On Christmas

It’s Christmas once again, another year almost over, another year about to begin. I wish I could say it’s been a good year but that’ll take a heavy dose on self-convincing.

I had an accident at work last Wednesday that forced me out of work until my test results come back (unpaid). It was my first workplace screw up in my working carrier and it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. I was up for review to be brought on from Visron to Railplan. This would have increased my pay as well as given me badly needed benefits. Now I’m not sure if that’s going to happen.

Fortunately I was able to give my fiancé what she wanted for Christmas, though at the Wal-Mart brand level in order to conserve what few pennies we’ll have left after the rent gets paid. I hope she likes the wedding band anyway: it’s a five stone, 1/5 carat ring in 10 carat white gold. The stones are probably fake, though, since it’s from Wal-Mart. Maybe next year we can upgrade to something from Kay’s Jewelers.

Since we don’t have much money going north for my family or south for hers is out of the question. So here we stay. The positive is my friend, Tom, is having us over tonight for a Christmas dinner so we won’t be totally isolated. He’s going to be cooking a Spiral Ham while Jess will be doing a twelve pound turkey. I think we’ll have some leftovers for a while.

I start Germanna Community College in January, after switching from Northern Virginia Community College. I couldn’t sustain the time or money needed to travel between Culpeper, Manassas and Fredericksburg. I was filling up every day, spending up to four hours a day driving and sleeping only three or four hours a day. My new College is here in Culpeper which allows me to change my degree to Engineering from Business Management and allows me to take more classes in the day.

The political wrangling in Washington continues to show just how inept and out of touch our politicians are – in both parties and in both houses. While I’m not using this as a platform to advocate one way or another for any of their policies, I will say that the unemployed still hovers at 8.6%. In a poll released in November the authors noted that the drop from 9% wasn’t due to seasonal hiring. Being as it’s the season for seasonal hiring, I’m just not sure, after watching the numbers for the last three years employers suddenly decided to permanently hire so many people. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the unemployment numbers skyrocket again in January.

Housing continues to be in the doldrums, with foreclosures expected to ramp up now that the “robo-signing” thing has somewhat abated. This means more people out of their homes because of no work, further declines in home prices which means more people going underwater on their mortgages and less people being able to buy homes even if they do have the credit to do so.

I think on all levels, from me personally to us nationally, next year is going to prove to be another year of the same past three. And god forbid if Europe settles into a new recession…

But I guess for now I, as well as most of us, will just settle back for today, enjoy the time with our friends and family, and not worry about the past or what my happen in the future. That’s a story for another day; today is a story for today. I can convince myself of that, at least.

Merry Christmas.