Where is my head at these days? All over the place, it seems. I’ve been finding it difficult to find a focus, what with multiple areas of life all demanding my attention. I’ve been so scattered that even to sit down and compose a little blog entry has been an over-the-top challenge.

I guess I have to admit that my primary mission in life lately (given that I’ve returned to, and am maintaining, an acceptable level of health) is conducting my job search. It goes on and on and on…

For example, I interviewed at another Oregon community college just over two weeks ago. This happens to be a position and a place that, at least on the surface, feels like the perfect fit for me. I thought the interview day went quite well and had hoped to hear something (e.g., a job offer!) by now. No such luck. I received an email from the college’s VP a couple of days ago informing me that the search committee was “gathering more information” and that she hoped there would be a decision sometime in the next three weeks.

Holy Ambivalence, Batman! Three WEEKS more!

It sure has me wondering what’s up, up there!

For now, all I can do is continue with the process and, to the best of my ability, trust it. I had a phone interview with a college in the Northeast U.S. this morning, and have another one with a campus in the Southwest next week. I feel like a politician repeating his stump speech over and over and over again. I need to keep reminding myself no matter how familiar my stories are to me, that this next interview group has never heard them before.

Another thing constantly on my mind, that is when I’m not obsessing over the fact that I don’t know where I’m going to be working in the near future, is my photography. As you have learned, I have an entirely new primary camera body and lens these days and new software to go along with it. I’m trying to be patient and teach myself Nikon Capture NX, which actually seems to be going well. However, my patience with the other Nikon product, PictureProject, totally ran out some time back. I think that, basically, it’s pretty worthless. Fortunately, I found a replacement that I’m entirely delighted with, namely Photo Mechanic. This is an incredible piece of software that is going to make managing my ever-growing collection of digital photos much easier.

And, then there’s getting out of the house to actually take photographs. I’m continuing to make time for that, and though I’m tightly scheduled, it feels really good to be back “out there.”

Of course, I haven’t even mentioned that I still am required to show up at a real job every day and expected to make a difference. To the best of my ability, I’m attempting to do that. Just today we finished the first week of spring term, my last full academic term in this location…and it was intense. There were lots and lots of fires to put out, so I ran from one to the other as best I could. Whew, am I glad this week is over with!