2010!

Hi all,

I have not had much inspiration lately to write, I think I need to shake things up a bit.

The house process is driving me insane; slowly, but surely. Once again close of escrow date has been pushed back as the builder's financing end decides what type of loan they will or will not process. I had kept dealing with the madness because they had agreed to pay all closing costs, but at this point it has become ridiculous by any standard. I am likely going to go with an external lender that I had been working with. I am hopeful we can get through the process with some expediency, at this point closing sometime in February. Wish me luck.

Watching the photos of the earthquake in Haiti come pouring in, it is unimaginably horrific. Living near an active fault that is due for another big earthquake, it definitely stirs up the worst case scenario photos in my head. Granted, we have better construction standards here in the Bay Area and one would hope that I could get in my car and drive inland in some type of horrific emergency. It is a disturbing reminder though that human life is fragile and insignificant in comparison with the elements in which we live. *Note to self, I need to go through my earthquake preparedness kit and get new stuff for it.

School starts in the next couple of weeks. I am taking a US history course and an Oceanography course this semester. I did well in the fall, scoring 2 more A's in my critical thinking and literature classes. I expect to take a course over the summer and then start at Cal State East Bay in the fall. It is exciting to be almost done with my pre-reqs and moving on to my major courses. Based on my community college grades, I have guaranteed admission into Cal State. I am simply waiting for the final acceptance letter from them which I expect to arrive in the next month or so. I almost wish I could continue attending community colleges online as they are a lot cheaper! $26 a credit versus $200-300 at Cal State, so it's a big jump. I am not in any huge hurry to finish though, so I should have a bachelor's degree within five years by taking two courses per semester.

The city I work for has been engaged in a not-so-civil fight with the union that represents city workers. Traditionally, our city has offered a very generous compensation package; probably too generous. In any case, after union negotiations broke down this year, the city imposed a contract on us that forces city workers to pay for some health care costs and increased retirement costs. (I am still not altogether sure how a city can impose a contract on a workforce without us being allowed to strike, but that's another point of contention all together.) The biggest issue of the new contract however is that anyone hired with the city after July of this year has a drastically reduced retirement benefit in comparison with current city workers. The reduced benefit package has increased the retirement timeline of a few people in my department who are now due to retire at the end of May, 2010. Whereas before the city was able to attract lateral employees from other agencies around the Bay Area (like me in 2008), it is going to be very difficult to do this with our new reduced retirement package. The union and the city are due to start negotiating again within a few months to try and resolve the differences, but it is a bitter atmosphere right now. My department has also had a couple of new mothers leave and go to part-time status, so we are going to be very short staffed starting in June. Dispatcher positions are hard to fill and time consuming; between testing, interviews, background checks and more, it takes about a year and a half to train a line dispatcher. The training process usually ends up weeding out 30-50% of the people who get hired too, so these are not easy positions to fill even though the pay is generous. With the city's benefit package so disproportionately bad, we are just going to be training dispatchers for other departments at this point. We will spend approximately $100,000 per dispatcher in training only to see them leave in a year or two for another department. All the while, we (the current dispatchers) will be having to fill the overtime for five open positions at time and a half and costing the city even more money; it is an ugly cycle. I really like where I work, so I am hopeful that some type of compromise will be able to be reached that will allow us to hire people that want to stay with our department. For the next year to two years, Moi is going to be expected to work lots of overtime. It's nice in the pocketbook, but the work is definitely draining. Being locked up, even with people you like, for eleven to twelve hours a day wears thin.

Personally, not too much going on. I got down to Mexico at the beginning of December and had a lot of fun exploring Puerto Vallarta, Tequila, and Guadalajara. I am heading to New York in April with my parents for a few days and then (hopefully) to Europe at the end of May. So lots to look forward to travel-wise, as always. Also the Olympics are coming up, is everyone excited? British Columbia is gorgeous and Canadians are such great people, these games should be fantastic.

Sorry for not keeping up with the blog as much as I should, but c'est la vie. Hope you are all doing well. Cuidate.