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I started my new job yesterday and so far I’m liking it a lot. I don’t really know what to say about it because I try not to talk about work on my blog too much. But I’m very happy. It’s good.

And of course, because things always work out like this, it was only last week (after I’d already accepted the new job) that my old job back in Seattle contacted me and asked if I could do a little freelancing project for them. I said yes, thinking, meh, it’ll probably take me two days, no big deal. And holy mother of pearl, this project is HUGE (nobody’s fault, just miscommunication about exactly what was involved) and so basically I’m now working on evenings and weekends in addition to my full-time job. Not cool, although the money sure will be nice when I get it finished.

Also, we’ve decided to change things up a little with the daycare situation. I’ve had some qualms about our in-home daycare situation since the time Nicole (daycare provider) emailed me to tell me that she thought Catie had Sensory Processing Disorder. Something about that was a red flag to me, so I’ve been watching Catie carefully, and here’s what I’ve noticed:
* Catie used to be excited to go to daycare, and now she cries when I tell her that she’s going to Miss Nicole’s house that day.
* Her behavior at Nicole’s house isn’t improving. She’s fine if she’s left to play by herself, but she shuts down & cries when Nicole tries to get her involved in an activity.
* She freaking loves the drop-in daycare down the street that she calls “daycare school,” and the lady who runs the place has told me repeatedly what a sweet, friendly little girl I have.

It’s become pretty clear that the in-home daycare is not the best fit for Catie. I’m not sure what it is, maybe it’s because there aren’t enough kids there (just Nicole’s own 2 kids and another baby who’s about a year old), maybe it’s because Nicole is too rigid and doesn’t really “get” Catie (who I fully admit is a pretty quirky kid), I honestly don’t know what it is. I was originally thinking about trying to get Catie to go to Nicole’s 3 days a week until preschool starts in the fall, but something about that decision just didn’t sit right with me.

So, rather than holding out and waiting for preschool to start, I’ve started looking for a full-time preschool/daycare that would work instead, where she could start now. Last week, my mom and I took Catie with us and toured a few different daycares. I found one that I think will be a really great fit for her. Of the three places we saw, it was the first place where Catie let go of my hand and ran off to play. She really seemed to like it there, and I got an overall good vibe from the place. So, we’ll see. I’m optimistic about it.

Oh, and did I mention that my baby girl is turning 3 tomorrow? I can’t really believe it. More updates on THAT milestone (with pics from her birthday party last weekend) tomorrow.

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First of all, it’s apparently National Delurking Day.

So if you read this site but never comment, today is the day that you’re supposed to say something. Even if it’s just a simple “hi.” It’s kinda nice to know who’s out there in the big bad Internet, you know?

Ok, moving on to the BIG NEWS of the day…

I GOT A JOB!!!

If you read this post last week, it’s the one I referred to as “Job A.” It’s full-time, working-from-home. I don’t want to get into too many details about what I’ll be doing because I’m not sure how prudent that is. It’s still in the IT industry, although it’s in an area that I have absolutely ZERO experience with, but it still sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Now, I just have to figure out how to accommodate Catie in all of this. She already has daycare two days a week, and that’s great. I think I have a temporary solution for the other three days of the week for now. The main thing is going to be finding a preschool for her in the fall. And of course, most of the preschools around here are enrolling kids, like, right now as I type. I’m not worried, we’ll figure it out, it’s just going to take some research to find something that’s a good fit for all of us.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go wake up my baby girl from a nap and take her to the movies to see “The Princess and the Frog.” Because days like these needs a little celebration.

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I’ve missed a few challenges for this (W)rite of Passage thing, but I’m trying to get back to it now. This week’s challenge: the job. “Pick a day of your life in a significant, or completely insignificant, job and make us feel like we’re living it with you.”

I thought about this and realized that I’ve never written about this on my blog before, so this might be news to most of you. Here goes.

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I was 20 years old, and I took a semester off from college to “find myself.” A friend of my sister hired me for a job doing secretarial work at a drug testing company. Essentially, the company would do drug screens on school bus drivers, truck drivers, construction crews… really, anyone who had to have a commercial driver’s license to do their job.

Then the drug test results would come in, and I was the person who would type up all of the letters to the company.

“We regret to inform you that Employee X is apparently snorting coke before he drives a bus full of elementary kids to school, and then smoking pot to come down at night.”

It was never written quite that explicitly, but man, I always wanted to say it that way. Especially with the breath alcohol test results.

“Employee Z was drunker than Cooter Brown at 8:00 in the damn morning. What the hell, dude?”

One day, we got a phone call from a convenience store in a tiny town called Union, Mississippi. (For those of you who might know the area: it’s about halfway between Hattiesburg and Laurel. A good 90 miles or so from Jackson.) The guy who owned the convenience store was sure that one of his employees was smoking pot before she came to work, and he wanted to bust her for it. The store had about 10 employees total (working on different shifts), and my boss told him that the best approach would be to just issue a mandatory drug screen for all of his employees; that way it doesn’t look like discrimination against the one girl who he suspected was a pothead. He asked if we could do the drug screening for him, my boss said yes.

My boss made one huge mistake, though: the day the drug test was scheduled? All of our field drug testing employees were already scheduled to be at other sites all over the state. Under normal circumstances, that would mean that my boss would have to drive out there and do the pee-collection herself. But she was about 3 months pregnant at the time, and she said that if she had to smell and/or handle other people’s pee that early in the morning, she was going to throw up.

At that point, I had worked at this drug testing company for almost a year. I had heard so many stories around the office about pee testing, I was pretty much immune to all of it. It was June, and I was going back to college in August, at which point I’d be quitting (since I was going to school out-of-state), so I knew I might never have this opportunity again. So I decided to man up, and I volunteered to collect the pee of strangers.

My boss went with me, and we drove out to Union early one morning. The owner of the convenience store had told all of his employees to come in early for a staff meeting, and then, surprise! While you’re here, you’ll also need to go into the bathroom and pee in a cup. I thought it was kind of a lousy way to handle the situation, but I also think that if you work at a convenience store in Union, Mississippi, your life has already perhaps not turned out the way that you’d hoped, so what’s one more insult to add to your injury?

We donned our white lab coats and rubber gloves and set up all of our paperwork and supplies. One by one, the employees went in, did their stuff, and brought out their cups full of pee. They’d hand the cups to me, and I’d put the little stickers on the cups that labeled them accordingly with the paperwork. Then each cup was sealed, the sealed cup went into a plastic bag, and the paperwork was put in a little sleeve on the outside of the plastic bag. Then the packaged-up pee cups would all go into a big styrofoam cooler-type contraption, which is how we’d transport them to the lab for testing.

Oh, and the girl who the owner suspected was smoking weed? She walked into the store, saw us in our lab coats, walked over to her boss, quit her job on the spot, and walked out. Although it proved that he was most likely correct in his assumption of her drug use, that was actually a very smart move on her part, as it kept her from having a positive drug test on her record. And the owner was kinda pissed, because then he had to go ahead and pay us for running the drug test results on his other 9 employees who were all clean.

So, yeah. One time, almost 14 years ago, I collected pee. How many of y’all can put that on your resume?

Other (W)rite of Passage stories here:

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I’ve had three or four job interviews over the phone in the past week, and when I started thinking about it, I realized that I’ve probably had hundreds of them in my lifetime. I usually interview pretty well over the phone, and it usually gets me to the next step, which is the in-person interview.

So, since I’m starting to think of myself as somewhat of an expert on job interviews, here are a few of my tips. You know, just in case you happen to be in the job market yourself.

1. If you have small children at home, get rid of them. Find a sitter or whatever, but nothing is going to make you sound unprofessional faster than your 2 1/2 year-old shrieking, “Mommy! I need more juice, pweeeeez!!!” in the background. Personally, I take Catie to a drop-in daycare facility that’s only a mile or two from our house. It costs $8 an hour, and I consider it money well spent.

I did one interview on a day that Dave happened to be working from home, so I let him watch Catie and I locked myself in our guest room for my interview. Of course, Catie had a huge screaming tantrum while I was on the phone because she wanted “Moooommyyyy!!!”, and I’m pretty sure that the interviewer didn’t hear her because Dave did a good job of keeping her at the other end of the house, but I could hear her, and it was more than a little distracting.

2. Tend to all personal needs before the interview. That means go ahead and use the bathroom, so when your 10-minute interview runs for over an hour, you aren’t doing the pee-pee dance around your living room by the end of it. Not that I have any experience with that one myself. *ahem*

3. Have a glass of water nearby, in case you get dry-mouth. Note that this does not apply to soda, as that will likely just make you burp during the interview. And most interviewers – I’m guessing – deduct points for belching. Water, though, probably won’t make you burp and it’s better for you anyway.

4. Don’t try to multitask. During one of my interviews, I thought that I would take advantage of the fact that Catie was at daycare and tidy up the living room during my interview. It’s not like putting toys in the toy box requires a whole lot brain power, right? Um, wrong. It didn’t take long to realize that I wasn’t really hearing anything that the interviewer was saying, so I stopped, sat down and concentrated on making my best possible phone presentation.

5. Don’t curse during the interview. This might seem really obvious, but you’d be surprised. Years ago, I had an interview right after a major dental thing, and I was on painkillers, which is my excuse for this huge blunder. But I said the word “crap” in the middle of the interview – I honestly cannot remember the context or why I said it, but I know I did. The interviewer kind of paused for a second, then wrapped up our conversation and I never heard from them again. So, yeah. Learn from my mistakes, y’all.

There you have it. Clearly I missed my calling as a career counselor, no?

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Last fall I got a part-time job doing some freelance technical writing for a small software company that’s based here in Raleigh. I enjoyed the work that I did for them, and I was excited for some of the projects that they had coming up. However, they’ve had some major employee turnover in the last month or so, and now it seems that things like “have our freelance writer produce more documentation about our awesome software” and “pay our freelance writer’s invoices” have gotten pushed to the back burner. It sucks, but what can you do?

So, new year, new opportunities. I decided to start looking for another job. Obviously I’d prefer to work from home, but I’m not opposed to an office job either. I started sending out resumes, but I figured that it would take a long time to find something that would be a good match for me. And suddenly this week, I’ve come across two different jobs that both sound really good, both companies seem very interested in me, and I’m not sure which one sounds better.

Job A: Entirely work from home, and while it’s in the IT industry, it’s a side that I have absolutely no experience with, but it sounds like it would be a LOT of fun to me. And even though it’s work-from-home, it would involve a lot of talking on the phone, so I’d still get that need for adult interaction fulfilled, and not feel all isolated and hermit-like (which I know is a downfall of a lot of work-from-home jobs). However, the pay is just so-so – it would be more than enough to cover daycare expenses and still have some money left over, which I guess is the main goal.

Job B: It’s an office job, but it’s straight up technical writing, which is what I’m used to. (And I really enjoy technical writing, so that’s not a bad thing.) It would challenge me, which I love. And the salary would be… well, a lot more than the Job A, that’s for sure. It’d probably be enough to bump us into another tax bracket.

Now keep in mind, I don’t have hard offers for either of these jobs, I’m just in the early stages of interviewing with them. But, how do I choose between two seemingly great opportunities? Do I go for the work-from-home job, and take a chance on my gut instinct that’s telling me this would be a good fit for me? Or do I stick with the side of the industry that I know, and accept that security (and ok, the money) in exchange for having to commute to an office every day? Is it all about the dollah-dollah bills? Or is job flexibility the key to happiness?

How would you choose?

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With headings, Mimi Smartypants-style.

JOB STUFF

I had a job interview today. The job would actually be pretty good – not super-exciting, but ok; I’m qualified for it, the people seem nice, etc. And the interview went really well, I won’t be surprised if they make me an offer. But I think I’ve talked myself out of it simply for the fact that it’s a full-time office job, and the office is over 30 miles away. That’s a long-ass commute. Especially if it means that Catie would be going to daycare full-time, tacking an extra 45-ish minutes onto the beginning and end of each workday just for the drive? I don’t think I want to do that.

Although, I would get to pass this sign every day, which might make it worth it.

Yes, I actually pulled over to take that picture. Don’t judge me. (Oh, be sure to hover your mouse over that pic so you can see my Flickr caption. I’m kind of ridiculously proud of myself for my juvenile sense of humor.)

Anyway, I figure that any job interview is good practice for the next one, which might actually be for a job that I do want. So, eh. Moving on.

DAYCARE UPDATE

Of the two days that Catie went to daycare this week, one day was great and the other day not-so-great. On the really good day, Nicole (our daycare provider) set Catie and Kiersten (Nicole’s daughter who is Catie’s age) up with some toys in Kiersten’s room, and then Nicole left them alone, but listened to them from the next room. She said that they played really nicely together for a long time. They talked to each other, role-played with their Little People action figures, and had an overall great time. So that’s good.

One of the things that Nicole mentioned last week, which was really bothering me, was that Catie often seems to be on the verge of tears when she’s at daycare. I couldn’t figure out why that would be, since that’s not her normal personality and Catie tells me all the time that she loves going to Miss Nicole’s house.

Then the big “DUH!” hammer smacked me upside the head. Remember how I mentioned recently that Catie goes to bed way too late for a 2 year-old? Well, on normal mornings where she’s just hanging out at home with me, she wakes up between 6:30 and 7 a.m., she has some milk, and then we go back to sleep for at least another hour. But on daycare days, we just get up and go. So, hi there, Big Fat Obvious Answer that I overlooked: she’s tired! Of course she’s tired! DUH! I’m kind of mortified that it took me this long to notice that.

So, we’re working on bedtime. I’m trying to bump her bedtime back about 10-15 minutes earlier every night. Last night she was in bed at 10:00, tonight I’ll aim for 9:45. I know you 8:00 bedtimers are still appalled that my child is up that late, but whatever. That’s the first time she’s been in bed that early since we left Washington. (Hey, maybe that’s the problem! She’s still on Pacific time! Even though we haven’t lived there in over a year. Hmm.)

THE REASON FOR THE SEASON

Catie has gone Christmas crazy. She’s absolutely berserk for the cartoons, the decorations, everything. And it’s only going to get worse because the child is essentially having FOUR Christmases this year. No exaggeration.
* 1st Christmas – Next week, when my family is here for Thanksgiving. Since we’ll be in the UK next month, they want to do our big celebration and gift exchange now. Which is fine with me, really.
* 2nd and 3rd Christmas – With Dave’s dad and mom, respectively. I guess this is when divorce pays off, the grandkids get two sets of presents from two sets of grandparents. Score!
* 4th Christmas – When we get home from the UK, because you know, Santa understands vacation plans, and he knows that suitcase space is limited. He doesn’t want to deliver Catie’s new toy kitchen to England and make Mommy & Daddy haul it through customs. So Santa will reschedule delivery for, I don’t know, maybe New Year’s Eve. It depends on how jet lagged we are tired he is after making all those Christmas Eve deliveries.

So, yeah, she is WILD for Christmas. It doesn’t help that Christmas decorations are currently everywhere, so she sees Christmas stuff every time we leave the house. She loves it. Everything is about “Santa and reindeer, and look, it’s a snowman, Mommy! A SNOOOWMAAAN!!!” It’s awesome to see her get so excited about it, because it reminds me of how magical Christmas was when I was little, but it’s also completely exhausting.

She’s an awfully cute little elf, though.

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Yesterday was a day of suckage the likes of which we haven’t seen for a while. FYI, this post is going to contain a lot of whining and it’s all very stream-of-consciousness blurted out by a crazy person in the midst of major sleep deprivation. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

1. We found out that we will not, in fact, have our money from the UK in time for our closing date on Friday, the 11th. The sellers have the right to completely back out of the deal and keep our earnest money that we put down, which we’re praying they don’t do. Hopefully they’ll just allow the closing date to get bumped further out. Again.

Meanwhile, this house that we’re currently living in has been re-rented, and the new tenants are moving in on Saturday, the 12th. So, we’re still moving out on the 11th, with nowhere to go. We’ll be putting our stuff in storage and then moving into a hotel, or with Cat & Tony, or who knows what. And then we also have to figure out what to do with the cats – our awesome neighbors have offered to help us out with them, so that’s a huge plus. Still, there are about 10,000 other details that we’re going to have to figure out in the next week. I’m not so much looking forward to that.

2. My dad’s cousin that I mentioned earlier is really not doing well. She has pneumonia, she can’t speak, they’re keeping her sedated, and the doctors expect that she’ll die sometimes in the next three days or so. I don’t know if I’ll be able to take off and fly to Mississippi for a funeral if Catie is sick and we’re in the middle of moving, but I’m going to try and do what I can.

3. Catie is sick. I’m praying that it’s just a bad cold and not H1N1, but the poor kid is really miserable. The cold triggers her asthma, so we’ve been having to give her medication through the nebulizer every couple of hours. As a result, none of us are getting very much sleep, so our house is not a very fun place right now. She started barfing tonight, but my Mommy Ninja Skills (acquired through countless other episodes of puking from this kid) meant that only one barf ended up on my socks, and none of them fully hit me. The rest I caught in a mixing bowl, and even managed to grab her hair with my other hand to keep her from puking in it. I’m telling y’all, that is talent. If only I could figure out a way to make money off of that type of skill… well, we wouldn’t be having issues with our house financing, that’s for sure.

* However, there was one good thing that happened yesterday: I got a job! Kind of a surprise because I went into the interview with zero expectations, but I’m going to be doing some freelance technical writing for a new, local software company. It should be a lot of fun, and the extra money will be really nice, so I’m excited about that.

But yeah, even in spite of the job news, it’s not so much a fun holiday weekend here with the sick toddler, terminally ill family member, and house troubles. I’m praying Catie sleeps a little better tonight, since I think that one solid night’s sleep alone would probably help improve my outlook drastically. Here’s hoping!

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