Holidailies ends and poof! I'm gone. The guilt disappears and so do I apparently.

Ah, well. It's not like anything here is much different. I did go to Florida for the weekend. My mom, sister and I all went for a great aunt's 75th birthday party. We missed 80 degrees and sunny by one day, we're told. We had mid-60s and cloudy all three days. Heck, that's what we'd been having in Ohio that week. My sister and I did sit out by the pool on Saturday, but we were huddled under towels while doing so. And I took a walk on the beach, because we were staying at Clearwater Beach and it seemed criminal not to at least touch the ocean.

Now I'm back and the reality of my utter lack of job prospects is hitting home. I didn't really want to find a job in November or December, because it's the holidays and I wanted to have time off to visit with family, shop, decorate, what have you. Now it's the new year, high time for a paycheck to start rolling in again and I have nothing on the horizon. Do you know I haven't had a single positive response to any of the jobs I've applied for in the last four and a half months? It's not like I'm wholly unqualified for these gigs. I know corporate HR often moves slower than a senior citizen in the passing lane, but c'mon and throw me a bone here, people. There was one job I found right before Christmas that really interested me. I even went so far as to find the name and email address of the chief marketing officer of the company and email her my resume, stating I'd applied for the job via the posting but wanted to let her know how interested I was in the position. She emailed back, thanking me for the effort and saying she would personally forward the resume on. That was December 23 and I've heard nothing since then. Gah. What else can I do? Should I call the HR manager who received my online application and ask what's up? Is that overstepping the implicit boundaries of an online applicant?

Actually, all this just reminds me I haven't hit some of my secondary job posting sites since last week. So now I'm off to do that before bed. Fun.