I have a job!

(Greetings from God's own county, Yorkshire, where I'm on holiday and visiting friends.  I may publish some photos with comentary later but, firstly, some good news!)

I have a job and will be starting on Monday.  At least three agencies mentioned one particular engineering company to me, saying they were expanding.  It was serendipity.  Not only had they purchased the highway's maintenance division of one of my earlier employers (WSA) in 2013 but, in a twist of fate, my new boss very nearly became my boss at WSA 10 years ago.  I left WSA in December 2006.  My old boss resigned in April 2007 and my new boss (NB) took that job, working there until he was made redundant.

Actually, I think that is why I got an interview.  NB didn't have a vacancy to fill but he wanted to meet the woman who was responsible for implementing a certain billing system in his old business when he saw it on my CV.  In fact, it was one of the first things he mentioned.  I jokingly apologised, saying "Yes, it was all my fault" before mentioning that while I'd scoped out the parameters, tested the system and parallel run the system, it was RD who had tailored it for us from the original system he'd built for a rail joint venture.  I gave credit where credit was due, which seemed to impress him.

In most respects, it was more of a chat than an interview.  This was a sounding out, similar in many ways with the first interview I had at my most recent employer.  (When they first saw me, they didn't have a job to fill either but they liked me so found me a project.).  I was asked questions about what I'd done and my skills, along the lines of "We may need to do xxx.  Can you do that?".  We also discussed the business and the UK divisions.   We talked about their safety culture and how it intermeshed with the one I'd worked in for nearly 10 years.  I asked about their performance metrics (Yay!  They don't use billability.).  By the time I left their offices, I was sure I had a job if they could figure out how to justify it.  (In fact, as he showed me out, the second interviewer told me that if it was down to him, he'd offer me one on the spot.).

The job offer, when it came through, was for an initial three month contract.  Given that they didn't really have a vacancy, just a lot of tasks that need doing, this makes some sense.  They really want to secure my services for something.  I don't know my job title or what I'll be doing.  They actually wanted me to start on the 12th - even though I had holidays booked for this week (last week of September) - but I had to get my permanent residency visa updated to a biometric one, thanks to new legislation, so my start has been delayed.

Wish me luck on Monday.

- Pam

Tales of the Unemployed

If we aren't connected on Facebook then, chances are, you won't have heard my latest news.  My job finished on 5th August.  I was "restructured" out of the company.  It wasn't my choice;  I wasn't given much notice; and the business I looked after didn't have any say in the matter.  In fact, I had to break the news to their senior management.  (Being Finance, the line management that determines your fate and the people for whom you are actually working are frequently totally disconnected.)

Dark, God bless him, came down from Manchester to ensure I wasn't alone on my last day, took me out to lunch and made sure my sense of self didn't feel too battered. He is the most wonderful friend.  With his unerring sense of timing, he'd phoned me just after I'd got home on the day my boss broke the news to me and I cried all over him.  

It was the end of a brutal couple of weeks.  Definitely, the hardest part about leaving was saying goodbye to people.    Because I'm me (and conscientious), I wrote handover notes for whomever will pick up the work afterwards, and I made sure my business boss (Our Man in the Middle East) has copies.  I handed over my projects to someone I can trust to look after them properly.  I couldn't just walk out the door, leaving people who depended on me in the lurch.  (My line manager, on the other hand....)

Since then, I've spent the last two weeks licking my wounds and trying to figure out a way forward.  I have never not worked.  The plan of attack has been:-

1.  Update my CV, which I hadn't done since 2011.  It's been drafted and redrafted, and then summarised.  (The latter was the hardest part, so I enlisting the help of a friend who writes CV's for the National Careers' Service. Thanks Eva.)  
2. Updated LinkedIn.  At some point over the last few years, they deleted the job details I'd laboriously put up in ?2012, leaving only the headline job titles.
3. Signed on with the DWP/Job Centre.  No, I don't need the derisory £73 per week they'll be paying me as contribution based Job Seeker's Allowance but this was a point of principle.  I've paid into the system for 27 years, I'm entitled to the money.  Also, I want the NI "stamps" that come with it, which will go towards my state pension.  (I will probably rant about this in another post, later.)
4. Contacting agencies.  I have contacts at several so have been gradually dropping them all emails.   Two are putting me forward for jobs as I type;  a third, I shall see next week. I spent Friday morning meeting with three recruiters at the one agency, who were really positive about the job market for accountants in the Thames Valley.
5. Working out how to eek out my payoff.  I've got savings and a reasonable payoff coming to me a the end of the month, but my "hope for the best, plan for the worst" conscience tells me it could take considerably longer than I expect to find a new job that will pay me what I think I'm worth.  I've shut down everything I can think of:  the ISA savings; the share investments; the money being set aside for holidays; Audible subscription, etc.   The only things I'm committed to contributing to are the joint account for the mortgage/household bills and the housekeeping.  I reckon I can eek the payoff out to last a year without having to sell off any shares or raid my existing savings.
6. Working out what do with the money.   Beyond picking a savings account into which to shove it all for now, this is still at the daydream stage.  Each month, I'll transfer back the minimum I need to pay my share of the household expenses.  As to whatever is left after I get a new job, well, at the moment, I'm tempted to put it all into an FTSE100 tracker.
7. Spending my profits from the Employee Share Save Scheme.  Under the rules of the scheme, I had to either sell or transfer my shares from the scheme manager when I left the company. I'm currently sitting on a 44% profit so have decided to sell.  As agreed with DH, this profit will be my "mad" money, to spend without inhibition on whatever I fancy.  I'm thinking of spending it on a multi-fuel stove for the lounge, a new "fake Aga" for the kitchen (my beloved stove is 16 and showing its age), and getting my sewing machine serviced.  Probably not what he had in mind, when he suggested I have some mad money, but hey...
8. Figuring out what to do with my days.  This is actually quite hard.  I don't know how to be "a housewife".   I have never been unemployed.   I've been in continuous employment since 1992.   Even when I didn't have a job before then, I did agency nursing.  Without the Olympics or the European Football Championships to keep me entertained (as they did when I was stuck at home with my foot), day time television is mindblowingly boring.   I've started a daily To Do List, just so that I don't become completely zombified by TV and, instead, actually achieve some things.

- Pam

Knitting as the wild side

It's been a long time since I've written a knitting post.  You may have noticed that the picture has finally changed in the right side-bar - the previous jumper shown was finished in October 2013!  I've actually knitted three jumpers and a cardigan since then, several hats, multiple pairs of socks, several pairs of fingerless mitts and two Five Hour Baby Sweaters.

I am currently knitting totally off piste.  Oh, I have years of adapting old patterns to fit me but this is different.  The pattern Entertain in This was impossible to adapt. Initially I was astonished to discover that it didn't quote gauge - no mention of a knitting tension at all.  When I read through it, I realised that the reason no gauge was quoted was because all the shaping was done via changing needle sizes, so they'd have to quote at least five different gauges!  Seriously, the needles used range from 2.75mm for the welt to 5mm for the majority of the body.  There is no way on this earth that the Drops Alpaca I'm using would cope with 5mm needles.

Anyway, at that point, I gave up trying to adapt the pattern and decided to just copy the design features:  the frilled collar and cuffs, and the nobbles.  However, when I knitted the nobbles - purl 5 into the stitch on one row, knit 5 together on the next - they didn't show up.  The alpaca halo overwhelmed them.  Time to grit my teeth and try something I've never done before:  knitting in beads.  

(There are two ways to knit with beads:  the first involves threading dozens of the fiddly things onto your knitting yarn and sliding them down it periodically as you knit.  It really only works on small items, or when you have one beaded section, since all the yarn you will knit with will be pulled through the unused beads.  Completely not feasible for a garment or for anything knitted with a halo, upon which the yarn may catch.  I did this method for the first time at a class in October, at the Knit & Stitch Show at Ally Pally.   The second method is something I knew about by repute but I'd never seen it until I looked it up on YouTube:  using a tiny (1mm) crochet hook to pull your next-to-be-knitted stitch through your bead, so that the bead forms a shank on it.  That's what I mean when I say "knitting in beads".)

Much to my surprise, given how beaded knitting is one of the holy grails of knitting, it is easy!  A little fiddly certainly, particularly as the hole in the beads aren't uniform, but really easy.   Pretty, too!  Take a look:

Believe me, it is harder to take a photo that accurately reflects the colour of the yarn than it is to knit in beads!  It's meant to be a dark blue with purple tones.

Neither of these photos are blue enough, although the latter is closer.

- Pam (only one scary knitting technique left to try - entrelac.)

Today is the first day of the rest of your life

Every day is a new start.  The past is prologue - you can't change it but you can change what happens now.  I think that is why we imbue this day, 1st January, with so much importance.  Why else do we make New Year's Resolutions?

Sometimes, I think that is part of the problem.  We give the New Year so much baggage:  "this year, I will be thin"; "this year, I will get straight A's in all my subjects"; "this year, I will get out of debt/earn a fabulous salary/save £100,000" (all while netting £2.50/hour or something similar); "this year, I will meet the man of my dreams", etc.  Frankly the expectation for virtually all New Year's Resolutions is  "this year, I will turn my life around and it will be wonderful from New Year's Day onwards...",  Of course, change can't happen that quickly but, when we get to the second or third week of January and wonderful things haven't happened, we feel like a failure.  Failure is built into the equation from the beginning.

One of my friends posted on Facebook earlier today "Best part of 2016 so far??  Reminding everyone that we have 366 days to make a difference instead of 365.  Make a difference!!!"   This is what I've been pondering all day:  how can I make a difference in 2016, both to my life and to others?  I have decided to set some very specific goals, rather than woolly resolutions, in order to make a difference.

16 Challenges for 2016

1). Run the Sports Relief Mile in Osterley on 20th March.  I've already signed up and Howard has agreed to run it with me.  We've set a modest fund raising target and hope to exceed it.  (I'll post a link closer to the time.). Since I can barely run 100m, this will involve training every workday morning - getting up at 5am - except when I'm travelling.  I will use the www.mapmyrun.com app to track my progress, as well as my Fitbit.

2).  £50 February.  Yes, I've decided to try again.  Will you join me?

3).  The weight challenge.  I want my UK size 12 clothes fit me, comfortably.  Right now, some do, some don't. I reckon ending the year weighing 9st10lb or less will do the trick. 

4).  The strength challenge.  Every workday morning I will do the 7 Minute Workout, which is a free app available for iPhone and iPad (not sure about Android).  I should be able to fit this into my routine after my new daily run.

5). The language challenge.  Resume my daily sessions on Duolingo to learn French.  (I took a break over Christmas.)  It takes about 10 minutes to work my way through the requisite 2 modules a day.

6).  Knit From Stash 2016.  This year, I will not go totally "cold sheep", instead I will limit my purchases to 10 balls of yarn for a sweater and 4 balls of yarn for socks/other presents.

7).  The other knitting challenge: to knit - and finish - four sweaters in 2016.  (This is theoretically possible.  In my most productive year, I knit six.). This will be on top of my regular production of six pairs of socks per annum.

8).  Fashion on the Ration.  Yes, once again, I will try to stick to 66 coupons as dictated by the 1941 clothing regulations.  This covers yarn purchases, too, but not items bought for household use.

9). To get my sewing machine serviced and to use it to make an outfit from my fabric stash.  (Yes, of course, I have a fabric stash.  What were you thinking?)

10).  To read 16 books in 2016.  Should be doable.

11).  The vegetable garden challenge.  I hereby commit to planting seeds in February, for planting out at the end of March.  If that doesn't happen, then I will call this challenge a failure then and be done with it.

12).  To move into the back bedroom and sort out the wardrobe issue.  

13).  To audition for a solo in the ECS 2016 carol concert.   I am a lazy musician.  This will help me be a better one.

14).  The friendship challenge.  I have lots of friends, some of whom I do not see or communicate with very often.  The challenge is to write a personal email to a different friend each month

15).  The entertaining challenge.  In conjunction with challenge 14 above, I want to have friends over for a meal 12 times in 2016.  I am not going to aim for once a month because some months this won't be possible, whereas in others it will be possible to entertain twice.

16).  To blog 16 times in 2016.

What will you do to make a difference in 2016?

- Pam