Antarctica Starts Here.

Welp. Here we go again.

If you haven't been paying attention to social media lately (and for the sake of your mental health, I hope you haven't - ye gods, the world...) I got laid off in the last week of October without warning. A not entirely unprecedented early morning meeting rapidly turned into being told that my position was being eliminated, effective immediately. This was immediately followed by my work laptop and phone factory resetting themselves, while I was in the middle of typing a "so long and thanks for all the fish" message to my now-ex-cow-orkers. ¹ So, I'm back on the job market once again with all that entails. Since that day I've been updating my resume' and looking for a new job in all the usual places. Lots of pulling wires, too. I've no idea how long it's going to take to find a new job, in part because this is the beginning of the holiday season and just about everybody's wrapping stuff up for the year.

And, of course, because the holidays are beginning that means that there's a whole bucket of anxiety and worry that comes along with it. Most of all how it kicked our health insurance into a cocked hat. COBRA is a clusterfuck of bad timing, waiting on reimbursements, waiting on paperwork to go through, and the odd panic attack when I go to pick up a prescription and the price is astronomical. ² We can handle it for the foreseeable future, we've got savings and backup plans in place but that doesn't mean that it's not stressful. I've had a couple of things that I've wanted to write about for the last few weeks, but... it's just not there. Writing just this much text has taken me the better part of four hours, and it's just two paragraphs. I've got stuff about playing around with Wayland on Windbringer, something from a discussion I had a while back that I'm trying to turn into a somewhat intelligent post, some stuff about using Cryptpad for the last few months, even some photo sets from a couple of concerts this year but they're all stuck somewhere between anxiety and shell shock. And the holidays are coming up, with all of the monetary costs those entail. ³

I'll figure it out. It sucks but I'll figure it out.