I'm getting sick...

I can feel it creeping on. Woke up with a wicked sore throat (yes, wicked) and now my sinuses are becoming gummy. Great.

I've been around sick kids for weeks without so much as a sniffle. Chances are I picked something up in a totally random place, like the T, or at the Verizon store last night.

Yep, I gots me a new camera phone. I've had it with my crappy, no-frills clunker with a pitiful battery life that I've dropped countless times. Now I've got a crappy LG clamshell zero-megapixels color screen clunker. But this time I've got a holster. The user interface is idiot-proof, but what really put it over the top for me was the sliding lens cap and puny flash. The best part, though, was that it was FREE! Perfect for capturing those ephemeral moments when I'm out and about on my commute.

Blogs Are Better When You Have Oodles of Time On Your Hands...

...and I simply haven't had much during the past few weeks.

For those of you who don't know this already, I took the job with the non-profit. Two weeks later, I'm pretty happy. It's a decent gig, and I have a good boss.

More later.

W.S.J.D (What Should Jenny Do)?

I'm panicking.

Either its my morning caffeine buzz, or it's the fact that I haven't heard about this non-pofit project management job I've been interviewing for.

It could be both.

Complicating matters is the fact that yesterday I got a call from another temp agency about a Web Production gig that would start right away. And this job pays $20/hr.

Broken down, that's much more than the base salary of this other position I've been busting my butt to get for the better part of the past month. But I would have neither holiday nor sick pay, nor any guarantee that I would stay beyond a certain point.

And frankly, I've been an hourly employee at one job or another for almost four years. I'm pretty sick of it.

However, I think production work could be more fun. But I'm lacking confidence in my technical skills. So if I jettison my efforts for the full-time, salaried project management position in favor of the hourly production position and it turns out I'm in over my head technically, then I'm back where I started -- which is to say, NOWHERE. I don't want to void all the hard work I've done to get this far with the non-profit, not to mention turn my back on the friends I made while temping there -- friends who have also worked hard to get me this opportunity. And I'd much rather stay in the non-profit arena anyway.

BUT I haven't been working for three weeks. That's three weeks without income, and Christmas is around the corner.

I have to make a decision today.

So I put in a call to the non-profit and the temp agency to try to tease out some details. Heard back from the non-profit, and the HR rep says she'll have some kind of answer for me this afternoon. The original temp agency through which I found the non-profit position is not going to be as much of an obstacle as originally feared. I haven't heard from the other temp agency yet.

Meanwhile, JLew and I are working the numbers.

Stay tuned.

Update (10:30am): Temp agency called. Job doesn't start until early January. That changes matters...

Update (10:55am): From JLew...

The temp agency wouldn't pay vacation or sick days so I subtracted that from annual and avg monthly pay. I assume a 25% tax rate. The bottom line is the after-tax difference between the two employment options.

Temp
Pros: More $$
Cons: No benefits, vacations, sick days; holidays not earned for about 6 months; job doesn't start until 1/1/05; additional car maintenance; uncertain fit to skills, interests and work environment

[non-profit]:
Pros: Benefits, vacations, sick days, holidays; presumably starts soon; known commute; known work environment; new job experience
Cons: Less $$; new job experience

To me, the [non-profit] pros outweigh the reduced income. Either way, it's a lot more than you've been making before, plus I low-balled the [non-profit] salary.

That's my data.

So this is what it means to be a grown-up...

Update (2:30pm): The non-profit has made an offer! Waiting to talk to JLew.

So much time...too little direction.

Oy. Y'know, it just figures -- I had something in my head to share with you all, but the thought got lost somewhere in the login process. I hate it when that -- wait! There it is...

If there is one thing I learned in my retail experience, it is that THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING TO DO. In other words, don't just stand around waiting. Organize, clean, create a useful project, etc.

While waiting to hear about potential employment, I've been redesigning my pitifully dull and outdated Web site. There's nothing I love more than sitting in front of my ridiculously huge computer -- Radiohead playing on my headphones, coffee mug at the ready, seemingly endless supply of yogurt snacks -- doing something creative.

Unfortunately, I have other tasks to complete today. And they require that I peel my butt off the office chair, bathe, get dressed, and go out into this raw, rainy day. Bleh.

I asked Jlew to leave her laptop behind for me today, in the hopes that I will get some other work done "off-site". I really should be going through SpeakOut evalutations and compiling some quotes for future use -- we have a board meeting today and I would like to show that I have in fact been doing something useful. But I know that if I do it at home, I'll be distracted by my fun work.

Deciding where to do this has been a challenge in itself. Someplace that requires the least amount of effort and distraction, considering the weather and the amount of work that I should be doing. Someplace warm (we've been keeping the the thermostat low -- damn oil prices) and quiet. I'd love to go to the Brookline main library, it's really neat, but I'd have to pay for parking and that's a drag.

Y'know what? This is turning into the most tedious blog entry ever! I'm stalling! Enough typing! Time to go.

On Cysts & Politics, Part 3

I had intended this series of blog entries to be about how my health problems coincided with many other events inside and outside of my life.

Events like the election, my job, my decision to lose weight -- all culminating in an intensified desire to be more politically active.

But as is often the case, life got in the way. I'm so busy living my life, I just don't have time to write about it. Now that I've some time waiting for my next job, I figure I should catch up.

It has been four weeks since the diagnosis of my ovarian cyst. My doctor said the pain would go away after I had my period, and for the most part it did. However, after a nice stroll with Jane yesterday, I was once again doubled over with pain on my left side. I don't know what it is, or why it is happening. I know that I'm ovulating, so that's a factor. I also know that I haven't been terribly active the past several weeks. It's possible that the walk kicked up some residual fluid. Who knows?

Leave it to my mother to remind me of the connection between cysts and excess weight.

I know she’s not nagging. I know this is an issue. In the past I’ve considered making appropriate changes in my life in order to lose weight, but this recent episode has been a big alarm call. The bottom line is: I’m not healthy. And if I want to get pregnant as planned, I've got to drop some weight. I've enlisted JLew to be my personal nutritionist, and we are researching a suitable plan. It's a bit of a struggle, as she doesn't believe in diets per se, and also because she lived with an insecure, chronic dieter for ten years. But I think she sees that it's important to me, and I'm not doing it purely out of vanity. I've been going through old photos for a scrapbook I'd like to put together, and it's very apparent that I've put on a significant amount of weight since we've been together. When one is in a comfortable relationship, one tends to let these things go -- not that I was overly concerned about such things before I met JLew. But right now I feel like my weight is in the way of me living a more productive life.

It is strange that this realization should come now, in the midst of so much change -- not only in my life but the lives of those around me. Just about everyone I know is either changing jobs or experiencing health issues, emotional challenges, etc. And here I am, at the threshold of of a new job, a new perspective on my health and my roll in society.

The rest of my life is about to start. And I'm just waiting...waiting...waiting for the phone call from human resources, waiting for my pain to subside, waiting for the holidays to be over...waiting for the wait to be over.