The county’s juvenile justice program interviewed me for a network/user support specialist position today; I feel I acquitted myself fairly well on the technical questions, but couldn’t manage to put a good enough spin on why I got fired from my last job (they hired an individualist with Views into a department that highly values conformity) and resigned from the job-before-last (I got a supervisor I hated, my productivity went through the floor, I bashed head-on into several department regs, and quit just before they could fire me). Meantime, I sent in a redaction of my resume yesterday for a job with the state department of transportation. I’d submitted a resume as requested, and got a return email saying, in effect, “the hiring manager hasn’t got time to evaluate resumes and figure out who’s best qualified for the job, so you have to boil down your resume, answering our Statement of Knowledge and Skills point by point, and spoon-feed him the information.” This didn’t give me a greatly secure feeling concerning whether they have any clue of what they’re supposed to be about. I also got several forms from the school district to be filled out, supporting an application I sent them for a support job. I learned through the grapevine that it’s at least a positive sign they sent me the forms, and that it signals they’ll likely want at least an interview.
M was sent home from day care yesterday midday with a fever and rash, and it now looks as though she may have a light case of chicken pox. She has several pustules on one foot, one arm, and her trunk, and she’s being even crankier than normal. When I took her to the doctor yesterday afternoon, she shrieked herself into hysterics after the doctor looked in her ears; nothing about the procedure could have been painful, but afterward it took half an hour and a car ride before she howled herself to exhaustion and fell asleep in the car seat. It would have been hard for this to come at a more inconvenient time, with Moon and her son due here on Saturday to work on the drywalling and L trying to get the rooms cleaned out and the preparatory demolition done, which means she’s barely available for M, other than for periodic nursing.
This evening I finished digging up one of the front flowerbeds that had been overrun with grass and weeds, making it ready to put in a whole bunch of jonquil and oxblood lily bulbs that I’m moving from elsewhere in the yard. The bed needs compost (which I don’t have any of) added and fertilizing before I put in the bulbs, I think, because it’s ol’ nasty, sticky black clay that compacts to a brick-like consistency when it’s dry, and turns into gumbo when it’s wet. Apropos of fertilizer, I’ve been running the root feeder on my older crape myrtles, trying to get them to bloom, and on the pecans, trying to get them to set fruit this year (the last two years, my crop failed entirely).
