Outta my mind on Monday moanin'

Yet another installment...

Good moanin' - Mandatory reading: go straight over here and read some incredibly powerful stuff from my 2nd most favorite German Lutheran, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In light of recent events in Catholic circles, this is especially timely. (Thanks to Poor Mad Peter for the hat-tip!)

Good moanin' - the date is now set: I should become an official employee of Hewitt Associates on December 12th. I had two "interviews" (with my boss and her boss) and their only concern was that I was being hired in "below my skill set." Of course, they don't know that I'm being hired in well above my subsistence level for the last eighteen months. Thank you, God, for another fresh start.

Moanin' - however, the downside is that because the Hewitt bureaucracy was running like most bureaucracies (slowly and methodically), my health insurance was scheduled to run out before my new group policy would kick in. So I called the firm, and said, "So, if I renew my policy for another quarter, and pay the $700 premium, if I get a new job in the interim, can I cancel the policy and get a partial refund?" The response back was basically, "If you're not going to be a student, you're not eligible for the insurance - period. The only reason we renewed the policy in the first place was because it looked like you were going to be a student again." (Whoops.) So I get to be really, really careful over the next seven days... may saints and angels surround me!

Good/moanin' - both good and bad news. Good news: while I was in Ohio, I picked up what look to be my Christmas decorations. (I brought the artificial tree back at the end of October.) Bad news - it looks like there's at least one box (perhaps more) that didn't make it to Sue & Jeff's new place. I don't know whether it got tossed in the moving-Sue-n-Jeff melee a year ago, or if it got relabled and is in my basement somewhere, mismarked as something else. Now if I can just get my apartment straightened up enough to have some folks over for dinner and tree decorating...

Good/moanin' - while I still have drafts coming into my apartment from places I can't really pinpoint, the 3M window covering film (thank God for whoever invented that stuff!!) seems to have stopped the worst of the winter gales, which were entering through the kitchen windows (the upper halves of which were painted nearly-closed, but not completely closed). So now the furnace is only running frequently, instead of nearly-continuously. Progress, not perfection, I guess...

One reason I have not been posting much lately has been an ongoing dramatic slowdown in my Internet connection. By this morning, it was so severe, the WOW! service speed test showed that my download speed was only 3 kbps. (Dial-up service would have given me at least 48kbps...) I did the usual - installed the latest browser update (new Firefox 1.5!), cleared my cache and history, done everything I'd known to do. In a burst of inspiration this morning, I remembered that while I had rebooted the PC repeatedly, I hadn't restarted the modem or router in all this process. Once I did that, and got the router reinitialized, shazzam! Back to broadband speeds again. Woo-hoo!

Blessings ahead - my buddy Eric Amundson is coming into town Thursday night! He's got a business meeting out in the northwest suburbs (Hoffman Estates, to be exact), so he'll come in Thursday night, and head back home Friday afternoon. It will be great to see him.

That's it - I'm already starting off the week by going to bed WAY too late (early) - but I want to get back in the habit of posting more regularly...