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When I met Duncan, he was living in Florida and I was living in Oregon. He was working as a network & sys admin for a market research company. He worked ridiculous hours - 10, 12, 14 hours a day. He was always on call. Many, many tech jobs in the 90s/early 00s liked to suck the life out of young, otherwise-unattached talents. So, he worked and worked and worked.
We got married a few months later, while Haven and I were living out there and gearing up to make the move complete. Duncan had been restructuring his schedule to make it more conducive to family life - trying to be home for dinner in the evenings, trying to have some free time on the weekends.
They fired him. His boss said, basically, that his priorities were all wrong since he'd married.
Nice tailspin for the newly married, yes? After a few weeks of discussion and research, we decided that we'd move to Seattle. Duncan had lived in Seattle in the mid-to-late 90s, and he loved it. Seattle was at the top of my list of "someday I might move there" cities (followed by San Francisco and Portland). Our visit to Seattle in April 2001 clinched it, as I fell madly in love with the city (and remain so to this day). We moved here in July 2001. Duncan had been looking for work since April (the computer/tech industry - she ain't what she used to be, especially here). We had been in our new apartment for about a week when Duncan was finally offered a job as a contractor at Microsoft. Contractors are basically temps - he worked at Microsoft, but not for Microsoft. One of the things about being a contractor at MS - you can only do it for a year; after a full year, you are required by law to take 100 days away from the company. After 100 days, you can begin a new contract at Microsoft. But there's no way of knowing what your next contract will be like - it could be shorter, the pay could be lower, et cetera.
Duncan works for a year and gets unemployment for 4 months. That's the cycle. And it's been difficult and really scary. No financial security, no stability, no good way to plan for a future. And that's where we've been for the past few years - trudging onward, clinging to the hope that Duncan would someday get hired at Microsoft. MS is still the biggest game and best hope in town for employment. And, yeah, they're the Evil Empire. And, yeah, everyone knows how I feel about Bill. But they also treat their employees really, really well.
The uncertainty and fear has taken one hell of a toll on our relationship (really, we weren't always all about bitter animosity and yelling). And I've been feeling really give-up-ish. Like, this is our life - and it's fine, it's a good life, we have a lot and we're pretty lucky - and we should just stop hoping for something that may never happen and figure out how to build a future on this shifting ground.
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That's a lot of background. Remember when I posted, right around Solstice, that we had received some very very very good news? It still feels weird and not quite real, which is why it's taken me so long to post about it. Right before Christmas, Duncan was offered a position at Microsoft. On the 27th - his birthday! - he became a full-on, benefits-having, blue-badge-carrying, 401k-building, stock-holding, hard-to-fire, 3-weeks-of-paid-vacationing, more-money-making Microserf.

Vive le futur!