Tap, tap, tappity-tap-tap

Just waiting, in case you're curious.

Yep, we have to move a ridiculous amount of stuff out of the place where it's been accumulating for the past two years, sometime within the next five weeks.

Yep, the window in which we could buy a good-enough place and have time to close the deal and be able to move our stuff directly into it, as opposed to into storage and then out of storage again, stands at about the next ten days.

Nope, really can't so much as start boxing stuff up. (If we end up moving across the country, that's done as the last gesture of the current employers, and their movers don't take self-packed boxes.)

Nope, really don't have the slightest clue as to which way it's going to play out, nor a clear sense of how much longer this limbo will last (some reason to believe it won't go past the end of the month, but nothing's in stone).

The interview went pretty well. Ish. It was a brutal, ten-hour sort of thing, mostly of me talking, and I was seriously woozy by the last couple of hours. Employ a strategy of being myself? Towards the end, I couldn't possibly have maintained any sort of fictive posture. I was having enough trouble trying to remember whether I'd already used that particular illustrative anecdote with the group of potential colleagues currently in front of me, or with the one before it. Or, for that matter, where I was. Very clever, these northwesterners.

That said, I'm reasonably certain the day was gaffe-free. More remarkably, I genuinely liked everyone I met, and even experienced instant mutual bonding with a couple of people, which is generally not an Esquiver phenomenon. When one tends to go through one's usual workday with a little mantra of "not my tribe...not my tribe..." running through one's head, it's a fairly joyful experience to be reminded that one does, in fact, have a tribe.

But it wasn't shangri-la. There were definite red flags, in the form of recent rapid turnover in the position, and hints of organizational dysfunction. (I have, mind you, seen much worse.) The content of the job, to be quite honest, surprised me with both its mundanity (course underload policy! Insurance for student outings!) and the hours expected (rotational on-call duty!), but I could also see how positive personal interactions and those pretty, pretty offices with their soothing Asian art and state-of-the-moment technology could be compensating factors. My colleagues-to-(maybe)-be seemed much more beleaguered and harried than I expected, which is a little disappointing -- given the salary cut involved, I may have assumed more of a sane work-life balance than they're actually offering.

Very tough call, but not one that I have to make just yet.
Which is, in itself, even tougher.