Nothing like a career shift to readjust one's perception

First, thanks to everyone for your concern. Mrs. FE's doing much better, except for the part of seeing more of me around the house. And I've felt a lot better with regular sleep - forgot what it was like to get seven hours a night.

I've also embarked on a fiction-writing career, or was that my resume? Fourteen years and nine months in the journalism biz. Damn shame, because I enjoyed doing it. I'll cry about it in a few more years, but it still hits hard when you spent that much time in a profession and have to leave it.

After I posted about my new job, I got another offer two days later with better benefits. Being a black-hearted, mercenary sort, I accepted and start next week. If all goes well, next week I'll be getting some of my state tax money back with 34 weeks of paid-tuition programming training starting in January. It's weird having covered all these programs and now to be starting one. Nothing like a workout for one's sense of irony.

And - not having to worry about laying out a weekly paper that draws the scorn of semi-illiterate, hateful, old, pseudo-patriotic blue-haired Daughters of the American Revolution and/or Confederacy - I've been able to let my thoughts wander a bit.

Listening to National Public Radio one morning, I heard a spot on linguistic heritage that reminded me why British aircraft manufacturers have always been far more literate and poetic than their American counterparts.

Case in point: the announcer launched into a brief discussion of the word 'welkin,' which happens to be a derivative of the old English world for cloud. As my synapses are wont to do, they provided a mini-epiphany answering the question I've had for decades - why in hell this was named as it was.

I think even Vicus might agree with me on this one.

I'm going back for another piece of mince pie now. Sorry if I haven't been able to post comments on your pages lately. My version of XP seems to have a twitch in it that keeps some comment pages from opening properly, but I'm overhauling another computer and should have full smartass capability back soon.