Hey Margaret -- sorry, I must have missed your message (thanks Cathy for pointing it out). Apparently the fabled "New York minute" doesn't apply to the hiring process up here -- I may have to take your suggestions and start tending bar and dressing hair. Probably in that order -- you'd have to be pretty hammered to let me to cut your hair anyway.

So my 2 1/2 weeks here so far have been a blur of cover letters and online applications -- no interviews yet. Just today I retrieved some shirts and ties from my storage unit, and they're at the dry cleaners until Saturday, so next week I'll start knocking on doors -- this Internet & phone job search is not cutting it quickly enough.

Otherwise I'm doing a lot of aimless walking -- I must have walked a couple hundred blocks in the last week. It's not the only free entertainment up here (there's actually a lot of free stuff to do), but it's occupying me so far.

I'll probably appreciate my joblessness come Monday -- I hope to take in a lot of the 9/11 memorials. I stopped by Ground Zero on Tuesday -- I'd seen it from the Brooklyn Bridge one night a couple of years ago, but had never gotten a close view. You can't see much from the street (there is a moving photo exhibit though, with a grim timeline of the day), but there's a transit terminal below street level which is adjacent to the site -- there you can see everything, albeit through a mesh fence. It basically looks like a construction site, which is the subject of much disappointment among locals -- there's not much in the way of a memorial on the actual grounds.