Last morning in NY

We're finishing up our trip to New York, by rights the last vacation we'll have in a long time. Not just because we're broke but because the company Cris works for has now taken up the practice of deducting mandatory days off from employees' vacation pay. So that even though it looks like she has two weeks of vacation saved up, five of those days are being decimated this week as the company makes everyone take a mandatory "vacation" the week of Independence Day. Thus we all become happy Americans.

I almost wrote "the company Cris still works for." Having spent more than ten years at Sybase, she must be one of the oldest employees now, what with the dotcom boom that drained off many workers and endless series of layoffs that canned many more. She's been there so long we still marvel each time she escapes a layoff. Until now it's been mostly a matter of morbid curiosity: which one of us would lose our corporate jobs first? I've been laid off three times from three companies in the last six years; Cris has dodged it each time. Now that we need the income, this has become less morbid curiosity and more anxious worrying. But I was raised a solid member of the middle class: I don't worry too much about whether I'll survive.

Yesterday, on our last full day in New York, we made our annual pilgrimage to the Bronx Zoo and the pen of Rapunzel, the Sumatran rhino. We learned the poor creature is sick. Sumatran rhinos famously die in captivity and this is one of three in the U.S. She's been here every time we've visited, for the last five years. When we got to the zoo in midday, she was conked out in the ground, snoozing in the heat; after 4:00 she was up and doing her usual pacing around the grass and dirt pen. I was glad that our last view of the creature was that of an active rhino, not a sleeping one.

Today all we're accomplishing is packing. Cris sent me out of the room to get me our of the way, so I'm at a Kinko's, where they charge 30 cents a minute (!) to use these machines.

As I've said before, this is my last fling before I actually settle down and, for the first time since early October, get a job -- at a large national chain bookstore. I'll be working for a friend so I won't be able to publish much dirt about the l.n.c.b. -- she's doing me a favor by hiring me in these times. A church secretary job is the only other thing on the horizon for me.

New jobs mean the end of long mornings of reading the paper and long afternoons of working on my (fortunately completed) book. Of course, I suppose I could sell my (fortunately completed) book for a lot of money and won't have to work after all, but since the liklihood of that is nil, I'll be selling books in the more common way: over the counter. I'll be sure to note the first time if and when someone actually buys one of my own books.