Three months! Wow! Quite a few things have happened, this will be another long and rambling post…
First, some good news: My patent was officially granted on Dec. 29, 2015. You can see it in all its glory here:
http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=9222130
Of course, it is still worthless and we’re still paying for it. One friend insists, though, that the simple fact that I have a patent will make some employers more interested, only time will tell…
I’d been looking for a new gig for a while. My last job was really interesting right up to the point where they told me to stop working on it. Then, despite a number of promises, no further work materialized. I’d been bored out of my mind before (which is what got this blog started) so decided, after a couple of months of waiting, that I would look for something else. I found something else, back with an old employer (ironically, the one who was employing me the last time I was keeping the chair warm), but it took over 9 weeks to transfer my clearance. I’m ‘lucky’ that way, for some reason.
I was to start the new gig on Jan 4th, but, less than 2 hours before I was to start, I was contacted and told not to show up. The only explanation I ever got was this very blog. Fortunately my new/old company put me on overhead while they tried to get me a different new gig, but after 5 weeks without any success, they had to cut me off. To think: if I could just accept being bored I could have kept my old job and none of this heartburn would have happened (as I type this I am still unemployed. Very stressful, since we’ve been diligent about spending every penny we’ve earned on that silly house).
Speaking of the silly house, we have officially passed the final inspection. Not quite 5 years after we got started. I have yet to update the web page with the latest pictures, etc. If you’re curious, though, I stuck three pictures of the pool here:
http://sol-system.com/koxenrider/property/greenhousepool/poolpics.html
Now, if I could only get another job, we can finally refinance and pay off the credit cards we’ve run up to the limit to pay for the construction and maybe put some bucks in the bank. Of course, there are still little things to do, lots of them, and the aquaponics hasn’t started yet, but we are close. Too bad, as an austerity measure, we’re not going out to the place for a month or so. We’ll save a couple of hundred a month by staying in MD.
I have yet to get any interest from an agent for my book(s). I ‘finished’ the third, mostly I ran out of enthusiasm. I got 60K words out of an intended 85K. I slapped it into some sort of shape and am asking a friend to take a look. She might be the only one to read it, the lack of interest is starting to weigh me down and I’m getting to the point I’ll just stick them on my web site where no one can read them, just like this blog.
I’m trying to motivate myself to complete my attempt at turning my first book into a screenplay, but I’m starting to suspect that activity will fall by the wayside as well. While it is feasible to find interest in a screenplay totally independent of a book, I figure the competition is probably higher and thus odds are even more against. Then again, I may get enthused once this job situation is ironed out and things are back to normal. I’m nothing if not dully persistent…
Well, this turned out to be a shorter post than I thought… Maybe I really don’t have anything to say, so perhaps the silence wasn’t so bizarre after all.
In case you’re curious, this was the article that triggered my desire to post today:
Mind and Matter
Research suggests that a combination of mental power and conventional medicine may be better than either alone.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/45103/title/Mind-and-Matter/
More evidence that the so-called placebo effect is real and subject to harnessing.
