Hello, good evening and welcome to Election Night Special. There's tremendous excitement here at the moment and we should be getting the first results through any moment now. We're not sure where it will be from, it might be Leicester or from West Byfleet, the polling's been quite heavy in both areas. Ah, I'm just getting... I'm just getting... a buzzing noise in my left ear. Urgh, argh!

Thus begins Monty Python's "Election Night Special" sketch, always a personal favorite and certainly timely.

So, I've been blowing off my resume lately. I met with Tracy last Monday to go over my resume. It's pretty much the same one I used in 2002 with a slightly different heading and more bullets for my current job, but it's always passed the mustard so I figured she'd note a typo or tweo, suggest one or two different phrases, and that would be that. Instead she gutted the whole bloody thing. I don't think a single section was left un-noted with her red pen . . . or a coupla stains of ketchup, water . . . and I forget what else she had for dinner. The point is, the resume needed a total re-work, and I'm almost there. The problem is I have to do this "how-by-what" phrasing, where I don't jsut say what I did at the company, but how I accomplished it. And I hate braging about myself without self-deprication. I know resume's are supposed to be about bragging, I realize it's all about selling yourself to a potential employer. But it's always been something I never felt comfortable doing. It's probably a self-esteem thing, refusing to give myself credit or some such. Either way, it's been eight days since Tracy told me what to do and while format-wise the resume is ready to rock, I still have to revise the bullet-points.

Mind you, it's November 2. (Duh.) I'm already a week behind--I was to have been looking for jobs last week. Now it'll be at least tomorrow before I get this revamped./ Mind you, there's no reason why I can't look for jobs using my old resume--it was serviceable if not particularly stand-out-ish--but, well, I'm not. So that should tell you a thing or three. Place bets folks. Still good odds I get it done before the end of this week.

Last week was rather busy. Multiple sites being done for Bright-Matrix, and that took up much of my time last week. Now I'm more waiting on the client's feedback so I have room to cbreathe (and hence, work on my resume).

I gave notice to Brookedale Gardens last Thursday. It was rather surreal. I have to be out by December 31. I was hoping to have some time into January, hopig to make it to Jan 15, but it's not the case. It's rather sobering to think that in less than two month's time I'll be out of this apartment. Sooner, really, given that I need to have the majority of the move done before New Year's. Chirstmas is Saturday this year; my office is closed the following Monday so I'm betting that Sunday and Monday will be the big moving days. technically I'm working Tuesday the 28 through Thursday the 30th; and our office has offically closed the window on holiday vacation requests. But I'm still going to talk to Matt about it--with all the vacation time I have, and given that those three days will probably be very slow, I'm hoping to use my vacation days and actually end work Thursday the 23rd. But he may not go for it, which would be annoying but not earth-shatteringly horrendous.

We'll see. I had approached the topic of my leaving about two weeks ago and Matt said it was too soon to discuss, but I may bring it up again soon--next week I'll be training two buyers from Reynosa--essentially my (and all of Totowa's Purchasind Dept's) replacements. Once that training wraps up, it'll be as good a time as any to bring up my depature.

But one way or another as of January 1st I won't have an apartment in Bloomfield, so I'll have to find somewhere to live. I have this really annoying habit of procrastinating. You may have noticed. I suppose it's not too terribly soon to look for an apartment--in fact, I know it isn't. But even so, there's such an immediacy to things now. Daylight Savings ended on Sunday. It's dark by 5:00 now. My brain keeps hearing Hugo Weaving talk about "inevitability" over and over.

It was odd. I was talking to Linda, our HR manager, and Laura, our Customer Service rep about the incomming trainees, and Laura seemed bummed about the fact that we are training our replacements. And I don't get it. Granted, I have an out, but Laura's got enough seniority that she'll get a cozy severance package that's at least twice as good as mine; and we've all known this was coming since the Spring so I don't see why having to train our replacements should be a downer. If anything I welcome it as a sign that the end is indeed near. (You know me; can't stand the inbetweens.)

I'll be taking off Friday to head down to South Jersey to check out towns and possible apartments. Maybe that's why 'm not bummed about training replacements: I have a plan. I'm not just waiting for the axe to fall. I've got a definite date and I've got a strategy to get me through the time it takes to find another job--I'm already working towards getting another job (even if I'm procrastinating on the resume)--and by the time my office offically closes, I'll be at a new job and settling into my new life. Whereas Laura has to deal with the job she;'s had for twelve-plus years is gone and she probably isn't sure what she'll to do next.

Anyway, the game plan is, with Friday's recon session, I should be able to find a place to move into by Dec 1. Patti, Miller, and I moved into Clifton after two days of searching (though, granted, Patti spent more time looking on her own), and it only took a few weeks to find Bloomfield--I think I started looking around mid-november and had settled on the place by early or mid December). So the bottom-line is time is on my side with this. Sadly, even when time is on your side, it never bothers to slow down enough for you.

But at any rate, today may or may not be productive. I have dinner to cook, bills to pay, a new episode of Gilmore Girls to watch, a resume to revamp (yeah right) and somewhere in all of this a Presidential Election to keep tabs on. (Not sure how much TV coverage I'll watch; there won't be anything too interesting until later tonight anyway; I'll probably keep tabs on things via The New Medievalism.

I think there's something I should be mentioning, but can't remember. Ah well.

...we have to pick up a few results you may have missed. A little pink pussy-cat has taken Barrow-in-Furness -- that's a gain from the Liberals there. Rastus Odinga Odinga has taken Wolverhampton Southwest, that's Enoch Powell's old constituency -- an important gain there for Darkie Power. Arthur Negus has held Bristols -- that's not a result, that's just a piece of gossip. Sir Alec Douglas Home has taken Oldham for the Stone Dead party. A small piece of putty about that big, a cheese mechanic from Dunbar and two frogs -- one called Kipper the other not -- have all gone "Ni ni ni ni ni ni!" in Blackpool Central. And so it's beginning to look like a Silly landslide, and with the prospect of five more years' Silly government facing us we... Oh I don't want to do this any more, I'm bored!