No, you’re not seeing things, guys.  I’ve gone back temporarily to the old layout for the blog.  Odds are you’re going to see further changes over the next few weeks as I rethink how I want to manage content.

Along with several other areas of my life, I feel like I got off-track with the direction of Coming Unmoored.  Now that I have some time and energy again I hope to take things in some new directions.

I had also wanted to experiment some with advertising.  I think I’ve now got a reasonable sense of what works on this site and what doesn’t.  I think I’ve reached the conclusion that the visually distracting Google Adsense ads are going to  go permanently away.  The Textlink ads in actual article entries and those that appear at the bottom of the RSS feed are going to remain for the present.

Rather ironically, the past two months in which I’ve had very little time to devote to the blog are actually the first two in which the blog turned a profit after all operating expenses.  Go figure.

More than anything, though, I hope to continue to grow Coming Unmoored as both a record of my personal journey and as a resource for others making their own.

October 15, 2009 turned out to be what I’ve come to refer as a “Hand of God” Day.

Those are the handful of days in my life when it feels as though whatever divine entity who’s in charge of the universe exceeds his (or her) patience waiting for me to grasp whatever the current lesson is I’m supposed to be grokking and decides to step in in a far more direct fashion to move things along.

My “Hand of God” Days have never been pretty affairs. But then, I guess that’s rather unrealistic to hope for when Fate decides to step in and starts rearranging things in someone’s world like a two-year-old redecorating a doll house.

My last real “Hand of God” day prior to the most recent was the day my now ex-husband came home from work, made us a lovely three-course meal and then, between course one and two calmly informed me that he’d decided the best thing he could do is go out, buy a gun from Walmart, and blow both of us away “to put us out of our misery”. Suffice it to say, I didn’t end up staying for dessert. That was the day when I realized I really had to get out of my marriage before I ended up dead..

My current “Hand of God” day involved me checking in for my weekly one-on-one with my boss only to be greeted by an HR Rep and the information that my employer no longer required my services.

Now, anyone who’s been following this blog will probably know that I’d been struggling with my job for awhile. Actually, “struggling” is too polite a word. My job has been knocking the snot out of me most of 2009. In September I’d actually started to enact a plan I’d hashed-out in the hopes of eventually being able to transition out of my current job into something I hoped to like more. But the time frame for my escape was apparently way-too-conservative for the Powers-that-Be. So the Divine hand dropped in to the picture and handed me a pink slip from my high-salary job in the banking industry.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit that my first reaction upon receiving the news was: “Oh thank, God. This means I don’t have to work through the weekend again!” The panic of being jobless and having no immediate prospects for a new position didn’t hit until the middle of that first night.

Since then, I’ve been busily doing all the right things. I’ve been going through all the paperwork hoops for Unemployment benefits. I’ve gotten my COBRA coverage up and running. I’m networking. I’m interviewing. I’ve actually found a couple of positions I feel I’d be a great match for. But all of this still falls into the category of “survival mode” for me. These are the things I need to do in order to weather the current storm.

There still remains to be answer the bigger question of what I want to be doing with my life. How do I want to use my remaining time on this planet and given talents? And I know I need to figure out the answers to that question soon.

The universe just handed me an opportunity to point my life a new, better direction. And I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that if I don’t seize this chance the way I’m supposed to, things will get impatiently shaken up again.  And again.  Until I get the lesson.

No offense to the Powers-That-Be, but one snowglobe-style shake-up of my life every couple of years is quite enough. So please believe me when I say: “I’m on it, Boss.”