The daily grind
This is the part of unemployment that I hate - the daily routine of résumé shopping, emailing, and follow up calls. Financial solidity notwithstanding, perhaps the best part of getting a job is not having to spend so much time looking for work. Having to go through the same conversations over and over is rather dulling, and the number of companies that put jobs out there only to put them on indefinate "hold" is ridiculously high.
I'm pulling together a bunch of California news at [http://www.jasonbentley.org/etc], and there you can get the latest news about the landslides in Southern California. Some sources are reporting up to fourteen dead at this point, and there's likely more. When disaster hits so close to home it serves as a bit of a reminder of the Sword of Damocles hanging over us Californians and makes me wonder if I'm ready for disaster should it come.
When I last visited friends in New Orleans, we talked about how they live with the yearly threat of a Category 5 hurricane charging up the Gulf of Mexico and innundating New Orleans - the historic and modern sections alike - in a fierce storm sturge over the low-lying land, flooding the French Quarter up to their highest windows. This isn't a doomsday scenario - it's a very real, yearly threat that most residents of the Gulf Coast are brought up to prepare for. I can imagine December's tsunami gave them even more to think about.
The landslides are like that for me. The only thing separating my daily grind from the center of an awful news story is chance and 30 seconds. In the Bay Area, we live with the threat of potentially massive destruction along the San Andreas fault because it's otherwise such a perfect place to live. Most of the people I know here, myself included, were in school back east when the last major quake hit in 1989.
Am I ready? No.
I'm pulling together a bunch of California news at [http://www.jasonbentley.org/etc], and there you can get the latest news about the landslides in Southern California. Some sources are reporting up to fourteen dead at this point, and there's likely more. When disaster hits so close to home it serves as a bit of a reminder of the Sword of Damocles hanging over us Californians and makes me wonder if I'm ready for disaster should it come.
When I last visited friends in New Orleans, we talked about how they live with the yearly threat of a Category 5 hurricane charging up the Gulf of Mexico and innundating New Orleans - the historic and modern sections alike - in a fierce storm sturge over the low-lying land, flooding the French Quarter up to their highest windows. This isn't a doomsday scenario - it's a very real, yearly threat that most residents of the Gulf Coast are brought up to prepare for. I can imagine December's tsunami gave them even more to think about.
The landslides are like that for me. The only thing separating my daily grind from the center of an awful news story is chance and 30 seconds. In the Bay Area, we live with the threat of potentially massive destruction along the San Andreas fault because it's otherwise such a perfect place to live. Most of the people I know here, myself included, were in school back east when the last major quake hit in 1989.
Am I ready? No.
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