Catching up

The following will only be news to anyone who isn't my Facebook friend.

On a Friday in June 2012 I was fired by courier. It boiled down to a pissing contest with a newly hired VP. He told me to pull a network cable between two buildings during a thunderstorm. I refused, citing the absurdity of being 30 feet off the ground in a metal scissor lift during a lightning storm, and offered to do it the following day. His reply: "Put on your man pants and do it." I pointed out my lack of such a thing, and since he apparently had them it made him the better candidate, so he should take care of it himself. That got me fired. The truly ironic thing is I was going to turn in my resignation the following Monday when my boss returned from vacation. Instead I got to collect unemployment for six months and they were left without anyone who knew their IT systems. From the word that got back to me, I got the better end of the deal.

The reason I was quitting is because Myron and I were planning to move to Mexico in October 2012 and open a bed and breakfast. I spent the summer of 2012 getting the house ready to put on the market. We were talking to realtors when, in early November, we learned the Mexican government had passed sweeping changes to their immigration laws that made it much more difficult for us to move. Our plans were put on hold indefinitely.

In November 2012 Myron finally left his job of 38 years at the Medical University of South Carolina, and I floated along until my unemployment benefits ran out in December. I contemplated returning to the IT field, but I and couldn't bring myself to go back to a field that I had grown to despise. We spent 2013 traveling a lot and talking about what we would do next. Since I was home all the time and Myron was only working one job it was easy to get away and do things, and we visited friends in Tennessee frequently. I think the mountains grew on Myron and we started talking about running a B&B in western North Carolina.

After one of these trips last summer, Myron asked me if I wanted to go back to culinary school. My last experience was pretty disheartening so I thought about it for a while, and finally decided I would. I started at the Culinary Institute of Charleston in January 2014 and anticipate graduating in May 2015 with an Associate's Degree in Culinary Arts Technology.

For those who have followed me for a while, this blog is going to be almost entirely cooking-related from here on out. The only tech stuff will be me struggling to enter the modern world from the consumer side.