Thursday, August 28, 2008

A Year of Haberdashery

One year ago—well, one year and 8 days ago—I started this blog as a late afternoon pick-me-up surprise for *boy while at work. Since our trip to Spain where we serendipitously stumbled upon the word haberdashery on a store sign, we had joked about starting a blog, a blog to encompass all the random bits of life that we love, hate, or just observe. Around the same time we made a life wish list of sorts and stuck it on *boy's refrigerator door. Quite simply it included the following:

  1. Get job that allows for Bacon
  2. Get apartment that allows for Bacon
  3. Make living from our blog

Shortly after I posted our first article, I began looking for a new job—hopefully one that would either allow me to bring (then unborn) Bacon to work OR would be close enough to home for me to visit him during the day. By year's end I not only had a new job, I had a new nephew, too. I was also teaching my first class and looking forward to the next semester. Bacon was still in the distance but I felt us getting closer, felt life moving along, swimmingly.

By the beginning of February, in addition to my new job, new nephew, and new teaching gig, I had a new fiancé and a wedding in the works. By May, a new apartment, a roommate and, at last, a tiny, white puppy promised to be ours. June saw us into a new part-time job over at another (much more profitable) blog. And by July 5, Bacon was in my lap and the little hole in our hearts was filled with puppy breath and pink, freckled paws.

The summer has been a blur of puppy training and wedding planning, AT posting and 9 to 5 work, frustration and stress but also laughter and silliness. Most of all it has been full of anticipation and realization. Anticipating our our wedding day and realizing how great we have it and how much we have to look forward to, still.

By last week we were ready to kick wedding prep into high gear but by Friday I was leaving work early with bad news. Just shy of a year after my last job search began, I was informed that I would need to find yet another job by the end of the year.

After a very downtrodden weekend of doing pretty much nothing, and against my own vow to not even think about the job situation until after the wedding, I've already come up with a plan and begun its execution. Well, at least a plan to get us through next May. Ironically enough, the plan includes me being able to spend ample time in our wonderful apartment, with Bacon. It also allows me to make at least a partial living from a blog, just not this one.

Apparently this is the upside of making a very short, very broad life wish list: not only are there many ways to achieve the same goals but, when you're not busy making lists, other fantastic life wishes come true without you even trying.

I'm writing this anniversary post late in the afternoon at work—at a job that I won't have for much longer, a job that I wasn't ready to leave yet—for *boy to know that I wouldn't have wanted to spend the last year doing anything else, with anyone else. Good or bad, I can't wait to see what the next year brings us.

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