First off, welcome to the "large-print" NotAbbott.com, which owes some debt of gratitude to my friend Phineas, who, to his credit, stopped short of screaming "I can't read your damn site 'cause the type is too small," but perhaps only just.

Second, call me crazy, but I think the worst of the down economy may be over. Why, you ask? Well, I've been nominally looking for a job for well over a year now, and the pickings had been slim. I had a couple of phone interviews, maybe one or two in person, and that was mostly it. Some of that may have due to a somewhat lax approach, but not all of it. In the last two months, not only has interviewing ramped up (and not only due to me getting a little panicked and, subsequently, more aggressive), but I've gotten more than one call from former business associates about the freelance "data wrangling" that I've been known to do from time to time. That, in turn, got me motivated to identify other potential pipelines of that sort of thing, and the vibe I get is that the market research industry, which was down with everything else for the past couple of years, is starting to show signs of life.

Yeah, on some level, that may be an ego-centric view of things, but I'm more inclined to think that the stuff that shows up on my radar may be indicative of larger trends, especially since I'm not as tuned in to other industries and markets.

If not, other elements of Plan B are still humming along at varying rates. I almost dread all these different threads reaching some sort of decision point at the same time, but there are worse fates to have.