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!