So now that I have had three weeks to adapt my thoughts to the fact that I won't have this job that I have, shall we say, grown used to - I am trying to get a grip on what my next move should be. I think I have finally been given a date, which is the end of the month. But I am stuck in this freakish twilight zone where I am working harder than ever and knowing that this will be nothing to me in a few weeks. It's a very dichotomous life!
I finally did receive a response from one of my resumes, but it is a travel into the Big City, so I have to give it some thought. I'm going to go in for a meeting (it's only an agency so nothing concrete will come of this initial meeting, and they also have an NJ office so that's good) on Wednesday. The agency places a lot of temps, which I learned are now called "contracted positions," which was my reason for responding to this ad in the first place: I thought, if I'm not sure if I'm ready for city travel yet, what better way to find out than through a "contracted position?"
The problems, of course, with that would be B and the pets. As long as B is still home, he can solve the latter issue. Once he leaves, presumably, for college, I guess we'd have to get a dog walker to come in. But this year is the immediate quandary: I won't be able to drive him anywhere during the week, which means no swim team through school. He can ride his bike to the gym, and the school is full of activities that he can stay after school for. But in bad weather I have always driven him, and with a foot or two of snow on the ground, he will not be able to get to school. But this is all the cart before the horse for now.
On the other hand, the pay is double. And the cost is $330 a month on the bus + travel time. Local jobs seem scarce. It is a quandary indeed.
As for M, we 'skyped' with her the other night and she was sick with a cold, and she had a cut on her shoulder from the bathing suit strap! (I would have rather not seen that). I told her t take some medicine, which she did and said the next day she felt better. My little package of vitamins also arrived on that day; hope she is taking them.
Just today, she received the present I sent her, a small 7" TV so that she won't have to miss such historic events as The Office premiere ever again. Except that it's not just plug-n-play. She is going to have to figger out how to work it 'erself!! (Another reason to let your kids manage their own lives just a little before they leave your nest).
Well that is about all I can think of for now. Oh, yeah - in other news - I just found out that we have to go up to Boston on the 15th for a special sort of team parents weekend! I had had no idea. So I did get a hotel for just $125 a night. Kevin said he would try to find a freebie (I guess our impending poverty has him concerned, well I know it does, since his solution to the demise of our big TV was to plug in an old 13 inch on the family room rug!)
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
fall frenzy
It's fall this morning! In an effort to further procrastinate having to go get ready for work, I've decided to tend to the long-neglected blog. Where to begin?
So B is back in school and so far he has had a few tests with moderate success. I'd like to see him ace everything in the beginning because it never gets easier than it starts out and he needs the scores to bolster his GPA. But so far so good as far as we have been told. He's been to a few afterschool activities, including mock trial and he had planned on attending a swimming meeting, but they postponed it until next week. We're not sure if he will be able to swim because (a) they said they might effect cuts this year and (b) the pool is half an hour away and I don't know where I will be working or what hours by that time.
He also joined a gym and has been going a couple of times a week, as well as playing tennis. So he is beginning to feel better about himself, and he's gained a fair amount of weight so he no longer looks like a skinny string bean, and he doesn't have paunch either.
As for me, the job life is not good! Just as I was getting used to the longer hours (and nearly normal sized paychecks) they have been sucked right out from under me! My boss has informed me that he will be moving his practice an hour away, and I am not invited. I think I have been offered the opportunity to inquire as to whether or not I am needed there, but I get the feeling it's not with him. Or, if it is, I'd have to take less pay and drive farther to earn it. He is joining forces with a guy who has an existing staff of three, so I have become a redundancy.
My plan for now is to continue to put out feelers: my original agency says things are very slow right now, and I have completed countless online applications for jobs that have had hundreds of other applicants. As luck would have it, I am still on a sub list as a classroom aide (not a teacher anymore) in the schools, and I plan to keep my job search at this level until he finally cuts me loose. At that point I will file for unemployment, try to sub as much as possible, and contact temp agencies for interim assignments. With the economy, who knows if this will work. It's served me well in the past, but it did take me a full year to find the job I have now, last time I looked. The difference this time is that I am willing to move to full time now. It's only four hours a week more, and financially pretty much a requirement!
Just a few latitudes to our north, M is loving her new life as college student, Division 1 athlete and dorm dweller. Although I hate that she is in the dorm she is in. It's so far from everything else and her roommate seems to march to the beat of her own drum, which often finds M out alone late at night and needing to get back to that remote tenement safely. The campus has an escort service which I hope she will use when the weather is cooler and the streets are less populated. We have only 'spoken' to her once via skype, but we have almost daily contact with her through texting and messaging. No grades or swim results yet, but we are looking forward to next weekend when we can watch their intrasquad meet on the university's internet sports channel. Exciting!
And in other news, one of the downsides of the fuller time work schedule has been the neglect of home, garden and pantry. If I do end up with a break between jobs I plan to buckle down and whip things into shape. Since M is bringing her roommate with her at Thanksgiving, I really have to make sure the house is presentable! I booked their plane tickets the other day and they were $300 each! I could have had them for $100 had I booked in August but I didn't know swim schedules or if the roommate was really coming. They had discussed it online, but In Real Life can sometimes be another story. Although in retrospect I should have just done it, even paying the $200 and losing half of it would have been less than the $300 I spent on M's share. The roommate will pay us back, but not for a while. I booked them both together just to make sure they got on the same flight!
So B is back in school and so far he has had a few tests with moderate success. I'd like to see him ace everything in the beginning because it never gets easier than it starts out and he needs the scores to bolster his GPA. But so far so good as far as we have been told. He's been to a few afterschool activities, including mock trial and he had planned on attending a swimming meeting, but they postponed it until next week. We're not sure if he will be able to swim because (a) they said they might effect cuts this year and (b) the pool is half an hour away and I don't know where I will be working or what hours by that time.
He also joined a gym and has been going a couple of times a week, as well as playing tennis. So he is beginning to feel better about himself, and he's gained a fair amount of weight so he no longer looks like a skinny string bean, and he doesn't have paunch either.
As for me, the job life is not good! Just as I was getting used to the longer hours (and nearly normal sized paychecks) they have been sucked right out from under me! My boss has informed me that he will be moving his practice an hour away, and I am not invited. I think I have been offered the opportunity to inquire as to whether or not I am needed there, but I get the feeling it's not with him. Or, if it is, I'd have to take less pay and drive farther to earn it. He is joining forces with a guy who has an existing staff of three, so I have become a redundancy.
My plan for now is to continue to put out feelers: my original agency says things are very slow right now, and I have completed countless online applications for jobs that have had hundreds of other applicants. As luck would have it, I am still on a sub list as a classroom aide (not a teacher anymore) in the schools, and I plan to keep my job search at this level until he finally cuts me loose. At that point I will file for unemployment, try to sub as much as possible, and contact temp agencies for interim assignments. With the economy, who knows if this will work. It's served me well in the past, but it did take me a full year to find the job I have now, last time I looked. The difference this time is that I am willing to move to full time now. It's only four hours a week more, and financially pretty much a requirement!
Just a few latitudes to our north, M is loving her new life as college student, Division 1 athlete and dorm dweller. Although I hate that she is in the dorm she is in. It's so far from everything else and her roommate seems to march to the beat of her own drum, which often finds M out alone late at night and needing to get back to that remote tenement safely. The campus has an escort service which I hope she will use when the weather is cooler and the streets are less populated. We have only 'spoken' to her once via skype, but we have almost daily contact with her through texting and messaging. No grades or swim results yet, but we are looking forward to next weekend when we can watch their intrasquad meet on the university's internet sports channel. Exciting!
And in other news, one of the downsides of the fuller time work schedule has been the neglect of home, garden and pantry. If I do end up with a break between jobs I plan to buckle down and whip things into shape. Since M is bringing her roommate with her at Thanksgiving, I really have to make sure the house is presentable! I booked their plane tickets the other day and they were $300 each! I could have had them for $100 had I booked in August but I didn't know swim schedules or if the roommate was really coming. They had discussed it online, but In Real Life can sometimes be another story. Although in retrospect I should have just done it, even paying the $200 and losing half of it would have been less than the $300 I spent on M's share. The roommate will pay us back, but not for a while. I booked them both together just to make sure they got on the same flight!
Saturday, September 3, 2011
the end of our life as we knew it
So, a chapter has ended and a new one has begun. In a flurry of summer-end activities and last minute preparations, M is a college student. The move in actually went fairly well, we had the great fortune to be offered lodging with family just twenty minutes (in an ideal world, which we now know Boston at rush hour is not) from the school. We arrived and were given thirty minutes to unload into "bins" which were really just giant garbage cans for M's building, because the halls and elevators are so narrow that nothing else will fit.
We set about preparing when some hired movers converged upon us, and began to boss us around and rearrange. I, who had prepared a nice "bin" filled with manageable (for me) and easily controllable items, was told to take one of the containers packed by Kevin instead, and the professional mover took my light one. The one I was left with had a printer and a television perched and about to fall off, and I had to wheel the heavy bin about two blocks through the streets at a trot, trying to keep up with the rest of them. M was charged only with carrying a few handheld items. B had wisely opted not to join us. Good thing, because he would not have fit anyway!
So in the end, we managed, the printer had to be rescued and I managed to keep the TV at bay. The poor thing was returned home anyway, as M's room is so pathetically tiny that there was no place for her to put it. Her roommate has a large monitor which she put on her desk, and says she can stream live TV through that if they ever want to watch. Whatever. How do you live with no TV? Beats me. I can't sleep without it. But she will have to!
It is strange not having her around, but really not all that different. She responds to our texts, not prying but if we have something to tell her, such as that one of her classmates - yet another - was killed in a car crash yesterday morning. It wasn't someone she was close with, and perhaps not even someone she knew at all. But I texted her to let her know and that opens a short dialogue: so as best we can tell, she is having a great time, she eats but doesn't seem to exercise (I guess there will be plenty of that to come shortly) and she gets along well with her roommate ::knock wood:: but doesn't seem to be finding many kindred spirits in her dorm; they missed a meeting last night because they didn't know about it until later, they have been spending their time with kids from a neighboring dorm, I believe.
There are a couple more days of this welcome week, and then they have some mandatory advising and information meetings, as well as the President's Convocation and the Freshman BBQ. Classes will start on Wednesday. I hope she has her books! I got her two on amazon and left the rest up to her because I couldn't find them any cheaper than what the bookstore was charging at school.
Otherwise it's been quite a summer. We have survived almost nightly thunderstorms, random tornado watches and warnings, a hurricane and even an earthquake! M became as always unnaturally brown after spending every single day in the blazing sun, although I was grateful for at least a few cloudy days this summer. B had a busy summer as well, with volunteering at the hospital and a nursing home, and tennis camp on his days off. Now he has one more week to study his summer reading books before he has to return to school on the 12th. But his big news will be the driving. He should have his permit by Tuesday afternoon. Only one more two hour session with the driving school stands between him and the piece of paper with his name on it. And lastly on B, his neurologist rescheduled his appointment this year so it's been put off until the 20th of September. It's quite likely he will be sent for an MRI this year since it's been so long and he's grown so much. So please remember to storm the chiari gods for good results! He has been feeling fine. We even bought him a gym membership for his birthday. He goes on Monday for his inaugural session.
And in other news, the house is a disaster as my job has moved to full time, but I plan to spend the rest of this weekend trying to whip it into shape. We were lucky not to sustain any Irene damage, thanks to the waterbug in the basement that alerted us to the fact that water was just pouring in through a hole in the foundation, which was supposed to be sealed off around the pipe it had been cut to house. We only lost power for about ten hours and the backup sumps worked wonderfully.
After this weekend, it will be back to reality. Kevin has been on vacation but goes back on Wednesday. And our next big excitement will be when we go for Parents Weekend the third week of October. We are bringing the dogs because (a) it's cheaper to do that and (b) this way we know M will be sure to come and see us for a minute!
We set about preparing when some hired movers converged upon us, and began to boss us around and rearrange. I, who had prepared a nice "bin" filled with manageable (for me) and easily controllable items, was told to take one of the containers packed by Kevin instead, and the professional mover took my light one. The one I was left with had a printer and a television perched and about to fall off, and I had to wheel the heavy bin about two blocks through the streets at a trot, trying to keep up with the rest of them. M was charged only with carrying a few handheld items. B had wisely opted not to join us. Good thing, because he would not have fit anyway!
So in the end, we managed, the printer had to be rescued and I managed to keep the TV at bay. The poor thing was returned home anyway, as M's room is so pathetically tiny that there was no place for her to put it. Her roommate has a large monitor which she put on her desk, and says she can stream live TV through that if they ever want to watch. Whatever. How do you live with no TV? Beats me. I can't sleep without it. But she will have to!
It is strange not having her around, but really not all that different. She responds to our texts, not prying but if we have something to tell her, such as that one of her classmates - yet another - was killed in a car crash yesterday morning. It wasn't someone she was close with, and perhaps not even someone she knew at all. But I texted her to let her know and that opens a short dialogue: so as best we can tell, she is having a great time, she eats but doesn't seem to exercise (I guess there will be plenty of that to come shortly) and she gets along well with her roommate ::knock wood:: but doesn't seem to be finding many kindred spirits in her dorm; they missed a meeting last night because they didn't know about it until later, they have been spending their time with kids from a neighboring dorm, I believe.
There are a couple more days of this welcome week, and then they have some mandatory advising and information meetings, as well as the President's Convocation and the Freshman BBQ. Classes will start on Wednesday. I hope she has her books! I got her two on amazon and left the rest up to her because I couldn't find them any cheaper than what the bookstore was charging at school.
Otherwise it's been quite a summer. We have survived almost nightly thunderstorms, random tornado watches and warnings, a hurricane and even an earthquake! M became as always unnaturally brown after spending every single day in the blazing sun, although I was grateful for at least a few cloudy days this summer. B had a busy summer as well, with volunteering at the hospital and a nursing home, and tennis camp on his days off. Now he has one more week to study his summer reading books before he has to return to school on the 12th. But his big news will be the driving. He should have his permit by Tuesday afternoon. Only one more two hour session with the driving school stands between him and the piece of paper with his name on it. And lastly on B, his neurologist rescheduled his appointment this year so it's been put off until the 20th of September. It's quite likely he will be sent for an MRI this year since it's been so long and he's grown so much. So please remember to storm the chiari gods for good results! He has been feeling fine. We even bought him a gym membership for his birthday. He goes on Monday for his inaugural session.
And in other news, the house is a disaster as my job has moved to full time, but I plan to spend the rest of this weekend trying to whip it into shape. We were lucky not to sustain any Irene damage, thanks to the waterbug in the basement that alerted us to the fact that water was just pouring in through a hole in the foundation, which was supposed to be sealed off around the pipe it had been cut to house. We only lost power for about ten hours and the backup sumps worked wonderfully.
After this weekend, it will be back to reality. Kevin has been on vacation but goes back on Wednesday. And our next big excitement will be when we go for Parents Weekend the third week of October. We are bringing the dogs because (a) it's cheaper to do that and (b) this way we know M will be sure to come and see us for a minute!
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