In reference to my title on this one, if you haven’t seen Oh, Brother Where Art Thou, get thee to the movie kiosk or the Netflix stream, or whatever flavor of movie rental you prefer!

I believe it was the first Christmas Jenni and I were together. We were recently married and had not known each other for very long in the grand scheme of things. Many people were betting against our success, and it was hard to blame them. In the first year of our marriage, we bought a house, had a kid, and our net income put us comfortably in the poverty bracket. I wouldn’t trade that year for anything.

I’ve got sensitive facial skin. Gillette ought to run the census, because their demographic intel is incredible! When I got to about shaving age in my teens, I started getting Mach 5’s in the mail. They were useless to me. None of those multi-blade monstrosities have been any good on my face, but lead to endless razor burn and breakouts. I found that Grandpa’s old safety razor made for a beautifully close shave without side-effects, but I was not comfortable using it. Teenage boys are not well-known for their minute dexterity, and it took me half and hour and several cuts to get a shave with the thing. So, I went electric. In my adolescence, I had an electric shaver that served me well, even if it didn’t ever shave very close.

Then, on that first Christmas of my marriage, my new wife gave me a really nice Panasonic wet/dry electric shaver. I might add that she doesn’t particularly like me to wear facial hair. Now, that would make the little shaver 11.5 years old. It has served me well for over a decade. But, in the last few months, its performance has suffered. The battery would need to be charged more often, and the blades were showing clearer signs of their age. A couple of weeks ago, it finally deteriorated to the point of uselessness.

I was shaving one morning, and the old motor was giving its hum, albeit a few steps lower in pitch than when it was younger. When I got to the tougher whiskers on my chin, rather than being cut, they got jammed between the blades and the screen, and pulled hard. No amount of turning the switch off would make the shaver release its death grip on my facial hair. I wound up gritting my teeth and yanking the wayward device from my face. That was the final straw.

The Panasonic has gotten to the age that blades and batteries are no longer readily available, and would likely require a seal kit to install. I don’t even want to think about trying to obtain that! A new shaver would probably be a better option. It appears that this early gift from my young bride deserves a Viking funeral at long last. As Murphy’s Law would have it, a new shaver has exactly zero priority in my life right now, as we are pinching pennies in every conceivable way, with the start of the business and all. So, I took up Grandpa’s safety razor again.

I have a few blades for the antique razor, and when they run out, replacements are cheap. I didn’t realize exactly how dilapidated the Panasonic’s blades had gotten until using a real blade again. Where I was shaving every morning with the wet/dry, I can achieve similar results with three mornings a week using the safety razor. With the repetitive use, in my adult life, I’ve gotten a lot more efficient using the blade. What took thirty minutes as a goofy teen takes five now – and that’s with a whole lot more facial hair. I’m starting to think that I won’t own another electric, even when I am not feeling so thrifty again.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been a bit of a slug on grooming. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still showering and using deodorant. I just haven’t bothered to shave. Over the last couple of days, I was noticing that my head was getting a little fuzzier than I like it as well. So, this morning I decided to fix it. I got out the Wahl clippers and the #1 guard and went to town. I don’t often cut my own hair since it’s difficult to see whether I got it even in the back, but I thought that it would be far more likely to get done if I only had to ask Jenni to even up the back when she gets home from work.

Once I got all trimmed up, I looked really funny (to me anyway) as the hair on my head was roughly the same length as my stubble. So, out came Grandpa’s safety razor and I took care of that as well. Now, I look more like a respectable business man than an insane bum – always a good thing. Funny enough, I have not cut myself once in this round of using the old single blade. I’ve often mused about going to a straight razor, and I think I’d like to try that one day. The problem is that you don’t just need the razor, but all the peripheral stuff as well – the strop, stone, brush, cup, soap, etc. The initial investment is significant but well pays for itself in savings on supplies. There’s simply no cheaper way to shave in the long run. Until I do make such a jump, it appears that I’ll be using the old safety razor.

The computer has decided to not play nicely with the printer. I hate it when this happens. I need to print out some more business cards. I would really like to break away from this nasty habit and get some cards professionally printed, but I’m not settled enough on a design to commit to 1000+ cards just yet. Thus far, I’ve been printing on Avery’s smooth-edge business cards with an old HP LaserJet. The printer does a nice job, but it needs a good cleaning at the moment.

Things that I like about this printer are that it’s been incredibly simple to use, and it runs well. It was manufactured in February of 2002. It has logged 22,573 prints in its lifetime. Of those twenty-two and a half thousand pages printed, the errors are well under a hundred. The system only stores the fifty most recent errors, but it was under that number when we purchased it used, several years ago. I’d like to completely tear it down, clean it out, install new, HP-branded supplies, clean the duplexor, and upgrade the ram. Then, it would be like a new one again. We bought the printer at a garage sale for $100 after confirming that it did indeed function. The toner cartridges were each under 10% remaining, but we still got many hundreds of prints out of them before we had to order new cartridges. We went ahead with remanufactured cartridges from a third-party supplier (which I have regretted), and it has largely run well. The price was kind of ludicrous. We were planning on picking up a color laser printer, and had planned on spending a few hundred dollars for a new one. When we found the big HP for $100, we kind of had to do it.

Plug it into the network, and it works. Mostly. When we first set it up, we had to tell it which network it was on, and we had to override DHCP a couple of times to get it to IP correctly. There are reasons that most households don’t see a printer like this one. For one, you’ve got to have a decent working knowledge of networking to get full functionality out of this beast. Secondly, they are big and heavy. Lastly, you can’t usually get a working example for $100. It has been running smoothly and trouble-free for quite a while now. Well, up until now, actually.

Over the weekend, it became clear that this was going to be a busy week for me. I’ve got quite a bit of work lined up to get done, and I’ve got several deadlines to meet. I gave out the last of my business cards over the weekend, so I hopped on the computer last night to print out some new ones. That’s when the trouble started.

Open Office was very sluggish opening my business card files. In fact, it acted as if it was freezing up. So, I shut everything down, restarted and tried again. Similar results. Ran a full scan with Spybot S&D and tried again. Now, Open Office will open my files (slowly). Good enough. When I went to print, it told me that the printer was not present. I tried to print from Adobe reader instead with the same results. I also tried from Notepad.

I’m running M$ Windon’t XPee SP3 on a FrankenDell with a P4HT and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.25-Gb Ram. I opened up Printers & Faxes to see if I could diagnose the ‘missing’ printer from there. When I asked for properties on the printer in question, I was informed that the printer was missing.

I logged into the router via Opera and checked for DHCP clients. There, I can see the printer. I pinged the printer by IP just to make sure I wasn’t missing something obvious. Four sent, four received, nice fast connection, no problems. I shut off the printer and restarted it. I deleted the printer from the computer and attempted to reinstall it. In the printer installation wizard, I specified the printer by IP address, and the computer gave me an error, saying that it couldn’t find the printer there.

At this point, I’m at a loss. If I can ping the printer, why can’t I connect to it? I’m hoping that I haven’t screwed Windon’t up to the point that I’m due for a fresh install. I don’t have time to be monkeying on this crap. This week even more so than the last few, I need to be a designer, artist, and craftsman. Not a network sysadmin chasing ghosts in the ethernet.

It just figures, doesn’t it?

I shall tag Jenni who will write the next line and pass it on. I’ll do my best to keep up with the updates. Feel free to join in in the comments section. Okay, here we go!

Black and blocky
was the Glocky
that did slay
the Jabberwocky.

Next victim! Muhahahahha!!!

Update:

Original Line:

Black and blocky
was the Glocky
that did slay
the Jabberwocky.

Quoth Jennifer:

Asked did he
upon demise
What could be
the caliber size.

Sarah:

Jabberwockies, so hard to slay,
will go down if they are shot
with a round starting with “four”
and bearing the name Gold Dot.

And Christina:

The Jabberwock, not known for wit
is easy to be stalked.
You merely find a place to sit
and leave him to be Glocked.

He comes galumphing, trailing drool
and doesn’t glance my way.
Oh, shit! No Vorpal-ammo, Fool!
He lives to die another day.

Then Lissa:

And as in uffish thought she stood,
The Goblin-wock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the front-door wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! NOT through-and-through
My lil’ Siguette went snicker-snack!
The four nine-mil’s quite turned its head
And put him on his back.

Alright. So, I haven’t been great about keeping this thing moving. I’m feeling like kind of a slug about it at the moment. I don’t really have much to say right now… Not much at all…

We had a nice Independence Day weekend, for what that’s worth. Cat O’ Nine Tales drove in to our neck of the woods for the weekend. So, that was nice. Everything just kind of worked out great all weekend. We got to the parade later than we wanted, but we still got the best parking space in town. And, when we went to set up our chairs, we found a great place to park our butts too! The weather was cool and it started to sprinkle at the end of the parade. The go-cart drivers in the Shriners were in the finest form I’ve ever seen them. They must have a practice track somewhere, because I didn’t think it was possible to drive those little suckers that hard!

We had the same story when we went to the University to see the fireworks show. Got there late, still found a great spot. It was nice. Sunday afternoon we went to the range and converted money into noise and jubilation. I made some decent groups, but my lack of practice is starting to show. That kind of sucks.

On the business front, the sales are starting to roll in slowly. I’m seeing a very slow and steady increase in interest and in actual sales. This is a good thing. It tells me that it is actually working. I’m going to wager a guess and say that what I’m seeing right now is typical of a year in. If I’m right on that, I deserve a pat on the back or something. Maybe I’m just being optimistic. At any rate, I’m about to announce a great event over at The Holster Site. I’ve got to keep that pretty secretive for the moment, but I’m getting really excited about that!

Anyway, I’ve got some other stuff to finish up in the next couple hours, and that’s about all I’ve got for now.

I had a dream last night that I bought a cow and buried it in the front yard. I buried it alive, but I left a little tunnel from the surface to its head, so that it could breathe and I could provide it with food and water. Other than that, the animal was buried – its body completely encased in soil. The thought was if I could figure out how to make this work, just think of how it could revolutionize the beef industry! Besides that, domestic cows are not exactly active creatures. They just stand around and eat grass all day. They could do that any old place – like in a hole in the ground!

Of course, in real life, the thought of treating a living creature in such a manner is revolting, and it is very clear that there are many reasons that this would never work, but the dreaming mind doesn’t necessarily consider all of the same implications that the waking mind does. My friends and family were excited about my cow. They were constantly asking, “How’s that cow experiment going?” My initial thought was that I would bury the cow, making provisions so that it could live, and I would dig up the animal after a week to record and analyze the results.

About two days into the experiment, we had a get together at our house where we cooked on the grill. Our friends and family came to eat and have a great time with us. Someone in the party was asking me about the cow and my experiment. That’s when it dawned on me – although I had made provisions for air, water, and food to get to the animal for its consumption, I had made no provisions for the urine and feces. And even worse, I had the animal’s body buried with no room for it to expand as the cow breathed. I was mortified and discouraged as I realized what I had done. I answered the question at the party, “I’m pretty sure my cow is dead.”

Now, please allow me to interpret:

I believe the dream represents my latent fear in going into business for myself. The cow directly represents my leatherwork, and indirectly the financial investment in the tools, equipment, and raw materials. The experiment – burying the cow, digging the air/feeding tunnel, pretty much every effort of the experiment represents the real-world effort that I’ve put into learning how to make great leather goods. The very fact that I did something as outrageous as burying the cow both represents that I want to accomplish something truly unique with my efforts, and it represents planting a seed – in this case, planting the seed of my business.

The fact that I came to a sudden realization that I had done something horrible, and destroyed all the investment, and that all the effort was for nothing – that represents my fear of the unknown. In real life, do I have any idea how much money I will or will not wind up making by the end of the year? No, I have no clue. Do I have any guarantee that The Holster Site will make a living for me and my family? No – but I had no more guarantee this time last year that I would continue to work in a traditional job.

The fact of the matter is that the fear itself is kind of freeing. In traditional employment I enjoyed the illusion of stability, when I had no more job security than I do now. Frustration then came in the form of not feeling like I was being appreciated for my accomplishments and abilities, but that was the price I paid for the illusion of stability. And, I accepted a ceilinged-out paycheck that was probably less than I was worth in return for the false security that the next paycheck would be exactly the same as the one before it.

Had the dream with the cow continued, I would have liked to see myself do something wily and industrious with my failed experiment. Perhaps I would have discovered that burying beef for several days tenderizes and seasons the meat and makes it uniquely delectable. Conversely, maybe I would have discovered that my fears were in vain, and the cow had actually thrived in those bizarre conditions. I don’t know, but I think that’s the point – the dream was supposed to be a cliff-hanger. The lesson I take away from it is to not let my fears win. I will win. I will make the best of my situation, take the steer by the horns (as it were), and make my own destiny.

As I continued dreaming after the cow dream, a neighbor down the street had a shack in their back yard. In that shack was a hideous creature that appeared to be a cross between a human child and a piglet. They kept this child-pig in a chicken wire cage in the shack. There was a six-inch tall bi-pedal dinosaur that was in the cage with the child-pig. The child-pig would draw the dinosaur in and snuggle with it, but the dinosaur was uncomfortable with this and wanted to escape. A ninja-like character crept into the neighbor’s yard and entered the shack. He used a shovel to pry the chicken-wire cage open and scooped out the tiny dinosaur with the shovel. He tossed the dinosaur into the trees behind the shack. The child-pig was furious! It screamed and squealed and threw such a tantrum that the entire shack swayed and creaked. Just as the ninja made his escape, the child-pig’s tantrum peaked and he literally exploded in a burst of fire which leveled the shack to splinters and ash. And, that was all.

I don’t have an interpretation for that last one. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the fact that I watched Beowulf before bed last night. That makes more sense than anything else I can think of.

DISCLAIMER: I do not condone nor endorse installing parts or accessories on a firearm that were not specifically designed for it. If and when I do so, it is at my own risk. If you make a decision to do something similar, it is similarly at your own risk and has nothing to do with me.

The local gun range was clearancing out a bunch of their wares because apparently they had to make some extra space so they can do some construction. We’ve been taking The Kiddo up there on Monday evenings for air rifle training. Since we were there, we decided to check out what they had on clearance. The big clearance shin-dig happened last week sometime, and we deliberately didn’t go.

As both of you probably know, money has been tight recently. Sales on The Holster Site have been slow, which is normal for a brand-new business. Still, the rationalization of the facts unfortunately does not pay the bills. We didn’t really want to get tempted to blow our grocery money on the great deals, so we avoided the main sale event.

They had the dregs of the clearance items in one corner of the facility when we were there yesterday. Since this is like the ‘third-day-garage-sale’ stuff, we decided to give it a quick look. We probably shouldn’t have, but SCORE!!!!

Tritium pistol sights! We had been wanting to get some night sights for our S&W M&P’s! They didn’t have any to fit the M&P, but they had them to fit some of the older Smith pistols. I thought to myself (or possibly out loud – sometimes I get confused), “How many different dovetails could Smith & Wesson possibly cut into their slides?” I unloaded my M&P45c to compare. At a precursory glance, it looked darned close! It might be worth the gamble to get a couple sets! How much of a gamble though?

Not the $115.00 original price, not the $20.00 marked down price, but a mere $5.00! Worth the gamble? Oh hell yeah. Does it hurt the budget? Only nominally. So, we got the stuff home and I went about seeing if everything would fit right. Here’s what came in the kit:

The front sight is actually marked with the Trijicon logo and has the white ring around the tritium tube. The rear sight has the v-shaped sight groove highlighted with a trijicon ‘I’ to dot with the front sight. (I haven’t been crazy about the three-dot stock sights on my M&P anyway.) You can see the kit also came with an allen wrench to stake the rear down, some generic thread locker, and a plastic drift that feels and smells like Delrin. I know it’s weird to describe a polymer by its smell, but there you have it.

The front sight was slightly taller than the stock blade, but would slide into the end of the dovetail securely. Since it was taller though, if I tried to use it with my stock rear, it would make my POI low. We can’t have that! So, I decided the only rational thing to do was to pull my factory rear and see if I could get the XS on there. The M&P series pistols have a strange little block mechanism in the slide that is spring-loaded against the rear sight. So unless you are careful, it will come apart like a Chinese watch. The guy in this video shows us all about it except how to get the thing back together:

I didn’t need help taking it apart though! Once I had the stock sight removed, I compared the two. The one on the right with the one set screw is the stock sight. The one on the left with two set screws is the tritium.

Looks close enough to me! So I hammered the replacement sight into place and cranked down on the set screws. Then I proceeded to remove the front sight.

They look pretty close too!

This actually gave me more problems than I like to admit. It wanted to catch towards the middle of the dovetail slot on the slide. So, I’d have it almost tapped into the center and it would pop across to the other side. It was horribly frustrating. Eventually, after cussing and tossing my hammer and some deep breathing, it centered for me.

I went to reinstall the slide on the frame only to find that the little block dealy from the video that sits under the rear sight would not compress and allow the slide to clear. Apparently, the spring was bound up inside the hole. So, I pulled the rear sight back off, shot the spring into a mystery location until Jenni helped me find it, let her wrestle with the spring for a while and eventually put everything down. I was pretty well resolved that it wasn’t going to go together that evening. That’s okay.

Then we had to give it one more try. I pushed up on the thingie from the underside of the slide and used my finger to compress the spring completely into the hole. I then slid the disk over it, keeping pressure on the underside to hold the two pieces flush with the spring compressed. That allowed me to get the rear sight slid far enough on that I could let go and tap it into place. Then the slide went on and the pistol functioned almost normally. Almost.

Remember how the original rear sight had one set screw in the middle and the replacement has two? One of those set screws strikes the little disk that holds the little spring. With the set screw torqued down it was pushing the disk and distorting the spring so that the slide and trigger didn’t want to play nice with each other. But, I was undeterred for two reasons. 1 – The replacement was actually a far tighter fit than the original. 2 – The original only had one screw holding it down – I’m sure this one will be fine with just one screw too. I simply backed off the offending screw and checked everything else for tightness.

And, the results? Voila!

I wouldn’t believe they weren’t intended for that gun if I had to take someone else’s word for it.

Now, these had been sitting on a shelf for quite some time. So, a very valid question is do they still work? Let’s see that last sight picture with the lights off.

That ought to make it easier to sight the gun in near-dark conditions! We got two sets of these, one for Jenni and one for me. When I finally got the set installed on my pistol, it was far to late to think about doing the same thing to Jenni’s. Maybe I’ll install hers this evening.

DISCLAIMER REPRISE: Don’t try this at home! Just because I did it does not make it advisable or a good idea.

I just posted a new entry on The Holster Site concerning feedback from the people that wear my holsters. Although I’ve been making holsters for a few years, right now sales are slow. I’m trying to remain realistic about it though. In any practical sense, I’ve only been in business for about five weeks. The fact that I’ve made any money at all is pretty fantastic, actually. But, it can be pretty easy to temporarily lose perspective and freak out.

I find it to be much like the attitude it takes to quit smoking. When someone is puffing away on a cancer stick, it’s really easy for them to say that they will quit. They can envision it – putting the pack down and never picking it up again. Sure, they would miss it, but it seems like it should be so easy when they are actually in the act of smoking. But, when they get an hour or two after when they normally would have had that last cigarette, the heart rate increases and they feel nervous. Ask them about quitting at that point and you may induce a full-on panic attack! When Jenni and I decided that I should pursue my own business full-time, we very realistically acknowledged that things could be tight for the first couple of years, and that we were willing to work through that. But, five weeks into that decision and I find it really easy to get twisted over the lack of sales.

Attempting to branch out into other products is starting to look like a successful endeavor. I am about to nail this handbag deal – I’ve actually come up with a couple of viable prototypes! I’m currently wearing my Surefire G2 in a leather belt holster that I made for it. I’ll be posting pics of that before long. the coolest part is that it would be incredibly easy to alter the design to carry a can of OC spray. I’m thinking of maybe setting up a rig that has two holes in it – one for your light and the other for your pepper. I’ve also been carrying one of my new carbon/Kevlar wallets and have been taking notes on making it a real full-production item. I’m figuring out where it wears and where it doesn’t. Where it does wear needs to be fixed before I can offer it.

As of yet, the carbon fiber and carbon Kevlar have far exceeded my expectations of their performance. For that matter, all of the new materials that I’ve been experimenting with have been fantastic! You have to have special cutting tools for some of the stronger composites, as if that’s any surprise. The surprising part is that it’s not necessarily what you would think. In anticipation of the cutting challenge presented by Kevlar cloth, I purchased Gingher’s G12 industrial Shears. Although they work really well on the carbon fiber cloth, they won’t cut the Kevlar. For the carbon Kevlar cloth, the two tools that I’ve discovered work are Ginger’s 4-inch embroidery scissors and an Olfa rotary cutter. So, the industrial shears wouldn’t cut the industrial material, but embroidery scissors and quilting cutters will. I need to look at more crafter’s tools. Apparently, they’re a lot tougher than I have given them credit for.

I still need to set up the website for the bags and stuff, but I’m having a hard enough time keeping up with my posting here and at The Holster Site. I’m going to need to really set up a hard schedule if I’m going to keep track of three websites! Besides that, I’ve got to make sure that I’ve got product to put on the website!

On a household note, the car needs tires and an exhaust and a little body work, and we’re still paying on it for another year. That’s got me a little freaked right now. We are long overdue for a range session but it’s really hard to justify the expense of the ammo and stuff at the moment. We’re also long overdue for a vacation, but without a decent laptop, we can’t even consider the old road-trip-to-family-in-the-next-state budget vacation. There are lots of things that I would like to be able to afford right now, but there’s just no way. I guess I should write down a list for when things aren’t so tight. This can’t last forever afterall.

I know that with one big break, things could radically change for the better. If I could outsource production and basically just be a designer, that would be wonderful! At that point in time, I imagine that I would think back on the present with fond nostalgia. Well, wish me luck and keep praying for me.

If any of you have been following the news, you know that we in Central Oklahoma have spent the last couple of days getting drenched by several storm’s worth of rain. Fortunately, we’ve stayed relatively dry here in the Evyl Robot Empyre. It was A LOT of rain. The neighborhood streets were flowing yesterday, but it never did get over the top of the curbs on our street.

The sound of rain is relaxing. There’s no better sedative for me than a good downpour. Usually, when it’s raining while I’m in bed, I sleep harder than any other situation. On Sunday night, probably about one in the morning, there was a thunder crack that rattled the entire house for several seconds. Jenni and I both woke up and laid in the dark, listening.

I’m not sure specifically what we were listening for – just anything odd. We listened for any evidence that we needed to crawl out of the warm bed to patch a window, lash a tarp over the open corner of the living room, pry the car out of the front door, etc. Besides the dull roar of the falling rain, all was quiet. It certainly was an electrical storm, with cracks and growls of thunder all night. In fact, I keep hearing gentle thunder this morning even.

Yesterday morning, we made a more thorough assessment of the possible damage. Peeking out the back window, we could see that all the vegetation was intact, if not wading in a pond that didn’t belong there. Peeking out the front, we could see our unmolested Bradford pear tree, and beyond it, the river in the street. Jenni prepared to go to work, and I got ready for my day. When it was time for her to leave, I walked her out to the car. Once we got past the Bradford pear, we say this directly across the street:

If that was the lightning we heard in the night, no wonder it was so loud in our house! On the up-side, I don’t think that the neighbor’s truck actually took any damage – I haven’t seen any dents on it anyway. And, the breakage on the tree looks like it will grow in well.

On a side note, after making my commitment to post here weekly, I apparently didn’t post last week. So, I owe you an extra this week. That’s okay though, because I think I know just what I’m going to tell you about…

To both my readers, I’m sorry. I’ve been a terrible blogger over the last few months. Towards the end of 2009 and even into the beginning of 2010 I got to the point that I was posting a new blog entry almost every day. Somewhere in the mess of life, I fell off and now you’re lucky to hear from me on a monthly basis. But, that’s all going to change.

I’ve made a personal commitment to update my personal blog at least once a week, and my business website at least twice a week.. Once I can get into that habit, I’d like to do even better than that. I’ve been busy, life has been a whirlwind, but that’s still no excuse. I know that both of you depend on my wit for your entertainment (or something like that), and I will let you down no longer!

Quick update –

1 – I’m finally beginning to learn how to really use the new sewing machine. She’s a brutal beast with a mind of her own, but I’m starting to actually feel comfortable!

2 – Not counting the above mentioned machine, I think that I’ve actually made more money than I’ve spent on my current self-employment venture over the last two weeks!

3 – I promised new and exciting products that push the envelope, and those products are coming together.

4 – Kevlar is a tough material to cut – even with the mightiest of shears!

5 – When I initially lost my job at the beginning of the year, at two weeks in I was freaking out. I gave up a good job opportunity two weeks ago and I’m feeling calm and confident. Making the choice makes a big difference.

So, thank you for your continued support. If you need leather goods, I need work to do. Give me a shout. You won’t be disappointed!

Wai writes:

If you file for unemployment, you can probably get your state’s unemployment agency to pay for your college classes, if you meet the qualifications. And don’t think of it as “feeding off the system” because your former employer’s unemployment insurance payments to the state pays for these services, for the most part.

As for me, I finally got a job interview next week.

I would have never guessed that Wai was the Antichrist.

The thought of going back to school is becoming more and more plausible. I really am going to check and see what the laws in OK are. I hope your job interview goes well!