Ah, life's little vicissitudes.

If you have been following these notes you may have noticed several mentions of work stress. Well, the bell tolled somewhere around October 6, 2000. About a week and a half later I was given the final word that no help would be available before February, 2001. Since I started doing two people's jobs back in January, 2000 and had been asking stridently for help since April, 2000 and had been given the "3 more months" routine twice, I decided that it was time to cut my losses.

Since I've had no time for socializing and since I'm an unattached single male with simple tastes, I happened to have a good sized chunk of moola hanging about, so this was an excellent time to take a break. I'm feeling no pressure to look for work any time soon, which is an amazing luxury.

It was also desperately needed. I mean just look at the date. My last day of work was Halloween and it's taken me 20 days to even think about making a note of it on my web page. Tomorrow marks the end of my third week without work and I am just now becoming a conscious human being again.

And I'm living more like a human now too. It is true that I haven't washed tonight's dinner dishes yet. But last night's got done and that's somewhere between 7 and 14 days better than I had been doing. In point of fact, the week before I submitted my resignation I came home Friday night and I could smell my dishes from across the kitchen. When did I wash them? Two days later. And only then because I needed something to cook with that night.

I have to admit that that "unattached single male" thing means that I am frequently willing to leave the dirty dishes overnight. But I like to be reasonably clean. Clean clothes, clean dishes, even the occasional vacuuming of the floors and believe it or not stirring up the dust with a California Duster— these all happen normally around my house because I do appreciate the resulting environment. While I was using all of my personal will power to cope with my work environment, I let my personal life degenerate to the point where pigs wouldn't want to live with me.

Today, I made my bed before noon, for the second time this week. In all of October I made my bed once— on laundry day.