About a week ago, a Canadian reporter e-mailed to ask me a few questions about being a laid-off dad. I get these every so often, in spurts and drizzles, mostly because lately a lot more people have a lot more time to do things like Google "laid off dad." And I am the first thing you see when you do that. (Although I'm a little more proud of being listed as one of the things LOD stands for, right there with Large Organic Debris and Laparoscopic Ovarian Drilling.)
I don't normally answer these requests, because I think I've said all that there is to say about it. And truthfully, now that I've been working at my current job for five years (a record!), I'm not sure I remember much about the experience anymore. I mean, I wrote some of it down when I started this blog, but frankly, the memory is fleeting. Part of that stems from the last couple of years, which have taught me to keep my nose pointed forward.
Anyway, I answered this reporter because she knew all this. She'd done her research and realized I'm not laid off or married anymore. And when I left work and called her up, I ended up chatting for about 30 blocks. A very small subset of this chat appears here.
While I was talking, it hit me that my blog had turned six years old. (Well, technically it hadn't, because I hadn't written since before the birthday, June 1.) That's a long time. One blog year is like 20 dog years, so by that metric I've been writing since Reconstruction. In that time, blogs have emerged, erupted, plateaued, cratered, and been eaten by Twitter. She asked if I got to know people through my comments, and I had to admit that for the first year I didn't have any. I was just an HTML nerd hand-coding and FTPing my stuff through my dial-up ISP, while my thenwife made tallow candles by the hearth.
So anyway, now it's official. LOD is six. Cue the confetti.
