When I started this blog, Ed was on the brink of starting a new job. And now let me backtrack a couple of years. He’d been working for a company for, eh, four years or so. But their main work is tied to the construction industry and things had been getting progressively worse and Ed kept sticking it out, hoping things would improve but they didn’t and eventually he looked for something else and got hired by a company who then decided not to hire him the day after he’d quit the job he already had. Got that? Run-on-sentences-for-the-win! It’s all very complicated and I just don’t have it in me to go into it all and I’m not sure Ed wants it all out on the internet anyway, it’s not SECRET, just private. So for the last year and a half, we’ve been living on: unemployment, help from my parents, a series of temp jobs. The unemployment rate in California, last I heard, a week or two ago, is 12.2%, and it really really sucks. Add to that the fact that we don’t have a car and things are even more limited.
Ed has been working for an account through an employment agency for a while now, pretty much full-time, for most of a year (I’m leaving out a lot of crap here in the interest of not having this entry be 25 pages long, but there was a three-month period that was really awful and we’d have been homeless without my mother’s help). The money at the job is not great, but it’s keeping us afloat, and we’ve been looking for other jobs, hoping the economy will improve. This account is being taken over by another company in a couple of weeks, and Ed went through the hiring process and they told him he had a job and we rejoiced. Health insurance for the first time in well over a year! And just the relative stability of working for an actual company, direct, instead of the iffy-ness of being a temp. At the 11th hour, literally, the day before he was supposed to go to an all-day orientation, they told him he’s not hired. Talk about pulling the rug out from under someone. So now we’re looking at maybe living on unemployment again. Or Ed can take another job from the temp agency, it’s a night job, which is bad enough, but going into winter without a car, ugh, not so happy.
Anyway.
I haven’t been writing here since we found out about this because I’m just feeling exhausted from worrying. But I figured if I’m not going to write so much for now, I should at least write about why. I’m applying for my first “real” job in ten years. It’s not very exciting and I won’t set the world on fire with my awesome paychecks, but hopefully I’ll get the job and it will help get us through. Everyone cross your fingers for me on that, yes?
