Speaking of paperwork, the stuff I’m doing is for the office I’ve been doing computer tech for the last 7 years, off and on, and when needed, filling in for their secretary.  Their last secretary left a few months ago, though, and despite being asked to take her place, I just can’t commit to a job like that.  For one, I think it’s just too far to drive regularly, in between that and paying childcare, I’d probably be paying to work.  So after a couple of months, we agreed that when I’m in the area, they could pass me some paperwork, usually stuff to simply transcribe, and I could do it at home for an hourly wage.  It’s easy stuff for me, just, so far, completely time consuming.  Right now it’s all stuff for taxes.

Taxes… yes, it’s that time again.  Sigh.  I hate tax time.  I’m also closing down, more accurately, have already closed down my candle business.  I don’t have enough time and they are so heavy, shipping keeps going up, among other reasons, it’s just time to move on.  I made a point of closing it out before the end of the year.  I still have to file my sales tax.  The state of Missouri is going to love getting my check for $1.21.  All of my orders were out of state except one this year.

I also have a new venture… maybe two… what is wrong with me!?

Finally, weight loss.  So happy here.  I am officially down 40 lbs and I’m not the only one noticing anymore.  The downside is that I’m almost needing to buy new jeans.  Ironic, isn’t it?  You’d think I’d be dying to buy new clothes.  But I have no intentions on stopping here and I had to spend any money on clothes that I’ll probably not be wearing for very long.  I need to go through my closet and see if anything survived the closet purges of a couple of years ago.  But the jeans that were once tight are now almost falling off of me.  I guess I could get a belt, but I hate belts.  I could actually probably be down another 10 lbs already but I keep screwing up.  I had too many carbs the other day and let’s just say whoa.  Totally not used to that anymore and I got sick.  I really didn’t even have that much.  Well, I expect it to get easier all the time, to stay on track.  There are some things I really miss, like Chinese food and pasta, of course.  But some day I can have them again…

What’s really interesting, is that this is one of the unions that he had to leave the hospital to go re-sign at on the same day Kayleigh had her surgery. He has to appear in person every 6 months and that date fell on her surgery date. So he called the two unions that he had to go to and one of them (this one) said it was fine for him to come in the day before but the other union refused to budge so he had to just go visit them both on that day. When he re-signed that day, he was somewhere in the upper 100′s for his line position for a job. That is why it was so important for him to go. Then last week he started checking the job board and found he was #86. This company called something like 70 electricians.

We are just both so excited. I can still hardly not believe it. Honestly, I guess I’d gotten to the point where unemployment was life. I have been trying to get this photography business going good with my friend, so I had been really busy, but life became what it was: Steve not working.

Of course, there are no guarantees. We plan to live on as low a budget as possible and save the rest for the time that this may happen again. Somewhere around 2007 we were finally able to start a small savings account and though we were never rolling in it, there’s been a little something to save us during this time when we needed it. And we needed it at least once a month during the lay-off, usually when the Jeep and the mortgage and the electric were all due at the same time.

There’s also a downside to everything, I know Kayleigh is going to be upset. She’s already a daddy’s girl and she’s not going to like this at all. Plus I know Steve will be tired. But I’m not going to complain, we will all adjust. It’s just going to feel like a completely new life at first though.

But a big plus is we’re going to keep our health insurance! With no time off! Eye and dental, too. I’m psyched about that, lol.

So now, after more than 10 months of no work, he went into the union today and got his paperwork sorted out and is good to go!!

However, it is true, my friend and I have officially gone into business together. Last week she set up our LLC and got our EIN, etc. Today I started our checking account. But because of this, I’ve been working like crazy. Processing not just the wedding photos but 4 senior shoots and an 18 month old that I photographed yesterday. Add to all of that the website. I still don’t have it going yet. Trying to get our proofing gallery going now… But it’s all very exciting and is really taking off so far.

Ah, but the weird smell in the post before? Gone. :) Yay. Actually, it could still be there, but we can’t smell it! I do think it’s fading away though which is great because the last thing we really wanted to do was to prime and paint again. Steve started putting up trim the other day. He’s making it all rustic-like, out of old privacy fence pickets and it looks GREAT. He even got this cool little light switch timer thing and set it up for the outdoor post light that he fixed a few months ago. You press it once and it turns the light on for half an hour. Great idea because I could totally see us either never turning the light on (and it looks so cool) or we’d turn it on and I’d forget to turn it off ever! I’m really looking forward to getting that room finished though and if I wasn’t so buy with other things lately, I’d be done getting junk out of there already. I still have a lot of papers to go through and books, some stuff to pack away like photo frames that I have nowhere to put anymore and candle supplies, etc.

Hmmmm… maybe I’ll let THIS batch finish and go to bed now, worry about the rest tomorrow… er… later today…

I am working this week, but it’s only 3 days. Filling in for some friends – their secretary is on vacation. I am wiped out. It was a very busy day today. I am told that next time should be better, but I am not so sure, haha.

Had a photo shoot Sunday afternoon. It was so hot but I am very pleased with the results. Really, probably more than any other shoot so far, the percentage of photos that are good is probably about 98%. They were very easy-going subject, very relaxed and natural. I had fun! Tomorrow I’m going to add them to my site and get her CD out to her.

Speaking of my site, I’ve been working on something where people can order prints if they want. It wasn’t something I planned on doing but it’s been requested. I guess giving out the CD is great for most people but others don’t have time or don’t want to mess with printing what they want and would rather choose them online and pay. I looked into some services that do all of this for you (you upload, people order there, and they fulfill the orders) and a couple of programs you can install but every option I’ve found that’s meant for what I need it for is very expensive. I wouldn’t mind spending $329 on a certain program if I was making enough money right now, but if I’m going to spend a lot of money, I’d rather get another lens I have in mind! Instead, I installed Zenphoto and found a plugin for adding photos to your PayPal “cart.” I think it will work out just fine for now. I am just trying to figure out an issue my theme is having with any browser other than FireFox, and I’ll be good to go!

Um, first round of chemo went well for my father-in-law. In fact, first they’d told him 3 days in a row, then when he went in, they said once a week, then afterward they said he didn’t have to go back for about 4 weeks. I take this as a good sign. Right? So he’ll be back in there in a couple of days and hopefully this time will go well also.

The job didn’t pan out. They sent me some lame letter that didn’t make any sense. Whatever, I wasn’t really looking forward to the 50 thousand tests and vaccinations I’d have to get to work in a hospital, anyway, even if it was just clerical.

Steve’s still laid off and it’s been almost 2 months. He doesn’t see anything turning around any time soon. So far, we’re ok, but I’m going to have to learn to pay the vehicle bill earlier, or something, so it doesn’t fall so close to the mortgage. Since we’re on a smaller budget now, of course. On one hand, the union sucks in this respect because with him laid off, they’ve essentially taken all his chances at a livelihood in his field. We’re starting to look at options outside of what he’s been trained to do. He can’t work as an electrician unless it’s through the union. It’s a catch-22.

I suppose that’s really it as far as lameness goes. I’ll have to try to update more often as there are good things in my life, too. Really, I’m pretty happy and content. I just get nervous, here lately, when I think about what is going to happen when unemployment runs out if neither of us have found something? That scares me, but a day at a time…

1. First and foremost, we were hit with the news this week that my father-in-law has cancer, lymphoma, to be exact. From the link above:

“Lymphoma is a cancer that begins in the lymphocytes of the immune system and presents as a solid tumor of lymphoid cells. It is treatable with chemotherapy, and in some cases radiotherapy and/or bone marrow transplantation, and can be curable, depending on the histology, type, and stage of the disease.”

However, I sort of take that as good news as compared to Monday when they told him he had lung cancer. Apparently, the prognosis is better for lymphoma than lung cancer. He certainly seemed in much better spirits when he called and told me the updated news yesterday.

I don’t really know about lymphoma, or the lymph nodes for that matter, but I’m starting to read. It is interesting to think about the lymph nodes having to do with the immune system as he was not very long ago battling some very nasty cases of bronchitis and pneumonia.

2. I got called to go take some tests for a job I applied for and I am totally excited. However, don’t expect to hear much more about it short of I got it or didn’t get it because I’m not going to be one of those people who talks about their jobs online and subsequently gets fired for it. :P

3. Kayleigh is eating all sorts of baby food and cereal now. In fact, I’m feeding her now. Sometimes she’s really slow because she’s gotta stick those fingers in her mouth between bites. But she really likes it. I think the only thing she might possibly not enjoy is squash, she seems to like everything else pretty well. She really packs it in there, too. We thicken it up with the baby cereal sometimes nearly doubling the volume and she will eat the whole thing every time, sometimes washing it down with a bottle. Yet she’s really slowed on her weight gain. I think it’s because she is just so active, she must be burning up all the calories!

4. She’s also still not sitting up yet but is very close to crawling. So we got her started with some once-a-month physical therapy. She’s practicing sitting right now, in her little seat. We’re also supposed to push her knees together more when she’s on her hands and knees as she tends to really send them flying out to the sides.

5. Kidney ultrasound is next week, hopefully then we’ll know if this girl is going to need surgery or not. Thankfully, we still have health insurance for approximately through 2010 even if Steve is not called back to work.

6. Last night Steve started working on the lower room. He’s taking it in chunks and has already ripped out the paneling on one of the short walls and added more insulation and drywall, not to mention fixing the shoddy electrical work that was inside the wall that we never knew about. He about had a fit when he saw it, said it was a fire waiting to happen. Apparently someone at some point (not us) also barely missed sending a nail into a live wire and instead was pushing the junction box out from the wall. But now drywall is up, the electrical is fixed, and we even have a new outlet. He also put in a switch to use with the old-looking light that’s outside that’s never worked. He’s working on fixing that up.

7. Yes, remodeling is expensive. It’s not really fair if you ask me. Either he has no time or he has no money. Never can he apparently have time AND money. But it’s also good that we have a lot of things we’ve accumulated over the years that can be used for this. He did have to buy drywall, but it was not bad at all.

8. That room has become, it seems, our junk room though, since we tore the wall out of the other one and made the living room bigger and finished that. We have books down there and half of my candle supplies, shipping boxes, packing peanuts, the desk, a few other misc things, a tub of E’s bigger toys, and a piano. I am sad about the piano. I’ve decided there is no room for it and I never get to play so I was prepared to give it up. But I don’t want to! And I was talking to a friend about giving it to her to the point where she was going to talk her her husband – they already have one but it is in bad shape – but then my mom is trying to talk me into keeping it and so I start second thinking it. I don’t want to go back on what I told my friend but she also hasn’t talked to her husband yet and we were thinking that maybe we could fix hers and get rid of the horrible one out at my in-laws’ and put ours there for the time being. I dunno what to do but it just can’t stay here…

9. Eight is enough. :)