As the remaining days in November count themselves down, I’m trying to keep busy and explore all options to find a salaried job. As social media is trumpeting everywhere, now that the algorithms know I’m looking, it’s a brutal market. Talking with my brother-in-law, a recruiter based in Kansas City, I asked what I might be doing wrong, and he told me I wasn’t making any mistakes—it’s just that the bots are the gatekeepers and it takes an Act Of God to get through to a human, in a time when recruiters are getting flooded by hundreds of applicants in a single day.

So I decided to put the bots to work for me and set up a trial plan with ChatGPT so that I could create an agent. The idea is to have it look at a list of job aggregators, other NGO’s careers pages, and industry websites every morning to find new listings, compare them to the skills and experience on my resume, rank them, and set up a draft cover letter I can then rewrite as a human being. From what I’m being told, being among the first to respond is key, so every morning at 6AM it’ll run a check and hopefully good things will appear. Meanwhile, I’ve had several folks from work reach out and offer to put me in touch with their friends, which I’ve graciously accepted.

Yesterday I filed the official paperwork for Dugan Heavy Industries, LLC and got an EIN number from the government. The next big step will be to study for and take the MHIC license test to be a real live contractor, and secure some form of insurance so that I can hit the bricks and start generating cash with my hands. In the early 90’s, when I was flying by the seat of my pants, I had no license, liability or health insurance, and was paid in cash. I did it that way for three years—and in that time I learned how to do basic electrical, gutted and refinished a bathroom, stripped asbestos shingle off a house (I did wear a respirator for this), insulated several houses, roofed a house, and painted a dozen more. By some miracle, the IRS never came after me. I should have operated my consulting practice as an LLC but never did, and by some miracle that worked out too. I’m not going to tempt the universe again.

In the meantime, I’m unwinding thirteen years of files, passwords, accounts, and equipment down at work. It seems like every time I think I’ve got a handle on stuff I find other things I need to archive or shift ownership of; Dropbox was a big blind spot until yesterday when I remembered I had a whole directory of stuff online that I’d forgotten about.

At home, I’m making myself handy as the universe has been quietly deciding now is the time for that thing to break. Jen baked some delicious ginger/lemon/cinnamon bread last night, but it took longer to bake than it should have, because the oven wasn’t holding a constant temperature. Today I pulled it out from the wall and removed the back panel to test the temperature sensor with a multimeter. Turns out the sensor was completely fried, so the oven had just been guessing the whole time. The Jungle Site will have a $14 replacement on our front step by tomorrow at 8AM, and it should be a simple task to install and button everything back up. (I also took the opportunity to clean the floor under the stove, which was gross).

In the afternoon, they’re going to drop off a thermostat housing and lower radiator hose for the OG-V, which has been slowly piddling blue coolant onto the driveway for a week or so. Yesterday I drove it up on Dad’s old ramps, removed the front air dam and peeked up into the crowded engine bay to identify the source. After wiping the thermostat dry, I let it sit overnight and looked it over this morning. From what I can tell there’s no liquid leaking anywhere above the housing, so I took a gamble and spent $35 on the two parts. I think it should be pretty simple to swap in, and then we’ll see if she keeps peeing the bed.

Probably the hardest part of this new normal so far is simply telling myself, don’t buy that. I look around and see things that need to be fixed, which usually requires a purchase of some kind, but I’m trying to be as frugal as possible until we get some sense of how things are going to shake out. I’ve spent the last five years or so not worrying about money as much as I did for the first 50 years of my life, and now I’m back in that post-college mindset of keeping an eye on every penny. I’ve always been fiscally conservative (e.g., cheap), but it’s the stability I’m going to miss the most, I think.