Okay, I know I haven't been much of the blogger lately; I just haven't been feeling the writing love. But I've taken matters into my own fingers by checking out a couple of creative writing/writing for self-discovery books from the library and beginning to write at least ten minutes a day in a special Sark journal that Courtney gave me for my birthday last year. I think this is going to help. It feels constructive.

I wonder if maybe I've been in a funk these past few weeks. To inspire myself out of this possible funk, I additionally checked out a couple of career-hunting books. One of them is the What Color Is My Parachute? book, which I first encountered 12 years ago just before I graduated with my A.A. degree. The edition at the library is almost 10 years old. The edition I read way back when wasn't particularly helpful, but I thought maybe circumstances might have changed, so I'm giving it another shot. It supposedly has helped 6 million people.

I'm worried, though, that I will be the odd one that can't be helped. Which brings me to yesterday and the two hours I spent taking career exploration tests on the Arizona workforce site. The results are supposed to assist me in my hunt, highlighting my interests, work values, and occupations that would work well for me. For the "interests" test, I answered 180 questions designed to determine my work interests, marking my answers: like, unsure, or dislike. By the end of the test I had only marked 5 likes, 21 unsures, and 154 dislikes. My overall score for the various categories was 4 out of 30 for social, 1 out of 30 for investigative and zero for everything else. How depressing is that? This leads me to believe that my calling in life may be to live the lush life through constant retirement.

I'm not really sure how retirement is sustainable for me, since I'm pretty much broke and still have those nagging responsibilities such as rent, utilities, and food to pay for. So despite the answers clearly pointing to a decision of continual retirement, I am persevering in my job hunt and applying for jobs that I'm under qualified for (academic advisor, for instance) or that I'm over qualified for (administrative assistant, for instance).

Moving onto a less discouraging subject for me, I think I'll mention the autumn weather trends. This is encouraging for me to mention because Bisbee's forecast for today is a high of 75 degrees and a low of 51 degrees, while in Madison the forecast is a high of 45 degrees and a low of 33 degrees. In Fort Collins, the high is supposed to reach a whopping 38 degrees and the low is projected to be 27 degrees. I'm feeling pretty pleased to hunker down over the winter in this little weather haven. Since I'm mentioning weather, Vallejo is only forecasted to be 10 degrees lower than Bisbee today, which I guess isn't bad if you're currently in a snowy city, but it still seems a bit chilly for me (and they're looking at getting rain in the next couple of days). Their low for tonight is only a few degrees below ours.

I'm feeling better already!

I think I may have more to mention later on, but that's it for now.