Two years ago my goal was to work in a library or archive. I finished my second graduate degree (library and information science) May 2013 and worked on some projects with friends to see if one or two of their businesses would take off so I could work at home. Sadly, the businesses didn't work out and I had to start thinking about an on-site job. I gave myself a deadline: If I did not find something steady to do at home, I'd start looking for an on-site job.
The hitch? Both of my kids (15yo daughter and 5yo son at the time) have disabilities. My daughter is homeschooled and we planned on enrolling her in an independent study program if I had to work elsewhere. We met with her therapist to discuss our next steps and I was told it would be detrimental to her if I work on-site. We had to go through the process of having her declared disabled so she could have access to more expansive services.
I could be angry about this because I spent a ridiculous amount of time and money on my education - but the reason I did it in the first place was so I could provide more for my kids. Not my ego.
So, what now? I made a conscious decision to forge ahead, find even a lame job working at home, and embrace the positives I see at home and in my life every day.
Started our day with a family outing to Wafflehouse. We go to the same one regularly and are familiar with the waitstaff. They've literally watched my kids grow up. One of the few places my daughter feels comfortable regardless of the sensory overload (sound and people). Even had a nostalgic moment when the jukebox had a song by The Cars playing. They were the first band I saw in concert
My son is more of an action movie fan, so it surprised me when he begged us to buy the movie Frozen after we rented it. We are watching it for the second time today and he's been dancing during some of the songs! This is huge considering how non-verbal he was just a few years ago. He also has low-muscle tone (hypotonia) and with all of the early intervention he's had since he was 2yo he's walking, running, climbing - essentially able to keep up more and more with his peers.
Worked today while both kids were home. My son's pre-K is on spring break right now. Huge dilemma: what to do with him while I work at home and cannot have any extraneous noise at all?? My husband works an odd shift and sleeps during the day, so we set up video streaming in our bedroom. Husband goofed off on his laptop for a while as our son watched his shows and movies, then went to sleep. Mercifully, my husband sleeps like the dead so our son was able to play quietly in the room and I was able to work my hours today!! If all goes well again tomorrow, I may add another hour to my shift.
Seriously considering a new summer school program for my son so he's better prepared for Kindergarten. I think this week will be a test to see how he does on weeks when either the camp's program is unappealing or nothing is scheduled.
Rather a bit of a downer today with both kids sick with a stomach virus - so I had to cancel the hours I scheduled to work. The upside of this is I have a job where I can have a schedule flexible enough to take care of situations like this whenever they arise! There is no way I could take time off if I worked in a library or archive even if I was a salaried employee, so I am counting this as a good work environment for the time being.
I was able to catch up a bit on shows I haven't been able to watch by logging into Hulu. Just put my headphones on and was able to pause it whenever necessary today. Still not sure if we'll be able to attend an event this weekend or if we'll need to stay home. I hope we can go because I'll have a chance to see some friends and some are selling some art I'd like to at least see in person! A close friend of mine is hosting the event and this may be the last year he'll be involved with it.
Going to see how it goes today. Couldn't get my son to bed until rather late so I am a bit of a zombie right now. He napped for a long time yesterday. I may even take the day off just so I can go do something with the kids since he's on spring break this week. Could be a day of adventure!
---------- Post added 04-02-2014 at 10:20 AM ----------
A confession: I started smoking when I went back to grad school in 2010 and have had the most difficult time kicking the habit again. Tried ecigs (vaping) and had serious malfunction issues with the devices I gave up. About 2-3 weeks ago, I found a shop in town with really helpful staff and picked up another device. Went to a wedding that weekend and met another local who vapes and he told me about three other local sources. Much closer to home and the parking is far more convenient if I have the kids with me since they cannot come inside the shops.
So far, so good. No tobacco for about three weeks now and I feel better! My goal is to reduce down to 0 grams of nicotine and just stop vaping.
Also saw an email from a book indexing group I belong to with an offer to renew my membership. It's a professional organization and offers training, but it's above what I can afford right now. I took an indexing course when I was in my Library and Information Science program and really enjoyed it! However, my professor was not great about offering advice concerning how to build a business. My hope is IF I take this additional course that information is available. It's a difficult field to break into and I spent the past year trying to cajole friends who are writing books to let me index their books for free just so I could gain experience. Their projects were a bit more pie in the sky, evidently, because they still haven't started writing yet!
Something else to consider while I'm on calls for my current job. I'd like to do something in my field and indexing is something I can easily do at home with my kids' schedules.
Productive day as far as errands are concerned. Plenty of things to eat in case we lose power during the thunderstorm forecast in place for tomorrow. Usually never happens, but if I learned anything since moving here it is to be prepared in case. Even picked up some steaks to throw on the BBQ. Figured out where a few new businesses are in town.
Since my daughter and I did a gluten tolerance test (self-test) and discovered we do better without it, we've been on the hunt for things without gluten or even high fructose corn syrup. Eating a bit more organic produce and grass/pasture-fed items. It's a bit of a challenge where we live since our farmer's markets are only open seasonally. Major grocery store chains have a few things, but the produce and meat is pretty iffy sometimes. Found out the farmer's market season in our downtown area is coming back in a few weeks!! Our goal this year is to buy produce there and see about a local source for grass/pasture fed meat and eggs.
Goal for today? Work for six hours AND I was unable to even log in to work . The issue? Husband came home after working an hour of overtime looking completely worn out. He was going to watch our son so I could work, but there was no way I could push him to follow through with that commitment given how he seemed this morning.
His current job is fulfilling in some ways because he works with people he likes. However, the management is handled by two individuals who are such supreme ass-kissers that they throw the employees under the bus whenever it comes to pay. Husband is now two job reviews behind schedule and countless raises. Meanwhile he is performing the job of two people and coming home looking like he's been beaten to within an inch of his life. Unacceptable ! So off to the job fair he goes. I think he just needed more support from me - us working together - to realize I am on his side.
The plus side? We spent a couple of hours sprucing up his resume so he can go to a job fair hosted by a new company coming to our city. This was one of those situations where I wanted to kiss the academia fairies for placing me in a class in grad school with a completely anal professor when we worked on our resumes. Now the husband person has a great resume to hand out in person tomorrow!
My daughter joined Mene today!! So excited! She's 16yo and has asked me about joining on and off since she was 7 or 8. I stopped coming here in late 2010, but she would randomly ask if I checked in on the site over the past few years. She even attended a con with me in (I think) 2008 and liked the staff who were there. They encouraged her to join when she was old enough. So... I can see this idea has germinated for some time.
When I started posting again, she dropped a few hints. I thought about it for a while because, frankly, this site is the only place I can go to and decompress without people in my face from real life. I can log on to facebook and "like" a post, then I'm hit with a few private messages. Or posts I don't care to see.
However, my tastes and interests are quite different from hers, so I can be on here with our tiny community babbling about whatever and she can be off doing something else - or we can hang out here and make rude gestures/facial expressions at each other in person. AND she knows of my tendency toward not censoring my thoughts or parsing my words whether it's in writing or in person.
Welcome to Menewsha, sweetheart! I know you'll love it here!
This is so exciting! I believe I've already said it but welcome, Soki! I'm glad that Menewsha has been a good place for you to come hang out. I've always wanted a group of online friends that are sorta like a family so I'm hoping I'll find that here. ^^
I really do believe you will enjoy it here. The events are always a blast and people who tend to lurk or are unable to remain active through the year tend to appear at least during events. So, you will connect with people here, that is for sure!
It's a bit weird coming back here and finding some of the members who I knew when they were in high school almost finished with college/starting families. It's very cool, but I feel badly that I missed out. Reason enough to stick around.
I already like it here and that's good. Maybe I can convince the girlfriend to join for the events. She doesn't have a lot of free time with school and all but I think she would like the site too. Oh man, I bet! It sounds like fun knowing people for that long though and sort of seeing them grow up.
The thing I like is people understand if you're not around often because you have a life. The rules, mods, and staff here tend to keep folks out who just want gold and beg for it, so it's a bit different from other avatar sites I've seen. As a parent, I've seen enough to know it's a pretty safe place and a diverse global community.
I think we all go through some rough moments and I've been surprised by the amount of support people offer here. Lots of good times as well! I think your girlfriend would like it here, but totally understandable if she's slammed with school. My downtime from here was due to trying to just sort out things at home plus school. Lots of people IRL were vying for attention and pushing boundaries. I had to set my foot down hard and many of the people are out of my life. Home life has benefitted tremendously! Finding that balance between home/self/friends is difficult.
I'll have to invite her again during the summer on her off days. I'm sure she would love it here. I already talk about it enough that she knows some about it. She even roleplays so I think she would like that part of the forum.
I have a lot of free-time to myself since I don't have a job and I'm not in school at the moment then most of my friends are always busy too. My best friend and I almost had a fight, I think. We've had disagreements about things in the past and only one real upsetting moment towards one another but that was solved easily (boy troubles that turned out not to be boy troubles because I wasn't interested in him.) Bestie was a bit upset the last time she was over because Elora had left my house to drive back to school (6 hour drive) and called me for the last two hours so she wouldn't fall asleep at the wheel but that meant the entire time Bestie was visiting, I was on the phone. I thought it was alright since Bestie took a nap and I was hoping we could hang out later or that I could spend the night with her for a girls night. Turns out she had to leave after those two hours because she had plans with our mutual friends for dinner but if she missed me enough to get upset with me for not visiting with her, she could have asked everyone if I could come along. I hated being alone after being with Elora for a week+ so I was really hoping we would do something but that didn't work out too well. Wow, sorry. I didn't mean for this to get super rambly in your thread.
It's cool! Figuring out what's going on with friends isn't easy, is it? I have a few friends who think I can read their minds and vice versa. Did things work out okay with your bestie? I'm guessing Elora made it home safely.
I'm not familiar with the RP threads, but they always seem to have a lot of people playing on them.
We never talked about it so I'm not sure if we should or not. It hasn't really been bugging me, though I will say that she has a boyfriend she calls every night before bed and I've been over at hers loads of times when she's on the phone with him so that bugs me. Kind of hypocritical? She did and now she's struggling with her roommates because she has trouble saying no and they take advantage of how nice she is.
I've made a few friends on here already just from rp haha. It's fun but I had to close my rp thread for now because I tend to overload myself with anything involving writing. I'd like to publish a book of my own someday.
I understand about feeling overloaded! Which genres do you prefer writing about? I can imagine RP is time consuming. I'd do it, but I can't commit consistently with the kids and so forth.
If the situation with your bestie isn't bugging you, that's good! Yikes ~ I hope Elora can find a way to balance her friendships with her roommates and set boundaries. People will bulldoze if they think they can and often don't reciprocate.
On my own, I've been writing a high school setting. Different points of view for each chapter. At least a handful of characters that all know each other in some way. It's coming of age, focusing on finding yourself, coming out, drugs, etc. Kinda like my high school experience.
With rping, I do a bit of everything. Mysteries, fantasy, romance, sci-fi, war, etc. I don't believe I've done anything horror/gore but I have played the antagonist before.
I've read stories about coming of age, but it's mostly from the perspective of men/boys. Glad you are able to put things down on paper and can write from ore than one perspective! That is very challenging to many authors.
My favorite author would be John Green so he inspires me, as well as David Levithan. It's hard to write angry characters so I try to reserve those parts for bad days and go all out haha.
I'd really like to collect as many of moms poems as I can and try to get a book of them published. She wrote a lot as well but I don't think there's many poems left around. If it was published, I'd like for all the proceeds to go to our local woman's shelter.
Can you ask family or her friends if they have any copies of her poems? I think my mom did some sort of project where she asked some of her dad's friends to contribute stories they could remember about him, but most of what she has is from what he wrote. As far as I know, she's been working on it for over 20 years now! No idea where she has it stored so if something happens to her, my sister and I will have to dig around a bit I suspect. My mom's organizational skills are a bit haphazard. I'd need a map. Hopefully, your mom was able to show you where she put a few things.
Gloomy and rainy day here today! Some flooding. Hubster had to dig a few shallow trenches to deal with water pooling at the end of our driveway so the water would drain into a drainage ditch. Cooking dinner now so we can head out for a Girl Scouts meeting, and we're looking forward to it.
Adding this while it's loaded in the ol' brain pan:
SPOILERX
Hubster and I are evaluating a venture we can do as a family. This would allow us to earn some much needed extra income. Even though I have a job, my income level puts us at risk for losing the income-based health insurance my kids qualify for - something I pay into, but it's far less than private insurance. My income from my job is not enough to pay for private insurance, and the kids health issues make it nearly impossible to find private insurance in our state because our state legislators either eliminated or blocked any sort of help for people (including children) with pre-existing conditions to obtain insurance. Insane premium payments and I can't even describe the crazy for deductibles. Totally for another discussion, but that's the gist.
Crunched numbers and my hope is we can figure this out soon.
Last edited by Elmira Swift; 04-08-2014 at 12:25 PM..
Reason: Additional journal stuff
and he's been dancing during some of the songs! This is huge considering how non-verbal he was just a few years ago. He also has low-muscle tone (hypotonia) and with all of the early intervention he's had since he was 2yo he's walking, running, climbing - essentially able to keep up more and more with his peers.
! So off to the job fair he goes. I think he just needed more support from me - us working together - to realize I am on his side.
