What's been goin' on.

Short answer... Not a hell of a lot, but things are finally moving forward a bit.

The results of my psych profile finally came in, showing me to be completely normal, with no dangerous tendencies. "Textbook normal" was the term he used. I also found out I have ADHD, which I'd long suspected. But it's nice to have the formal confirmation. Now, whenever Denise comes home from work and goes into a long dissertation about her day, I can defend myself when I drift back off to whatever's on TV and she gets pissed at me. "Hey, I've got an actual medical condition!" See if that works.

Where do we go from here? Well, when he canned me, the Dean told me "The army has taken it out of my hands. They've banned you from the base" (based on the blog post and their contention that my words there showed some violent tendency). Ergo, I couldn't teach classes on the base any more, and furthermore, the words I posted on the blog were suspicious enough to threaten my continued employment with the college. The next day they fired me, "without possibility of rehire."

Well, since then I've dealt with the ban. I went out there a while ago and easily succeeded in getting my name cleared and have since gotten three separate passes to go on the base without any problems. Now, having this psych profile saying that I'm as normal as normal can be all points to the unjust nature of the firing, revealing it as an unwarranted "rush to judgment" on the part of the college and the Army.

Late last week, my attorney sent a letter to the college Chancellor pointing out these facts. It talks about my 20 year service to the college, without a serious blemish, documenting my skills as a teacher. In the end, it asks the chancellor to personally intervene on my behalf. So, the ball is in his court. We're back to waiting. Waiting to see how he responds.

Initially, all this waiting and inactivity was drivin' me nuts. I was used to being on the road or in a classroom from 7:30 AM to 10PM, four days a week. But I tell you what, I've acclimatized myself to it. It's kinda like bein' retired, so long as my money lasts (I won't touch my retirement money). I hope they'll hire me back and everything will be back to something like normal soon. I've applied for other jobs teaching online classes, and substitute teaching, but none of that has born fruit as of yet.

Meanwhile, I've kept myself busy with projects around my house and Denise's house. Mowing the lawn, pulling weeds, working on long over due knife projects and such. My buddy Glenn brought me his grandfather's knife, which he'd left out in the rain. The blade was rusted and the horn handle grips had warped. I took it apart, cleaned it up and glued it back together again. In the end it turned out pretty good. Now he's gonna bring me an old rifle and have me clean it up for him. Lookin' forward to it.

My buddy Dave brought over his old hunting/reenacting knife and asked me to trim and resew the sheath. It had always been too loose for his liking. I took it apart, trimmed it and resewed it so that it was tight as a... Well, you fill in the rest yourself. Bottom line, it worked out really well, and I learned a lesson on how to resew it the way it had originally been done.

Aside from that, I get up with Denise in the morning and fix her milk coffee before she goes to work (I used to do that when I had a job too). During the day, I peal my ass from this chair and try to clean the kitchen and/or get the laundry done. I drive out to get Denise and take her out to eat lunch most days, and I cook dinner most nights. There's boneless pork ribs marinading in the fridge as we speak, and I've got to cut this short and make some sandwiches for lunch. I'll take them out there and we'll find a quiet place to chill out.

We had some visitors last week, and a lot of other stuff's been goin' on too. Denise's daughter and her family drove down from Kentucky and spent the week with us. She had to work part of that week, but being unemployed, I was free to spend a lot of time with them and show them around. I'll talk about that in a bit. Cheers!