You see, at the end of July, July 31 to be exact, I was laid off. I knew it was coming as it was part of the transition plan to acquire Washington Mutual by JP Morgan Chase.

So what have I been up to the past few months? At the beginning of August, I took the family on a long vacation (3 weeks) up through Oregon, then west to the Oregon coast, and back down. We stayed at a large ranch, visited Ashland (the Shakespeare Festival), saw my cousins in Junction City near Eugene, then we stayed 5 days in Portland.

Portland is a beautiful city. We took bike rides (that first mile up the trail in Forest Park is a killer, what with me towing a double-wide Chariot bike trailer loaded with my two boys), went to the Children’s Museum and the Portland Zoo, visited Powell’s (a killer bookstore).

Then we went to Astoria (nice coastal city) and stayed a few days. Then we went south, through Gold Beach (the 25 miles south of Gold Beach is the most spectacular coastline I’ve ever seen and I live in California), and many coastal towns between there and my home.

We had a wonderful time.

I am in no mood to look for more work, either. I kind of like staying home. But for now, that’s a big dream I have. October might be the month where I get really serious about a job. I will be looking in the Portland and Seattle areas, though — that’s for sure. Places like REI, Columbia, Yakima, Nike, and a few others come to mind as places I’ll target to find gainful employment.

I’ve let the blog carnivals slip. I kind of dread sifting through all the posts because there’s got to be a ton of them. I most likely will break them up into 5 or 10 bit chunks, just to manage them better and give each post more attention. Sound good?

In the meantime, I’ve got a ton of stuff to do around the house. I’ve reorganized the office closet and have eliminated a lot of clutter (but there’s a lot more). We’re going to be redoing the front patio with tile. We’ll also being laying down some more sod in the front and back yards.

Plus, we’ve got our back yard landscaping plans back. I haven’t even looked at them yet. This is one project where I’ll have to really think about how to chunk it up into much smaller pieces because if I tackle it all together, I will literally kill myself!

Also on my list of to-dos is to install (or have installed) a door in the office that leads to the new back yard.

Boy, have I got a lot of work to do!

I don’t have time to look for a job.

Meanwhile, I am still laying the foundation for my eventual exit from the corporate world. I have redesigned a lot of my sites and hopefully will be able to put a lot of them on semi-autopilot (I have tried “autoblogging” software and I just really don’t like the outcome on anything other than a news blog), so I’ll be posting a lot to my sites:

• Muscle-Build.com and here
• Affiliate Central
• Internet-Marketing-Muscle.com
• Hardgainer’s Manifesto and here

Computer Monkeys will get a redesign, too (at least the blog will) as well as a lot more posts added.

Photo-dodo is on hiatus. I love photography and took a ton of photos while on vacation, but I just don’t foresee finding the time to devote to the site.

That’s it for now. I hope to make some contributions to this site in the very near future.

By the way, if anybody wants to guest-post, I’m all ears!

Leave me a comment if you want to make a guest post or two about personal finance (please, no topics other than PF).