Busy, productive, and loving unemployment (2)

I've put the Welfare Economics textbook down and am starting back into the econometrics with Studenmund and Kennedy (including using the free econometrics package R to run little self-designed exercises like "demonstrate the effect of serial correlation by running Monte Carlo simulations"). I'm just finishing the job of getting my head around "what are basic econometric techniques FOR?" It's fun. I'm going to revisit the "significance test controversy" next (don't ask).

I've done things in the following order;
1. Take a soul-destroying grad-level Quant Methods course at Queen's, about 10% of which I understood.
2. BARELY pass said course. (I picked up the Quant Methods textbook the other day, 10 minutes later I was weeping at the memory, the way a concentration camp survivor might weep when seeing Dachau again).
3. Get an extremely demanding quant finance job, about 10% of which I understood.
4. Get fired from job.
5. Sit down and teach myself basic econometrics properly, with full methodological and model specification considerations up front where they belong (it turns out that "model search and evaluation techniques" were a big part of my previous job, not that I really realized it).

School more or less forced this order of tasks upon me, and imposed much wasted effort and suffering thereby.