About the new job

Many of you have asked me how the new job is going. It's different. It pays the bills. Some days I feel empowered. Other days... not so much. Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful to have found something so quickly after getting the pink slip - especially in this tight market.

I'm a contractor which means we still have to pay out the ass for health insurance & I don't have any paid time off, but the money is good & enough to keep us afloat. The position is with a huge division of an even huger federal agency. Thousands of people work in this building. (They have a serious parking problem!) I have to pass through metal detectors and have my purse & lunch bag screened by armed security guards. Inside is like a small city - complete with a barber, dry cleaner, bank, drug store, and food courts. Still, I tell people it's like going from Oz to Kansas. No offense to Kansas, but in Oz they have bright colors, free soda, & animated employees who get in all kinds of interesting trouble. In Kansas - not so much.

I'm working on a project in the HR Department. It's different work from anything I've ever done before. I spend hours in silence dedicated to one task without a single interruption. Most of the people around me have spent decades of their lives doing the same exact thing each & every work day. I'm not sure what the future holds yet. This project will eventually come to an end. Maybe I'll stay in Kansas. Maybe I'll be able to find a place way more interesting than Oz. Who knows.

Many of you have also asked about Hubby's job search. Thank you for asking. Thank you for caring. Sadly, it's not going well. He's had several interviews but nothing has panned out. He's used to landing with both feet firmly planted on the ground, so this is new territory for him. He's getting depressed about the whole situation and it's weird how I - the one who worries about worrying - find myself in the position of reassuring him that everything will be alright. In the meantime, we conserve and spend wisely - which is what we should have been doing all along.

In a lot of ways, this is bringing us closer together. It's not about Hubby and it's not about me. It's about the two of us taking care of each other & Boo as best we can. I know you're probably thinking - duh, that's what marriage is about. To that I say that I got married at age 30 and was used to taking care of myself. I don't think I really "got it" - the whole concept of true partnership - until all of this happened at once. We've become more of a team over the past 30 days. It would be easy to place blame and point fingers at each other, but we don't do that. I'm very proud of us.

Now, if only I could teach him how to load the dishwasher correctly.