Kill The Beast

The last couple mornings Sadie, our faithful canine, has romped through the halls with a squeaker toy fully engaged in her creaky jaws. Not because she needed to go outside. Apparently she decided it was time for the pack to be awake and so blew reveille. This morning I ran through my mental Rolodex searching for a nearby glue factory we could ship her to, but couldn't find one. Lucky dog.

Then, after we came home from Ols' tumbling class, we found the kitchen thoroughly ransacked and a stick of butter and a bag of English muffins gone. This is our dog on the amplified anti-anxiety medication! I shudder to think of her without meds. Really, it would all be solved with another dog but I cannot do it. No way, no how.

Which reminds me -- stay with me, I am low on sleep and the ideas wander -- Olivia has started using short phrases! "No way!" Yes, please" and "Mommy! What you doing?"

So, as you all can read, my blog title is Dust Bowl 2009 and here we are in 2010. I honestly never thought our precarious situation would have lasted this long. Bends my mind to contemplate it.

I was listening to another doom-filled employment report the other day and it mentioned how the unemployment numbers didn't reflect the 100's of thousands of people who had given up looking for work altogether. There I am helping to skew the picture! I had to cease the job search just to get some equilibrium. It was so demoralizing I was presenting poorly as a candidate and needed to halt the downward spiral.

SO, new year, new sense of optimism. I have updated my resume and my Linked In profile and am working on my confidence. I figure things can only go up.

After reading "Born to Run", a book about extreme distance runners and the evils of shoes, I realized today that quasi-employment netted an unexpected benefit for me. For years my feet, plagued by fallen arches, neuromas and plantar fasciitis, have given me constant pain. Since I have been mostly telecommuting for the past 3 years I am generally just sock-footed. I wear shoes only when I absolutely must. And I have had no pain for the last year or so.

Aaron still has a job. Not sure for how long, half his team is to be let go. He has exhausted himself with worrying about it and trying to find something else, get ready for the new semester, find time for the family. We are kind of ignoring it in some way. We are both job searching but we can't keep focusing on how the legs can be pulled out from under us at any time.

For now, it's one bare foot in front of the other. Baby steps.