I'm calling this blog Catmint because catmint is one of the few things that have grown successfully at our home. Two of the others are Richard Brown and Catherine Brown. But Rik will be off to London in a couple of weeks to start a new job, and Catherine will most likely be heading off to university in a few short months' time. So even though I know they're fledged and need to fly, maybe this site will be a way to keep in touch.
Even the cat would agree with the first sentence, and she's hard to please.
Meanwhile, today is another waiting day. Dave is waiting for the independent examiner to report on his dispute with Peak and Northern Footpaths Society, as he has been since the row blew up in October - a senseless and totally needless waste of time and charitable resources, which should have been sorted out before it started by four simple words, Talking To Each Other, but which has left him, as the wrongfully accused party, feeling humiliated, angry and underemployed.
I am underemployed too, and waiting/hoping for work. Plain Language Commission work has dwindled as our public-sector customers are suddenly penniless - another collateral of the economic crisis. Academic editing only happens sporadically. Ostensibly there are hundreds of freelance writing jobs on sites like Freelancer.com, vWorker or Gumtree, but most of them turn out to be article spinning for internet marketing purposes, which is foreign to me (being middle-aged) in every way. And I am naively surprised at the number of people wanting to buy ready-made theses and dissertations. I do keep applying for anything that looks more interesting/ethical, and I sign up to job-search sites, but I find it difficult as self-marketing doesn't come naturally to me, and nothing has come of it so far. I've had it too easy for too long with Plain Language Commission, as demand had come in steadily over the past 12 years without me having to do anything but deal with it.
However, there are thousands of people in much more critical states of unemployment.
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