How does the old saying go? “When other people lose their jobs, it’s a recession; when you lose yours, it’s a depression.”  Things just got depressing in our household. Our sole breadwinner just joined the newly unemployed. His company has been seeking funding for months (a startup), but hasn’t secured what they need. In order to remain viable while continuing the funding search, they’ve had to cut pretty deeply.

Folks who’ve seen my comments and diaries over the years know that we had a long, nasty patch of dual-unemployment, large COBRA payments, and two kids to feed a few years ago. It left us in a deep debt hole, which we have largely failed to climb out of, but slow, halting, painful progress was being made.

Since every 401k penny was drained last time, and paying down high interest debt takes precedence over investing, we don’t have to worry about losing our 401K to COBRA this time out, so that won’t be quite as much of a drag… heh.

So we’re back to about 50 places behind the starting line. With no health insurance. And 2 growing kids. We have no mortgage (no house either), but we have significant credit card debt, and our only car’s not paid off.

I’ve been looking for a while now, and have noticed that one does not even get auto-replies when you send in resumes. Most companies aren’t quite tech-savvy enough to have their mail server set up to automatically respond with boiler-plate indicating your resume has been received, and others are so inundated with applicants, they couldn’t possibly reply.  I talked to one company a while back (to find out if they’d received my resume, because their submission form glitched), they’d received 4000 resumes within 2 days of posting the job on CraigsList. It took a while to find mine in the mass of responses.

Oddly, I’m feeling pretty calm about it. I mean, we’ve been through this. It sucks, but at least we have a place to stay … we just won’t have health coverage and we may lose the car. If it lasts more than a month or two, we’ll have to file bankruptcy, ‘cuz the credit card bills are more than we can afford on unemployment. Oh, and we had a flexible spending account, which we used to pay for our son’s braces, but since it’s only 1/2 way though the year, we haven’t actually contributed the whole amount into the account, so we’re going to have to pay back about half of it.

The evil lilac season this year has made my asthma return with a vengeance, and the new version of the inhaler that keeps me alive is EXPENSIVE, and hubby was recently diagnosed with high cholesterol, so he’s got his new meds.

OK, I probably won’t be so calm in a few days.

I sure wish we had a national health plan right about now.

Dear Congress, Hint, hint…

I don’t really have anything profound to say. We’ve been standing on the razor’s edge for quite a while, and now we’re in free-fall. I’m not quite sure what the landing is going to look like, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be pretty.

Job leads appreciated (electro-optics, web-dev management, tech writing).