!2018Nov09 My work situation is in a state of flux, with my current
employer going out  of business by the  end of the year.  I need to
either find a job that pays well enough to stay here or else accept
that my  wife and I  will have to  relocate once again  - something
we've already done four times since 2011.

The cost of  living here in the greater Seattle  area is ridiculous
and my  background (quality  systems management  for manufacturing,
mostly large  castings and  forgings) isn't  well-represented here.
I'm  open  to working  in  other  industries  but I  haven't  found
anything yet  and I've been looking  for months now. More  than one
place I've  talked to had  a much  lower salary in  mind. Meanwhile
recruiters are  contacting me about  jobs in places  like Michigan,
Arizona, or  the deep  South, places  we have  no real  interest in
living.

I  have somehow  leveraged  a  bachelor of  fine  arts degree  with
concentrations in  printmaking (relief, intaglio,  lithography) and
photography into  a career  in quality assurance  for manufacturing
companies.  It began  with  doing 'document  control'  for a  steel
foundry and learning  by doing from there. Training  as an internal
auditor, becoming a process  engineer for molding castings, filling
in  for a  'temporary'  lack of  a  degreed metallurgist,  teaching
myself FMEA  and the  ins and  outs of ISO  9001 and  other quality
system standards.

I have  been involved in the  rigging and pouring of  20+ ton steel
castings and the  manufacture of fireams, parts that  go into space
and parts  that go into mining  and railroad equipment. If  you had
told me where I would be in twenty years when I graduated college I
would have thought you were stark raving mad. And yet here I am.

Right now though I just need a new job...

And so requesting asylum at circumlunar.space is a good distraction
from the chaos  that is my life in general.  Good on Solderpunk for
offering asylum  to the 'sundogs'. There  is a lot of  potential in
good old-fashioned  text-based networked information and  the world
may need  some escapes from  the corporatized internet if  we don't
figure out  how to restore  net neutrality for  commercial internet
access. We  may have to  figure out how to  hide in the  cracks and
crevices. Gopher and NNTP may be our new best friends.

This  space  may  well   ramble  on  about  photography,  politics,
computers, printmaking, books, quality  systems, and gods know what
else.
        
        NO CARRIER