We had decided last night that we would drive out to dad’s house near Rochester this evening rather than tomorrow because there is a large snow storm expected to hit Westchester County tomorrow morning or possibly late tonight and it would make travel nearly impossible. It is supposed to be a pretty big one.
This morning I was mostly dealing with job hunting stuff. Things are slowly down for the holidays which is very frustrating. We will not likely have anything much in the way of news about anything until next week.
We spent a bit of the day packing. Dominica did that most of the day. We got the Acadia packed and got several boxes loaded up in it too as well as the “moon chair” – the mustard coloured leather chair and its ottoman that we got for our wedding. That chair does not fit in our current house and it has been completely in our way ever since we moved in. We are taking as much as we can fit into the Acadia up to dad’s house to put into storage there as we prepare for leaving the house in Peekskill. We don’t have any definite plans so we are really in a bit of a pickle. We know that we have renters moving in for February 1st but we have no idea where we will go once we don’t have the house anymore.
So our lives are really up in the air. As if the job situation was not stressful enough, we know that we are homeless in about ten weeks. And it is winter so moving our stuff around is a huge pain. We are looking at options like New York City, Saint Louis, Seattle, Menlo Park and Dublin right now. Any of them are real options and there are plenty of possibilities that don’t include any of them. So we really have to be prepared for anything. If we don’t have all of our stuff in some long term, strategic storage we are going to be in terrible shape.
Getting this first load out of the house makes just being in the house that much easier, though. There are fewer boxes in our way and that chair made a huge difference. The biggest issue now is that we have no idea when we will manage to take another load. We want to use the time available to us wisely but there is not that much time left before we have to move. Christmas in Texas makes our logistics that much harder.
We are thinking about maybe doing a cross country drive with the kids. Take them to a bunch of states that we have never been to. It would be fun and we have the time to do it. We could do it “en route”, so to speak, to Texas for Christmas. So that is something that we are kicking around. It would use up most of the available time that we have between now and Christmas, though. And it would not necessarily be cheap, which is something we are really trying to be these days.
It was around six when we left the house. The drive was fine. No snow at all. We made good time and hit no traffic. Very easy drive. We grabbed some food at the Dunkin Donuts at the bottom of the Bear Mountain Bridge on the circle just as you leave Peekskill. That is our usual stop for fueling up and grabbing food.
We only had to make one stop on the way up to dad’s. For a huge change of pace, it was Liesl who needed a bathroom stop. That never happens. So we stopped at the Wegmans in Johnson City. The girls thought that it was interesting that I had worked in that store and installed their servers. That was almost a decade ago! Hard to believe that that was 2005.
It was one in the morning when we got in to dad’s house. The girls managed to get some sleep on the drive and were ready to run around the house and play for a while before going to bed. They have so much energy.
So the latest job news from today is that things continue to move, just at a snail’s pace. I finally was told today, after two weeks of silence, that some lawyers are getting involved at some point and will be talking to my old job to see if they can work something out. That is encouraging that they are taking that step but very depressing because I was led to believe that that step had happened last Friday and yesterday and that everything was supposed to have been wrapped up yesterday. That it took major cajoling today to find out that everything that I had been told was made up and that things were not moving forward as I have been told did not make me happy. Because my old job is off for the holiday basically starting today that means that no one is even making an attempt at dealing with this until December. That’s ridiculous.
So at this point I have no choice whatsoever but to move forward, full steam, with alternative options. The time frame on this is just not realistic and at the rate at which I am getting news it will be months before anyone even gets around to telling me if things are going well or poorly let alone informing me if or when I am able to start working. My last two weeks have been nothing but sitting around waiting for a call back that I had expected in an hour or two. As things had been left with HR it sounded like there was very little chance of the job working out. So I am not working with very much information. The information exchange alone is happening horribly and not making me feel very confident in the process at all.
So that is where we are at this point. Things have not stopped but our confidence level is at zero. We aren’t burning bridges but we are forced to believe that the existing job process is, and has been, over and that we have to figure out something completely new. Very depressing as this process has been going, in some form or another, for more than an entire season. It’s been since mid-August that this was at least being kicked around as a possibility. That is a really long time, especially when we are talking about weeks as a minimum before we even get an update as to where the process is!