Saturday, January 24, 2009

That thing that's a virtue

In 2007, around Thanksgiving, I was laid off from the hospital I'd worked at for almost five years. I got six weeks of severance, and found a job at a construction company as their office manager that started the week my severance ran out.

In 2008, around Thanksgiving, I was laid off from the construction company job. No severance this time - I'm lucky to get paid for the hours I'm there, the way things have been lately. Dude, looking for work sucks. Starbucks isn't even hiring.

So this week I found a good-looking job and sent in my resume and got a response (which is better than I've gotten with any of the other jobs I've applied for) and have been looking forward to interviewing for it. But this morning I finally heard back from the hiring director and she's away until mid-February and won't be interviewing for the position until then. So...I supposeI keep looking and applying and see if something shows up in the interim.

During both holiday seasons when I've been between jobs, God has said to me very clearly, "Wait". So I guess I will. I'm not very good at waiting - I prefer to fill my time with something(anything, really) so I can either stop waiting or at least stop thinking about what I'm waiting for - but the past couple weeks, I've had the, uh, opportunity to practice waiting, and it's not so bad. My Hero and I have been talking about what it means to be living in the present; we both tend to talk about the present as the thing to be gotten through in order to reach whatever is on the horizon. Lately that's been grad school and a big garden, but we've both been reminded in the past week or two that our future is shaped by our present - if we're just impatiently muddling through our present, won't that impact our future?

So I'll work harder at enjoying my time to myself on the days G is in daycare, and playing hard on the days she's home with me. I'll get a job one of these days, and everything else will take care of itself.

"Don't worry about tomorrow; tomorrow has enough trouble of its own."
"Life is what happens when you're making other plans."

Friday, January 2, 2009

Triumph

No, not the Insult Comic Dog. I mean my first attempt at freezer-paper stenciling. Our niece and nephew got t-shirts this Christmas; I bought them at the thrift store (do you know how hard it is to find t-shirts with nothing on them??), picked up a couple bottles of acrylic and 150 square feet of freezer paper, and voila:


Our nephew is way into sprinklers, the way most four-year-old boys are into dinosaurs or trucks.

Now I'm itching to stencil something on all my t-shirts, and those of my immediate family as well...