Great OP, Swampster! I hear ya 'bout the job hunt. I hate it. Besides the general worry about what you’ll end up with and when and where you’ll end up with it, and the general feeling of instability and uncertainty, there’s the tedious work involved – faxing resumes, (hopefully) taking potential employer calls, (hopefully) getting interviews, then actually doing the interviews (a chapter in itself), and then repeating the process when they don’t pan out or you’re not sure you’ll hear from them again, yadda yadda. It’s more stressful than anything, but the stress just amps up the overall annoyance and frustration levels. Three jobs ago I lost my job in mid-January, and it took me two and a half months to find a job. With no savings to speak of and my previous job having paid way too little (I took it for the IT experience), those two and a half months were lean indeed, and the job search became more and more frustrating at time passed. Fortunately I lucked into a good job after that (that turned into crap – corporate BS), and then tripped an fell into an even better job directly resulting from the experience I gained with my previous job. It’s all very Zen. I like my current job, and it looks pretty long-term for me (cross fingers, toss salt, knock on wood, etc.) so, thank Og, no job searches in my immediate (or hopefully distant) future that I won’t undertake deliberately.
Never tried peach iced tea, and had no idea Smuckers made anything other than jams and preserves (which are quite decent). I like ordinary lemon iced tea though. I have tended to avoid the flavoured stuff because most of the ones I’ve tried taste chemical-y and have a nasty aftertaste. Lipton make a great instant iced tea though – the one that comes in those small packets that you dump into a bottle of water and shake. I was surprised they were as good as they are, though they are far from the best I’ve had. Peach iced tea sounds interesting though.
I wish we had Big Lots here. We do have XS Cargo, which is also a closeout chain store (albeit much smaller), but the stores aren’t that big and the selection of merchandise tends towards the skimpy side. A lot of it is unknown foreign or dollar-store-type brands of fantastically cheap quality, and most of the rest is known but also cheap brands (i.e. electronics by GE, Memorex, etc.). They don’t carry food or anything either, mostly just furniture, consumer electronics and a few household items (vaccuums, fans, lamps, that sort of thing.) They have a few gems there once in a while though, so it’s worth checking their flier from time to time. There’s also Factory Direct, but I won’t speak of them. I worked for them for a few months as a tech. I have nothing good to say.
On the work-front up here, we’re done with inventory for another year. Once again we finished ahead of schedule, which is good. We all took off around 2:30pm on Saturday, so at least a few extra hours of the weekend were salvaged. I slept off the long work week on Sunday – though I was awakened early by the mother-in-law. She likes doing that, calling early. She knows damn well we’ll still be sleeping at 9am, but being older she seems to feel that her age entitles her to expect everyone else to work around her schedule. <grumble, grumble> Still, what extra sleep I did get has left me feeling pretty good this morning – surprising for a Monday. Doubly surprising for a Monday after a one-point-one-day weekend. It’s a short week, to boot, so I’m a happy office drone. Except it’s busy this morning. I guess closing for that day and a half has backed up a lot more calls than I thought it would. Oh well – busy is good. Makes the day go quicker, keeps me employed. 
My dad’s coming over this evening. I don’t know how in the name of Og’s holy buttocks he manages it, but he seems to manage to cock up things that I personally set up for him and that should, by any estimation, be foolproof. I set up his PVR/capture card a couple of weeks ago and configured it to get TV and radio and be able to capture from the camcorder we bought him for Christmas. Everything tested just dandy. Somehow, when he caps from the camcorder now, it’s recording “squished” (his word). How? How does he manage it? The man has supernatural powers of electronic buggery, and he has no conscious control over them.
She has a bad head cold, not helped by the altitude change and the dry air on the plane. Poor baby is upstairs asleep. She had a lovely time, btw.