Furlough Friday Reflections

Furlough Friday Reflections:  After a week of furloughs for many, I just kept being reminded about tough times in our past, where we wondered just how in the heck we would be able to pay any of our bills.  Like, when I lost my job just before the summer in 1995...and Mike was a full time student, so we had NO income.  Or the next year, when I left my job working for legitimate reasons, and was again unemployed for the summer.  Or, when we decided I'd be a stay-at-home mom for our new precious baby, and we just made worthwhile adjustments to our lifestyle...and ended up moving a few years later and when trying to sell our beautiful and awesome NM home, found ourselves selling at the LOWEST time for house sales in the past 2 decades.  So much for a down payment on a new home, and "flush" to all the extra principal we paid for many years.  Sigh.

Sure, there were other times, but we learned to make adjustments and survive, and became closer in the process.  So here we are now, not in "regular jobs" but happy with the flexibility of our alternative jobs, where we can work at different times of the days and weeks.  More than anything, we are no longer frightened when adversity comes our way, if it ever dares to again, because we lived through several tough times, and we can still laugh about it.  It's such a sense of freedom to understand and realize that you do NOT have to fear losing a job, no matter how short of a time (like a furlough), because there are always other choices and options.  Always!

What did I do those summers of unanticipated time off with no income?  Unemployment surely does not pay much, so that wasn't the fun part.  We went camping, canned applesauce, bought the book "What's the Color of My Parachute" (good book for ideas), tried out new recipes, and more than anything, paid attention to what we "thought" worked before and realized that things were not always optimal.  Sure, sometimes we end up in jobs that are frustrating, bosses that are jerks, but that's where we spend MOST of our waking hours for M-F.  At my jobs, I spent more than that, as it was IT work, and salary.  Mind you, I was a woman working in the IT field, so it didn't pay like you'd have imagined, certainly not equal to that of my peers in the industry, not in NM.  I learned to be more truthful to myself and others when applying for jobs.  When asked by my next employer, where I stayed for 5 years until we moved to CA, why I had quit my last job, I told him the truth:  we just had different working styles, and I didn't fit his idea of an IT person working for an engineer who didn't know about how IT worked.  No offense to him, but it just didn't work well together.

The main point I think about when watching and hearing folks talk about the furloughs, is that there is always a silver lining, and Mike and I were so much happier when we found it, and we ended up better for it in the end.

So, after spending almost a decade as a stay-at-home mom, where I did alternative jobs or part time jobs such as substitute teaching, home hospital teaching, group home care for developmentally disabled (that was the hardest job of all, for the least amount of pay...hug those folks when you meet them!!!) -- well, it was not appealing to go back to a 9-5 job where I no longer fit and had no desire to spend my days.  We did do some surprising projects, such as making or helping to make, literally, thousands of tie dye shirts over the past 3 years, and we have a few more things up our sleeves for the upcoming future that we both feel will make all the tough and lean times more appreciated for all of the unexpected benefits they gave us.  We will continue to teach at the college, as teaching makes us happy.

We'll have more yard sales, which often don't reap that much in the cash benefits, but does wonders for clearing out things that no longer fit in our home or lives.  Combined yard sales make it more fun, and shares the opportunity at an ideal location -- what a deal!  In the past 10 years, we have downsized the extra "fluff" stuff we owned by at least HALF (woo hoo!!), and I only miss one thing we let go.  Sure, Mike has a growing collection of lawn mowers at the moment, but so what?!  They are easy to pass to the next person.  It makes him happy, and he deserves at least that, because he has never complained about the space my hobbies take up for all of the past 20+ years.  I don't even want to say how much space that is, because those hobbies are what help keep my head happy and balanced.  Sewing, beading, making jewelry, and whatever other projects that come up...they are truly mental health therapy for me.  I no longer go to the bead store and spend about $100 per visit on the beautiful beads, but I do play smarter and have made beautiful projects with the beads purchased in the more lucrative years.

So, I will end this as I need to finish grading papers, and go clean out my kitchen of extra stuff we're not using, then move on to 2 other rooms. Set up for the yard sale tomorrow.  Do some laundry.  Finish grading some homework.  And then soak and tie t-shirts for an entire kindergarten class that we're helping to dye on Sunday.  Crazy, busy, that's this week, but then some down time next week, and lots of good company and laughs in all of the above.

Y'all enjoy that furlough for as long as it lasts, and hope you can find the "other" things to do that you never have time for when you're working the 9-5 jobs.  Carry on!