A LETTER FROM LINDA DUNN by Linda Dunn
Consider this sort of the equivalent of one of those awful Christmas cards that you get from frieds, filled with glorious news of their son's acceptance at Yale and their daughter's marriage to a multi-millionaire coupled with their win of the lottery and recent trip to the Carribean.
This news brief isn't quite as cheerful.
We're still on the Priority Placement Program but only locally. Greg decided he'd rather forfeit the pension, lifetime health insurance, and job security in favor or being able to continue doing engineering work. He had a good shot at a transfer to Jacksoville, FL and decided against it. The goverment offers job security but the type of jobs that are available are such that you feel more like you're being imprisoned than changing jobs. Also, you have no control over where you're sent. We could wind up living a thousand miles apart. I remembered Steve Bridge and Angalee. I remembered my friend Lyn, who just filed for divorce from her husband of 18 years after his transfer out-of-state. I looked around and realized darn near everyone I knew who lived apart eventually separated permanently. At this point, I decided it was better to forfeit the job and stay together.
Fingers are crossed for Hughes picking up both of us. If not, I guess I can always go back to factory work. {blah!}
Hughes expects to hire 2,154 people and there are 2500 of us (counting about 300 temporaries hired after the closure announcement). Not all jobs will be filled in January. Some of us will be left dangling until March. For the sake of what's left of my sanity, I hope we both get picked up early.
For those who have heard about the wonderful "pension portability" package. Let me tell you how it works: We get COLA in our pension if we forfeit our severance pay. Given that we're not covered by social security and this retirement fund is subject to political whims (Clinton's borrowed from it twice), it sounds like a much better idea to take the severance pay. That's a sure thing. The idea is to set aside the severance pay into a survival fund because we really, really, don't expect this job to last until our retirement.
That's one reason I'm taking magic courses at IUPUI. Calculus, Statistics, and other pure magic. I know it's magic because the professor draws a formula on the board and then gets the expected results. If that's not magic, I don't know what is.
Like Dave and Robin, we also had storm damage. Not nearly as dramatic but we discovered in the course of investigating this that our siding was installed wrong. We had the siding removed and re-installed. This is not as simple as it sounds. If any of you have seen the movie, "The Money Pit", then you've got an idea what this summer has been like. We're still waiting on a new floor for my son's room. [He left for college -- the carpet was impossible to salvage -- my allergies are worse -- we voted for fake wood flooring.]
Things got worse as we tried to prepare for the coming school year. Last year, we had extensive problems with the school over the "ten days and you lose all credit" policy re: surgeries and ilnesses. The daughter decided she wanted to be homeschooled and we said, "No way."
To make a long story short, we are now homeschooling while working full-time. After extensive conversations with the school and arrangements to have Toni declared a "homebound student" so she wouldn't experience the problems she had last year, they called us two weeks into the school year and said basically, "Sorry. We misunderstood the program." In a nutshell, we'd have to present a letter from the doctor to the superintendant then have the school board approve the absence, which must be 20 days in duration for each occurrance and we have to go through the same song and dance for each 20-day or more absence. I can't begin to detail the number of hoops we'd have to jump through for each absence. So the vice-principal turned to Toni and suggested she take a semester off. Then he suggested she just drop out of school and take the GED.
I'm quite proud of the fact that I was not arrested for attempting to strangle the school's vice-principal. Greg also managed to keep his annoyance in check until we reached home. Then he had to devote the next few hours to peeling me off the ceiling.
I contacted the state of Indiana's educational department and discovered just about every school in Indiana except ours accepts correspsondence credit from IU extension courses. So we've enrolled Toni in IU's high school courses by mail, hired a part-time tutor, and (since it was past the cut-off date for this year) made plans for her to enroll in Warren Central's Walker Career Center next semester. Warren accepts IU credit. For a bit of humor, we even enrolled Toni in Drivers Education by mail. Try imagining that one.
The bottom line is that we're both exhausted mentally, physically and emotionally. I should probably add "financially". Homeschooling is not cheap. One semester of courses cost over a thousand dollars.
Now the logical question some of you may be asking at this point is WHY am I telling you all this in e-mail. Logical answer: I don't want to talk about it in person.
Hope everyone one else is having a MUCH less exciting life. Right now, I'd like a little boredom.{grin}
Linda
