The musings of a madman...

  "Hey buddy, you remember me?"      I'mma keep it all the way funky with y'all... When someone asks me some shit like that and I wasn't looking to have already determined whether or not I'd ever met them, I adopt a "lie first and then sort it out" approach. I've found that this helps keep my ass out of situations I might not desire to be in. I turned around... Me: "Um... I can't say that I d--..." Him: "I interviewed you for the job at [company] back at the beginning of the the summer." Me: "Wait... The ones who kicked me out when I told the story about getting fired over the softball game?" Him: "Okay, so you DO remember!" Me: "Yeah man, my friends thought that shit was WILD funny." Him: "To be frank, so did everyone else in the office when we told them about it." Me:  "'we?'...  'everyone else?'...  How many damn people did you speak of my misfortune to?...

       They say the dog never has a plan for when it actually catches the car... As I've mentioned before, some wild hiccups that ended in the ER back in December and the fallout wound up setting fire to my PTO at the full time gig clear through April setting things right. Once I was back into the rhythm of accruing my time like I've become accustomed to over the last 18 years, we were more than halfway through the year and I was in full panic mode over how to take days so as to not lose them. I know it sounds weird to be thinking like this and it is still only August, but bear in mind that I am in a  very small department of only six specialists so a maximum of two can be off at a given time, with the exception of extreme emergencies and after the fall and winter I had, I've had enough of those!      So anyway, time off... A few weeks ago I looked at the team PTO schedule, counted up the time I got left and the time I will need or have alre...

       For the sake of moving this along... The weeks between December 17rd and February 7st was one of the most trying periods of my life and involved not one but THREE visits to the hospital, once through the ER. The months since have been a minefield of minding how I live and follow-up visits. If you know, you know... If you don't, well you get it.      The way my off time goes at my full time job, I am allotted 248 hours a year of off time in one bank for use for both vacation and sick time. I am allowed to roll over up to 40 hours at the end of the year, and that is a wise thing to have banked on some just-in-case shit. 18 years with the company, I've always had at least 25-30 hours to roll as a cushion until my allotment begins to build back up. This time, however, that late-year hospital stay set fire to nearly ALL of my leave time and I approached January with only like two hours. Because of this, I've spent the first half of this year S...

       I have been with my current employer since December of 2006… Almost 16 years of productive employment and the merit increases and simple seniority at a well-known-but-ne’er-to-be-named-here company has afforded me a comfort I’d never felt at a prior job.   The seniority thing lends itself to a goodly amount of paid time off as well, which is a fact that makes me as an employee kind of hard to recruit/snipe by other companies.   They can match my money, but they can’t match the amount of time off I receive.      One thing about the above-mentioned time off is that I must use it or lose it, so I frequently find myself forced by my wife at gunpoint to take time off for no fucking reason taking time off for nothing more than my own entertainment. If it feels like I have talked about something like this before, it is because I have . -BUT- This is not that…      Now that you’re back from the sideques...

     Life is hard these days… Y’all recall clearly back in October when I was fired over titties and not ONE of you came to my aide? [ link ] Well, I have been trying with all I can to come up with SOMETHING to do for money in the in-between and still getting no assistance from any of my readers, but somehow I have managed to make due.      Well I finally got an interview! After 3 months now of throwing my resumé EVERYWHERE I thought it would stick, I finally earned myself a call back from a company not far from my house.  That would be a plus, compared to the 23+ mile commute I had been up against for the previous several years.      Nerves dragged me out of my bed last week at 5am, I showered and brushed my hair, ironed my clothes, brushed up on rehearsed interview responses front-loaded on me by my lady.  The interview was set for 8:30am, which gave me time to drop my daughter off at school and show u...

True Story©…                 Confidence is EVERYTHING. I realize that I have been using this space to tell silly stories with little in the sphere of life lessons.  For that, I apologize and intend to make it up to you.  Today’s discussion is how having your chest out and being confident can go FAR in getting you where you want and need to be. Since the only way I know to tell you these things is through a totally real anecdotal True Story© of things that have happened in my life, we will peek in on me in a job interview from back when I first got home from the Military…                 Interviewer: “Well Mr Evans, what can you tell us about yourself?”                 Me: “Well as indicated on my CV here, I am recently home from the milit...