Regarding Methuselah’s Daughter, I’m torn. Dean has expressed interest in starting book 2 and we’ve even exchanged some pretty good ideas on what form it should take and where it should lead, but neither of us has really written anything new of note. I find myself tempted to just stick to the blog and leave it at that, at least for the next few months. We’ll see.