Filed under: Uncategorized
Blogging will be sparse the next few days. To make a longer post short, we found an apartment very much at the last minute, we rushed to get everything in and are now moving in Monday. I unfortunately work every day until my family arrives on Wednesday, so this should be fun. Hopefully I’ll find some time to blog before next week 
Our overly exciting week that was supposed to happen last week turned out to be complete bust. The Lebanon place told him that he was overqualified–a useless and wholly disappointing excuse. The Concord place we heard nothing back from them until Lasse called them today and they said they hired someone else. He tried to find out if there was any specific reason why they didn’t hire him and was just told they would be mailing out official rejection letters and to wait until then. Sigh. It’s supposed to be a good thing to call companies, right? And to be pro-active in a job hunt instead of just sitting there waiting for them to contact you? If this is true, however, why is it that most jobs don’t seem to appreciate being called? Why is it that Lasse might get one call from a company, feel that he does fairly well with it, and then never hear from them again or get rejected all together? Or, even if they do tell him he will have another interview they still never contact him?
This whole situation is really frustrating. There must be something he’s missing as far as job interviews and phone interviews are concerned. I just wish we knew what it was that is specifically causing him to be chronically unhired. If we knew, we stood a chance of fixing it. Without this knowledge….we’re just floundering around in the dark.
Filed under: Uncategorized
So far, our exciting week has been a disappointingly boring week. Lasse did get a call from a new company on Tuesday when he least expected it. It’s a job out in Portsmouth this time that pays fairly little, but they say they promote quickly. They, too, wanted examples of his writing skills and references (which Lasse now has) and he sent those off.
On the other hand, he’s found another freelance translating opportunity that is turning out to be extremely good. It’s for an engineering company that needs around 15,000 drawings translated and their first Finnish translator crapped out on them so they’re pretty desperate and need these done ASAP. They asked Lasse to send in a per drawing rate, which he did two days ago, deciding that $0.50 cents per drawing would be a reasonable rate. Then he didn’t hear from the guy and both of us started exchanging worried looks. Was that too much? Did they just decide to screw it? They shouldn’t have! It’s negotiable! If they had just given him a ballpark figure of what they were willing to pay, it would have made it a lot easier for him to give an estimate.
Then the guy emailed Lasse back today and told him that they actually pay $2-$3 per drawing. Hah! The downside is that it would be split between the two translators, but heck, that’s still $1 per drawing, minimum…which quite a lot of money that we’re talking about now. So, we’re fairly happy about that. We just wish we’d hear back from one of the steady, full-time jobs he’s applied for so that we could actually start moving on with our lives.
Meanwhile, it looks like it’s time to get Lasse his own computer. I will physically make him order one, if need be. No way I’m going to spend the next however long not using the computer and listening to him complain about how much harder it is to do ____ on a laptop that’s running linux, has been dropped several times, has clearly seen better days, and is about ready to be put out to the pasture. It’s all true, unfortunately, but really. With this job and how much it pays and how quickly it needs to be done, him ordering a computer is 100% rational.
Filed under: New Hampshire
The picture you currently see gracing the top of my blog was taken last summer at the Canterbury Shaker Village Museum by my friend Suong when she came up to visit. It’s a really neat place and I’ve been there twice—eventually I hope to go there when it’s actually open. But for now you can see some of the awesome stone walls that line the place. Pretty, huh?
My husband and I very often get these obsessions with things that you can’t get here. The first time this happened it was with Knorr band salad dressing mixes that are, for whatever reason, only sold in Germany but make really delicious salads. We looked all over Finland for them, but couldn’t find them. So, finally he decided he was going to write an email to Knorr Company and find out if we could buy some directly from them. “It’s not going to work,” I told him. I decided it really wasn’t going to work when he decided to write his email in German instead of English (his German isn’t the best). Lo and behold, they responded and he got a ton of Knorr dressing mixes…with a discount.
Fast forward to this week when we realized that we’re down to the last two bags of Fennobon Xylitol Chewing Gum. I had stocked up on them when I was in finland last November, but apparently not enough. “Ask your parents to send us some,” I suggested. “No, I’ll email the company and see if we can buy some directly.” I doubted it. Sure, it worked last time, but that time they were sending it within the EU. This time we were in the US. It wouldn’t work, it couldn’t. Sure enough, they replied that they couldn’t send the EU Xylitol gum outside the EU, but they did have a product they sold in the US. Lasse responded that that would be fine and the next morning, his phone rang. Lasse was *ahem* indisposed, so I answered, thinking, “Wow! The job people are calling already! This is great!”
“Hello?”
“Hi, this is *didn’t catch* calling with the requested follow-up call from *etc, etc.*”
I frowned. This didn’t sound like a job call. They didn’t ask to speak to Lasse. What’s going on? I had no idea what the heck they were talking about. “Sorry?”
“This is Fennobon calling with a follow up call.”
“Ooh!” Ding! “Just a minute.” Lasse came out and I passed the phone over to him. He knew exactly what was going on. The funny thing is that the lady on the other end of the line was a Finn (I could make out a faint accent) and for the first couple minutes of their conversation together, they kept speaking in English and then finally…a burst of Finnish and they had established Finn-Finn contact.
After about 10 minutes of discussion and a string of Finnish numbers, Lasse hung up. “I placed an order for 30 packages of chewing gum and they’re giving us a 30% discount for ordering so many.” I stared. It worked, again. Now we’re going to have a crapload of 66% Xylitol chewing gum and even some of their new 77% xylitol gum, a new formulation. The idea behind is that the more xylitol in the gum, the better it is for your teeth. It will make more off the cavity causing bacteria “sick” and heal the beginnings of cavities better. We also found out a few weeks ago that mothers who chew high xylitol gum cut the chances of passing on their oral bacteria to their kids by 80%. Despite the fact the gum was fairly expensive (about $6 a bag!), it’s still a lot cheaper than all the fillings and root canals I’ve had. Now we just have to wait for it to arrive…
Filed under: Uncategorized
We’re approaching the sixth month of Lasse being in the US, he’s still unemployed, and the clock is ticking. Not the baby clock–we’re fine on that one. It’s more the “Family is coming to visit in 3 weeks and we don’t have our own apartment yet because we don’t know where we’ll be living” clock. Gah!
The good news is that he has employment possibilities. There are about three positions that look promising at the moment. The first one he did a phone interview way back in March for, but the company appears to be moving at the rate of frozen molasses when it comes to actually hiring someone. They’re a non-profit and get a lot of funding from New England state governments, so I guess that explains that. They’re located in Concord or will be. The second one is an econ job also located in Concord that definitely plans to have someone hired by early June. Lasse hasn’t had an interview with them yet, but when he called up there Monday before last they recognized his name, said that his resume was good enough and they had forwarded it to their hiring staff. They then asked him to submit some examples of his economic writing, which he did and they told him he would hear from them “in the next few weeks.” Hopefully for an interview, because he would be absolutely perfect for this job.
Then last week he got an interview for a job that came out of the blue and the company was absolutely eager to interview him and wanted to set up an interview THE VERY NEXT DAY. So, Lasse went there without much time to prepare and came home absolutely embarrassed and said it didn’t go so well. I think it went better than he thought it did, but I still don’t think he’ll get this job. He applied for it with a bachelor’s degree and left off his two masters but then told them in the interview he had two master’s…way more than they wanted and they immediately concluded he would get bored doing that job. It’s located in Merrimack.
This week he got a call and did a phone interview with a company located in Lebanon, NH and he feels that that interview went extremely well. It’s for a market analyst position and the really great thing about this job is that not only does it pay well, but they’re also willing to pay to relocate the right person AND they have an apartment set up for this person. Whoa, right? Hopefully his interview went as well as he thought and he’ll get another one. The lady said he should hear from them by next Friday. So…we’re waiting. Again. For another position.
It’s the waiting, really, that’s the worst. The fact that we’re finally getting all these leads is great, but the fact that they’re all coming now when we have 3 weeks time to actually get something settled and all of them involve someone contacting us in the “next few weeks” is positively nerve-wracking.
The sad thing is that every time my husband gets an interview or something positive happens in his job hunt, he gets really happy and excited because surely it won’t be long now! We’re going to know where we’re going to live! We’ll have his income! Things will be settled! Horray! And then…nothing…happens…and he slowly descends into a semi-depressive “I’m never going to get a job, everyone else finds a job faster than I do, you’re not going to be able to work much longer, we’re not going to have an income, we’re going to eat up our savings, and once that’s gone we’ll just be poor, and living on the streets.” Seriously. He was like this in the morning before he got the call from the company in Lebanon. I looked at him and said “How long do you think you’re going to be unemployed??” “I don’t know! 3 more months? 6 months? A year? Two years!” And then he got that call and was on friggin’ cloud nine the rest of the day while I spent half of the rest of the remaining time brooding over the fact that I’m the pregnant one, and his mood swings are worse than mine.
In any case, hopefully he’ll get the econ job in Concord or the analyst job in Lebanon. The econ job would be great because it would be in Concord, would be in economics and would hopefully enable Lasse to launch a career as an economist. The Lebanon job would be great because it pays well (t’s, oddly enough, the only job that has mentioned what its pay rate is…the rest don’t even bother), they would pay for relocation and apparently have an apartment lined up. The downside is that it’s in Lebanon and if you’re not familiar with New Hampshire, let me show you why:
Lebanon is 1.5 hours from Manchester. I currently live 30 minutes away from my job. No big deal: he could always move to Lebanon while I finish up the last few weeks at my job. The bigger problem is the midwife. It’s 91 miles away…almost 2 hours driving time. Hmmmm. Guess we’ll have to see about that one…
In any case, I hope he gets one of these jobs…and soon. Maybe I should start a pool? “When will Lasse get a job…and where?”
