2014 Retrospective

Personally 2014 was a better year then any of the last few years I have lived through. 

We started this year living with my sister, in a partial renovated house. We had a working stove, but the sink and cabinets were still out in the garage. They were remodeling so they could sell the house so they could go on a mission before their health went too far south. But family emergencies around the country kept interrupting the work. We were literally cutting the new vinyl flooring went one of their children called for help. We rolled it up, shoved it through the window, rolled it out, placed the stove on it and they left.

My wife was recovering from her total hip replacement surgery.

To help my progress in trying to find a new job they were putting me through school at the local state university. I had earned a Web Design Certificate, and was finishing up an Entrepreneurship Certificate. 

That wasn’t going too badly, I was nominated for an award, which I didn’t win, but I am sure they won’t forget my presentation. If only for the fact that I ended and then the timer went off. 

One of the more interesting experiences was an assignment: Describe your greatest achievement but cast it in the light of what others did for you to get you to that place. An incident jumped to mind, but nope, I didn’t want to speak that one out loud. I thought of three other things I would rather talk about, but then he said. “You should go with whatever came to mind first, that is best.” I knew then that I had to. We had been together for a couple of classes as a group and shared other classes too, it was safe enough.

For one of the other students, it was getting up again and going to school again after losing everything. For another, it getting out of the abusive relationship she was in. 

Then it was my turn. It didn’t take long before I was weeping. There was sadness in those words but also anger, but mainly just pain. All to help a friend I’d never met. 

Most of the way through the girl who had gotten out of the abusive relationship comforted me. The Marine said, “I have to go after that!?”

The professor wrote he “f***ing loved it!” on the hand in stars and all.

A small part of me was reveling in the fact I had devastated them, but it was beyond exhausting and I was glad for the long bus ride home.

But all in all, it seemed more and more obvious that Colorado was no longer the place for us to be. 

My sister and her husband were back and were working on the house again. Putting pressure on us to get a move on. I would have loved to but there was nothing in my power to do that change that. None of my resumes got me an interview anymore, no one I knew was hiring, and we had no friends nearby.

Our future horizon we could see kept getting shorter and shorter. Trying to imagine what next week was like was a complete mystery and where I wanted to be in five years was a impossible task. We had no stability. On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs we were not even completely filing in the bottom level. Yet somehow I kept writing. The one happy place I could make. It was all in God’s hands.

Then my wife’s sister called to say that her friend was going to Alaska for the summer and needed someone to watch the house and pets. So in like a week we packed up what we could and moved. It wasn’t a job, as we weren’t even being paid but it was a place to stay for the summer at least. 

The Mother-In-Law took me to Employment services and I got a job at a thrift store, it was a minimum wage, part-time, no benefits ObamaJob, but it was something. It was not fun, the first day I had to leave the floor so I didn’t do something precipitous with a customer that was throwing just about every red flag I knew for being an abuser. It wasn’t our place to deal with that, just try and sell the stuff. Then I upset a coworker for changing things around to make it easier to clean up after customers, but then we rearranged things to be even better, even ignoring some minor rules to make the clocks display better. 

Then an old college friend of my wife’s, well her husband’s company was hiring so I gave him a resume and I got an interview. It went well and they offered me a full-time job at twice the wage I was making at the thrift store, of course I jumped at it. The thrift store was happy I had found a real job, and I was glad to be gone from that job after just a week.

It was so odd, I felt no emotional connection to getting the job. I could not care, and after all the stress, pain and humiliation of my job search, I did not dare care about this one.

So come Monday I went to my new job, set up a computer for myself and started training. It was drinking from the firehose but I got a handle on things. I noticed that they needed an Exchange server to do some testing, so I set one up, and now I am the resident expert on that stuff. As I learn things I write them down and put them on the website and it seems to be helping. 

We found an apartment as the summer ended and my sister brought out our stuff, which we are still unpacking. 

For my 90-day review, my manager said he wasn’t sure what he was getting for a worker when he hired me, but he is so glad to have gotten me. He was gushing over all the things I had done and gave me a 13% raise, the second largest I’ve ever had. He gushed about how wonderful I am to my wife at the company Christmas party.

We celebrated Great-grandmother’s 99^th birthday.

This was a good year, even though it was not the kind of year I imagined it would be. Sometimes God takes control and things get better for no reason at all. Hang in there everyone, 2015 is going to a ride.