As some of you know, I haven't lived with my wife and kids for a few years because we haven't been able find jobs in the same city. Now my wife has found a decent job in San Diego and they have moved there. Houses down there are fantastically expensive (~$1M), particularly near decent schools, so I can't move unless I find something that seems likely to work. I've applied to every plausible position and haven't received so much as an e-mail or phone call, with the exception of one for a contract position with a one-man company that looks like a very bad gamble. The only thing I haven't tried for is radar surveillance research, which I have experience with, and there's some of it down there. But I think that work is evil and also a bad long-term risk. Eventually my wife might be able to find a job in the San Jose area where I am. But I don't think she should have to give up a good job for something marginal where I am, when my job kind of sucks to, and the housing and commute situation here is even more insane than in San Diego. And I don't want to wait that long, my kids are half grown already and I haven't been there for them. Now they're close enough that I can fly and visit a couple Saturdays a month at least, but that's really not enough.

So my question is....how is this going to play out? And if you have an intuition about this, how can you tell the difference between an impression of what is likely to happen, and an impression of our hopes and fears about what is likely to happen?

This is the difficulty I have with something like a Tarot deck when considering my own situation. It definitely works in the sense that it displays relevant images, not just random images that I'm reading stuff into. But it looks to me like reflections of my thoughts and my wife's thoughts, and I already know what those are. My dream intuitions are like that also. But the dynamic changes when other people are brought into the picture.