Aren't we both clever... :)
Really sucks to hear your news, but I am glad you told me. I was actually just kidding about civil service, but you never know - there might be quite a few openings even where you are. www.usajobs.com is the most comprehensive listing gov't wide, and the series code for electrical engineer is 0850 (easier to search by series code usually than by title). Might be a good option for riding out the economic tide, and with the tiered retirement structure (and your age) you could do as little as five years and actually leave with a retirement from it. It wouldn't be a lot, but every little bit helps, I suppose.
Have set up the forum, though it's not ready to go live yet (not linked in from the site yet, it needs some content first).
http://melitasite.com/smf/index.php
If you want to test it out and see how it works, log in as each of the following users: 'testuser2', password 'n0ne' (<- that is a zero, not the letter O), and then as 'Regular user', password also 'n0ne'. With the testuser2 account, you should see a private forum that you cannot see as either a guest or as the account 'Regular user'.
Since adding anyone to that forum takes positive action on my part, nobody else that registered on the forum would be able to get to that private section, or even know it existed at all (though that last bit took some doing - I had to do some extensive modification to the forum software, to keep it from showing in the public sections how many users were logged in, and/or how many total posts had been made - pretty obvious there's a hidden forum when the total # of posts is more than the total number that are visible to everyone). I also disabled viewing/searching the memberlist to all but select users (I think the testuser account can see the list, but a regular user cannot).
Test it out with me (the testuser account can post and send messages on the board), and if you think it's a good option for keeping in touch, then I'll finish it up and get some rock-related stuff on there so that it's believable that that is how you found it/what your interest in it is (if it's ever in question).
Anyway, the links to the pages are below.