Why so quiet?

It's been a busy time in my little world recently, so I've had very little internet time or energy. About a month ago, my company announced that they were outsourcing our production operations, resulting in the closure my remote site and the loss of ~ 250 jobs in the Seattle area (including mine) and another 500 jobs in Virginia. This is a good business decision, and it's being handled in as associate-friendly a manner as possible: we have great severance packages, terrific career counseling services, and lots of support from our internal company resources. This helps the transition, but it's still a challenging time. The combination of figuring out how to transition all of our various responsibilities and ensure that our teams are utilizing the career resources along with the emotional stress involved in losing one's job and leaving co-workers who have become good friends over the years, is exhausting.

I am applying to graduate programs, so tacked onto everything else is the pressure of application deadlines (first one is due Wednesday!!). Did I mention the cold that's going around, or our home flooring project? (Okay, Jeff's doing most of it, nailing away as I write, but I'm helping).

Everything will be for the best in the end. This is a great opportunity for me to finally transition away from the corporate world into public or non-profit community work. The floors are going to look amazing, and I'm really learning a lot about leading a team through change.

I'm thinking, however, that holiday cards might be more of a January thing this year.