Here it is:

Wife still loves me after all of the BS I dump on her nightly - I use her as a venting board when I come home from the crappy job (Info already posted in PHB and Jobs forums; too lazy to look up the links). Teenage daughter fights with younger son as you would expect. Got a house after living in an 2 bedroom apartment for 7 months, kids sharing an air mattress. Taxes on the house are $3.89 per $100 value, over 40% higher than what I had at the previous residence. Mortgage is $300 a month higher, even though I went with the cheapest monthly mortgage option of a 7 year balloon. Oh, and don't forget the $800 a year HOA dues.

Job is still nothing more than coding in VB and using MS SQL Server 7 and 2000, with an occasional stored procedure thrown in. No admin rights, so I can't improve the design of the databases or the integrity of the data. Resume has been on a few job boards since my shitty review May 2002; all of the sites combined have below 60 hits and no direct contact from anybody. Have cold-called over 2 dozen employment agencies in town and sent them my resume, but all reply "we have nothing that fits your background right now...call back in a few weeks." No luck with the half dozen mainframe recruiters scouring the country for the past year. The head of HR has told me that he's seen my resume on the Internet for months now, so he knows I'm looking (what did he expect after the BS put into the review?) Don't know when I'll ever get the opportunity to return home to Chicago before I'm old enough to retire. By them mom and my brother will probably be dead.

On a positive note, I've decided to do a self-study and get certified as a MS DBA. 4 exams at $150 a pop; who knows, maybe I can parlay that into a new gig somewhere in town, since night school for Java or ASP doesn't carry any weight to a recruiter unless you're a fresh off the campus college kid willing to work cheap. Even though it's MS, at least I have some opportunity to work with the product - can't do that if I go the Oracle route.

My daughter is a champion Girl Scout cookie seller: over 2150 boxes in the past 4 years. And she could have sold much more if the Houston area GSA put the boxes into the girls' hands, like she had the previous 3 years, instead of doing a pre-order and making people wait a month to get them. Son was the pack champion in the Boy Scouts Pine Wood Derby, so he goes on to the district races in April. Chance for a big trophy and bragging rights at monthly pack meeting.

With the clock ticking here at my present employer - followup review last month rehashed all of the crap from May 2002 review - wife went out a got a part-time job as a supervisor at a local Blockbuster for $8/hour. It will help cover the mortgage, but means she'll work 3 nights a week and Saturday nights. I'll have to handle more household chores and be home in time to watch them. Then once I get canned, I can stay home all day to job search and keep them in line.