Four Days

Employment:
In four days, I won't work for this company. I'm a little sad about that, though my insight extends to realizing that its not so much the company being a paradise on earth -- its actions here show that that's not the case -- as that I simply don't like change, let alone change forced upon me. In about ten days, I'll go out to Saint Louis to meet with people from the company I'm talking to about a job. Assuming no surprises about the nature of the job, I'm thinking that its about 55% likely I will not accept it, and 45% that I will. The pivotal point will be travel. I doubt they can pay me enough to accept any level of travel; as I'm thinking of working a maximum of five years, and most likely considerably less, that wouldn't make an overwhelming change in our net worth. (A change, yes, and a welcome one -- just not enough to swing the balance.) I'm willing to travel about half the time, whether that works out to Monday out/Friday back for two weeks of the month, or some collection of shorter trips. I told my wife (not sure if I should mention this to them) that if they wanted me to travel overseas, or to places I'd like to see, such as Canada, I'd be a little more amenable to traveling (Bill, want to go to northern England for a while? Greece? Australia? Well....OK.) I doubt that will happen, though. I think this job includes the possibility of that kind of travel, but not lots of it. We'll see.

Dental:
On the plus side, my jaw feels better -- I actually ate a mayo on rye sandwich (one of my favorites from when I was a kid), which I couldn't do about a week ago. On the other, I keep getting this weird taste somewhere in the back of my throat/nostrils, on the same side as where the jaw's been aching. I know I'm a bit of a hypochondriac; as I said to my wife, phrases like 'post-operative infection due to a damaged sinus coincident to a bungled extraction' comes to mind. When she pointed out that I didn't have a fever, I said 'sub-mucal blood loss due to nicked sinus, resulting in intermittent blood pressure drop'. She just looked at me.

So we went for a drive (in the van, not the Prius, or as we've taken to calling it, the golf cart; I wanted comfort), and stopped at a fairly high end cooking supplies store not too far from here. I always enjoy poking around in there, where my reaction to most of the tools is 'who the heck would use that?" and my reaction to the foodstocks is usually 'Yum!'