Today, it rained nearly an inch and a half.  Most of that was between 8 am and 10 am, aka: my morning bicycle commute.  Everything I was wearing was soaked through, and as I was heading over the Hawthorne Bridge…the bridge went up, leaving me to wait, shivering in the downpour, for a boat to pass underneath.

The point of this story is mostly to emphasize that Portland, while lovely during the summer and apparently a magnet for recent graduates, has some staggeringly un-picturesque weather.

In other, more job-related news, my report on meeting with the Alum:

The alum was, as expected, very nice.  I ended up going along on a dinner she was having with one of my friends who happens to be in the region temporarily, and it was a very pleasant meal.  We talked Claremont, and Development, and I made it fairly clear that I’m organized and have a love affair with Excel (one which Mallory appears to be paralleling) to the extent that the Alum made a joke about me tracking something with Excel later that evening.  She also offered to send my resume to people she knows, which is a very generous offer.  I followed up with a thank you email (my resume attached) and have a thank you card that will probably go out this week.

My interview at the Museum was pretty okay.  The guy who interviewed me is the father of a good friend of a Scrippsie, which made for a nice ice-breaking conversation.  They ended up moving on with their search without me, but I know that there were a number of highly qualified people in the pool of applicants, and it was definitely cool to be considered as on-par with a pool of people smothered in degrees and experience.

This week I have another interview with a local non-profit.  It isn’t  precisely geographically convenient, but it is in many ways in line with the kind of skills I want to develop.  I suspect, though, that the interview will be good for knocking the edges off my interview jitters, regardless of the position itself.  I have at least one pot on the stove that I find awfully tantalizing, and would be deeply disappointed if I took a job and then got a call back from a job that seems sparklier.  It’s the job search Catch-22, and I can hear Valinda telling me that I should probably consider not turning down something that’s more or less in line with what I want in favor of something significantly less certain.

That tantalizing pot is a job in an advancement/development office in which a good friend works—she sent me a link in a Facebook message saying “come work with meeeeeeeeeeeee!” and I put it off for a bit, and then settled down, thought it through, and realized that I’d actually enjoy that job, and it’s in Higher Education, which is where I’d like to be.  (I think that this is one form of networking.  That verb is used so often, but I have only rarely heard a useful explanation of what networking looks like outside of a workshop.)  I faxed my application to my friend, and she handed it to the assistant vice president.  I’m totally qualified for the position, and my friend has de facto vouched for me in helping me so much with my application, but I am out of the region.  That means I have to have a few extra degrees of awesomeness to be a viable candidate.  I think I probably have those degrees, but I suppose that is up to the search committee.