have been toying with the idea of coming back to this for a long time.  You can't imagine how many times I've started a faltering entry -- trying to describe what has happened in the last year and a half of my life -- only to lose the disc I saved it on, or just plain give up.  Hopefully this entry won't be of the same fate...

To truly get up to date, I need to go back even further than the missing 18 months.  I suppose it's possible to just read all of the previous entries -- assuming the links to them are even working anymore (something I'll have to check when I get a chance) -- but I can provide all of the important details here.

Somehow, way back in 1994, I found myself moving from Pittsburgh to San Diego for a job -- one I thought had a chance to be interesting, but one I mostly took because it was the only chance I had at employment.  I dragged my wife out there with me, even though she knew nobody and had nothing to do there.  (I still wonder sometimes why she didn't tell me to go jump in a lake....)

Anyway, it quickly became apparent that we didn't fit in out there.  My job was trivial (though it took up a lot of time), our apartment stank (sometimes literally) and we couldn't afford anything better with the crazy cost of living, and all of our family was 2000 miles away.  Oh, there were a few good points, like our church, good food, and some fun places to go (like the zoo), but we knew we had to get out as soon as we could.

It took over six years.

I finally found my dream job -- back in Pittsburgh, no less -- and before we knew it, in November 2000, we packed up all our stuff (and our infant son) and headed back to PA.  We bought a great house in a nice neighborhood, found a church we liked even better than the one in California, and our Little One was thriving -- everything was going perfectly.

You know what that means.

It was a Monday morning, somewhere around Halloween, when my boss asked if I had time to talk.  I was happy to get the chance, because things had been squirrelly there lately, and I knew there was a big reorganization looming (and probably layoffs, too), and I was hoping he’d tell me what I would be doing in the months to come.  I got up and followed him, right passed his office (where I expected we would talk), and right past a conference room (which was my second guess) – and it was then that the full reality of what was going on hit me.  I think my mind left my body right about then, because otherwise, I don’t think it would have allowed my legs to continue walking.

 I followed him into what was basically a vacant office (ironically, it was left that way from a previous round of layoffs).  There was an HR drone sitting there with stacks of papers.  I slumped into a chair, and my boss said, “Your position has been eliminated.  I’m sorry.”

 They went through all of the paperwork, passed me off to some outsourced career consultant who tried to give me a pep talk, and took me to clean out my desk under the watchful eye of yet another HR drone.  Then, at 10:30 on Monday morning, I was home.

 My ex-employer arranged for us to attend a free workshop on our career search.  Though I knew it wasn’t going to be pleasant, I went, figuring that I needed all the help I could get.  As expected, it was brutal.  I left there thinking that I would never have a job again (unless Eat-n-Park was hiring).  They said that we should be making about 30 contacts a week related to our job search, and talk to a total of 25 to 50 hiring managers.

 My total number of hiring manager contacts?

 One.

About a month into my search, I stumbled across a small, privately-owned company here in the Pittsburgh area.  They had exactly one opening for an engineer – and, well, I had exactly one opening for a company.  The interviews were a breeze, which is of course very rare for me.  In mid-December, I started my new job, while still receiving severance pay from my old place.  Two months later, I still love it here.

I always thought that I would enjoy working for a smaller company.  Actually, I have worked for a smaller company before, on summer breaks in college, and it was much more my kind of atmosphere.  But what I didn’t realize was how much better it is working for a private company.  One of the things they said to me during my interview was that they have never laid anyone off here.  I just about fell in love right there.  But you can tell that the employees are very important to the owner, because the benefits are great. Plus, they let me do (woo hoo!) software, even though I had basically no experience.

Oh, and they have a picnic at Kennywood every summer.  How can you beat that?  Sure, I won’t be getting rich from stock options or anything, but I’m not even going to go into what my 5,000 options were worth from my previous employer.  I thought I was going to be able to pay off my house with them when they vested – now all they’d be good for is wallpapering my basement.

The thing that surprised me the most about the whole job search ordeal is that I never really got discouraged.  Well, I did a couple of times, but I didn’t sink into the deep, prolonged depression that I would have expected from myself.  I don’t think I can take credit for that, though – my wife and my parents had literally dozens of people praying for me.  And after everything, I know we’re better off – the only thing I don’t like is that my commute is longer, but other than that, I’m having a lot of fun, and the stability is exactly what we needed right now.

I'm thoroughly convinced that God orchestrated this whole thing for me from the start.  There really is no other explanation.  I couldn't have devised a plan to work everything this much to my advantage if I tried.  We went to San Diego for a while, learned how to be ourselves, saved up some money (since we didn't want to buy a house out there).  Then, He found us a way to get back to Pittsburgh, back to our family, just in time for them to watch our son grow up, and just while the first company was thriving enough to move me across the country and help me buy a house – a total cost that I can only guess at being something like $20,000 – and then dumps me after not even a year.  Then I find a job I enjoy even more, like it was the one I was meant to have in the first place – but they probably wouldn’t have been able to relocate me (and to be honest, I wouldn’t have even thought of looking for a job at my new company if I hadn’t already been in Pittsburgh).  So when they say that “all things work together for good”, I can just chalk this up as yet another example.

So this basically is why I wanted to restart this journal.  There is one pastor in our church who is big on journaling, to keep up with your prayer life, your walk with God, all of that.  I'm not sure how much this journal will be spiritual (this entry is, I guess), and how much will be just plain goofy, but I do agree with how therapeutic it can be to write down your thoughts and feelings, and to go back years later and see how far you've come.