Free at LAST!

I was laid off...again...

The company was running out of money. It isn't a bad thing though. I learned a lot, but I was ready to move on...and it is much better to be laid off than to quit, especially if you don't have another job lined up.

The lay off was at the perfect time. My mother-in-law was coming to visit for 10 days, and we hadn't planned on taking off work but a couple of days. We were just going to let her entertain herself during the day while we were at work. Now that I had been laid off, I had 4 days to clean house, and then spend every single day with her! Yay!

My mother-in-law holding the lobster we ate the following day...

We had a nice time too. We caught up on each other's lives, and now I know that things are really going well for her too. She left on Saturday morning. In her words, "It was bitter sweet." You hate to see her leave, but you know it's time to get back to normal life.

Now, it's back to reality...unemployment, job searches and attempting to get my house back in some sort of order and presentable to the public.

Lessons I have learned over the past year--

1. Forgetfulness goes hand-in-hand with being overworked. I was already forgetful, so who knew it could get WORSE with being so busy. I now understand how people forgot to eat, pay bills, appointments and the most surprising one for me--forgetting to answer emails. It has been a pet peeve of mine for people to not answer my emails. Well, I was now the person forgetting, and I understood why.
2. Don't ever apply for jobs with small companies, especially if they are more than 3 years old. I thought since this company had been around 25 years, I probably wouldn't get laid off. But I also thought I would've found something new by now. Tackle was small when I started there (already 6 years old at the time), and it progressively got smaller each year. It was a train wreck I watched for 5 years.
3. Family gets mad when you don't keep on touch. My mother and aunt were getting quite annoyed that I was only responding to their emails with brief responses if at all. I wanted to answer their emails, but I was just tired of being on the computer when I had the time. I just wanted to sit and stare. But I was finally told by my aunt, "YOU BETTER START WRITING ME! You aren't too busy to keep in touch with your family." She was right.
4. It's okay if your house looks like crap when your friends come over. I already knew this one, but I finally just stopped caring. I let them in the house anyways, and I am sure happy I did. Thankfully the man doesn't really care if the house looks like crap either.
5. I spent way too much time on social media. Don't we all? And it gets depressing, and you don't accomplish much by getting on it. I did unsubscribe to a lot of things I had "liked" so it wouldn't show up in my news feed. That definitely minimized my fb time, especially the depressing stuff.
6. My life is never going to be the same. This isn't a lesson I have learned from my job, but one from my personal life... I have accepted that my husband is probably not going to get better, at least not anytime soon. So, I have to help him in every way that I can find to make him more comfortable. This reality is one that is like going into a dark room and not knowing where the light switch is to be able to see. It's like we have lost our sight, and we cannot accept that we will never be able to see anything again. It's so unfamiliar...so foreign..and can be very frightening if you stop and think about how this handicap is going to change everything about how you live. It's a handicap no one can see visually though, and is very hard for others to understand. 

Reality... here we go again!