Finances

Ugh.

Raise your hand if you're satisfied with your financial situation.  Anyone?  Bueller?  Yeah, us too.

I've been effectively out of the workforce for a few years now.  I still do some videography but those gigs are few and far between.  I didn't get that pottery job I interviewed for which is really disappointing.  Interviewing for it may have a pay off later, she said that she may need to hire an additional person next spring and I'm first in line if that happens.  But there's a lot of car payments between now and next spring.

Job hunting the last few years is not what it was when I got out of college.  In my early 20's, I was able to sign up for a temp agency and have enough work to support myself relatively comfortably.  Since I've been dealing with the whole infertility thing and having doctors appointments every 20 minutes, I've tried to go that route again a few times (temp jobs would work great around a potential pregnancy) but I really haven't had any luck.  I sign up, I take all the tests, and then nothing ever comes of it.  I'm never called for the jobs.

Part of the problem is that the skills that made me really desirable 15 years ago are simply no longer needed.  I type incredibly fast, can do Powerpoint, Word, Excel, etc etc, but now all of the employers that used to hire assistants to do those things can pretty much do them themselves faster than they could explain to an assistant what they want done.  I'm also no longer up to date on software, I'm still using Office 2003 for crying out loud and my computer is 5 or 6 years old so I'm not exactly the up to date computer geek that I once was.  It's like I hit 30 and all of my computer prowess went right out the window and now I'm 38 and that much stupider.  This blog is on Blogger because I can't even figure out Wordpress as intuitively as I feel I should.  What the fuck happened to my inherent computer ability?

Now of course there's the added difficulty of having been out of the workforce for a long time and having 2 kids to complicate any potential schedule.  Whenever I try to find work, I find myself embarrassed and completely defeated before I really get going.  K doesn't exactly fill me with confidence when he tells me about the types of people he now has applying for cashier positions because they can't find work on par with their skills and experience.  If they are being turned down for entry level work, what hope would I have?

I'm trying to figure out how someone like me can contribute financially to the household.  I'm pretty much drawing a blank.  I'm looking at some writing sites, but those pay like a quarter per article.  Not much of a contribution.

While I try to figure it out, K and I discussed that the only thing I've got is my pottery shop.  It's not much, but we're at the point where a few penny's would be helpful.  So we've decided that now that the girls nap pretty consistently, and go to bed at a reasonable hour, I need to be spending an hour in the pottery studio every day.  Since getting pregnant, I have made one kiln load, approximately 2 dozen mugs.  It's time for me to up production and fill my shop.

The real benefit is that pottery makes me happy.  If nothing else, hopefully just having that hour every day will make me feel better in general about life so I'm not as worried about money.

When you get around to Christmas shopping, check out my pottery shop and see if some handmade mugs will make a good gift for that hard to shop for person in your life.