Long Hiatus Is Over

Due to hardware problems, I have not been blogging lately. That will now change. Here are some updates:

North Carolina. I volunteered for the Erskine Bowles campaign for the U.S. Senate down there during the weekend before Election Day. Yeah we lost, but it was fun and a nice change from pension processing.

Literary works. Still have no agent, and that one I had been waiting to hear from turned me down in a horrifically impersonal form letter. Things are stalled from lack of interest mostly, and work on the third of my unpublished books is still slow-going.

Contracts. My employees union negotiated a 5-year contract. The good news is I'm now over the half-way mark to 40K, but the bad news is pay raises through 2009 will only be 3% a year. There's also a pending reorganization of our department, so I may either seek a different position than pension processing, or find a job outside the UMWA Retirement Funds.

Visits from my past. My sister Jennifer may, thanks to cheap rates for airplane tickets, visit me in mid-January. A friend of mine from UF, Nick Capezza, is graduating Indiana law school and may make a visit to DC for job scouting this spring.

Road to the Presidency. My ongoing election simulation game has a new installment now in progress. RTP 3B fell flat because of my hardware problems, but RTP 4 is off to a promising start. Click here for more information.

In other words, not a whole lot has happened, but enough to say a little about them. I'll keep you posted as things change.