Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!

I'm feeling better, everyone... (insert small sigh of relief mixed with a tinge of worry, still, here)

Thank you so much for all your comments (even comments from brand new readers or first time commenters, that is just so nice, thank you!) and also email (Dawn).

One big factor in feeling better is that yesterday K was feeling at peace and OK (today he's back to being a bit depressed again, but we can help each other out). From Sunday night to Tuesday -- when I went to pick him up at night from the train and and we were just so depressed that we were silently riding in the car for 20 minutes almost right up until we drove into our driveway (the boys were sleeping), which is extremely uncharacteristic of us (both of us are chatterboxes) -- we were feeling terrible. Worse than we ever felt in all the years we've been together (19 years). On Wednesday night we talked more and yesterday K came home and was feeling all right, so I slowly began to feel that my feelings about life and our prospects are getting back to "normal" in a way.

Today I spent a lot of time driving and listening to NPR and what I heard about the ""struggling homeowners" (thanks for the comment, Ally) made me slightly hopeful. K called the bank yesterday and the lady he was talking with was not very helpful up until when he said that he might not be sending the next payment. Then she said, "OK, I'm sending you a packet right now." The bank folks still don't sound very helpful and this is the second or third time we contact them, the first time was last year in September and the "package" they sent (a couple of forms) wasn't helpful at all-- ours is among the "fallen" ones. We don't ever want to deal with big banks ever (I've already mentioned that, I know). Let's see what's in this package they mailed. We can most certainly prove a DRAMATIC decrease in income from last year.

The main reason K got depressed again today (he even had to go for a walk around the university to unwind, he tells me) is that he did the taxes last night and while our returns will be OK (8K, BUT having to pay around 1.2K for our state -- I don't like PA very much, :-( ) he had to look at and think about his basically 6 figure salary from the unfortunate big pharma year and compare it to his paltry earnings as a post-doc from now. He feels terrible about not being able to support us, to enable me to stay at home with the boys (since I may have to just start going to work full time if we want to survive -- more about this on a later post). It has to do with the things Dawn recently posted about how her husband struggled after he was laid off.

Some people have asked about K's job. It's really stable, a job as a postdoc at a leading university, BUT, it doesn't pay well, obviously, and it is temporary work, which, hopefully, will lead to a tenure track appointment in the next round of applications. BUT, it could be a couple more rounds if the next one doesn't work. Do you remember the adjuncting job that didn't come true for him and the position he was applying to at a local university? Well, today he got a letter from them saying that they're in a hiring freeze, so the position he applied for (the only one this year, BTW) is no longer open. Sweet, huh?

So, since he's our only hope of a tenure track job ever coming true, the pressure on him is enormous. Well, it's always been, of course, poor K, but now the pressure on him is even bigger because since I'm not working in academia and I haven't worked since 2004 (I couldn't because of my visa and the fact that we lived away from the university -- the only place a person on a student visa can work) my prospects of getting even a lecturing job are pretty slim -- my CV doesn't look right with my work experience ending in 2004 (of course I can argue I'd been dissertating from 04-08, but that's not a good argument in my favor, since it took so long, and, obviously, I cannot say, oh, and I was raising a baby boy too and now he's almost 5!) My hope has always been working (as an adjunct, whatever) at the same institution where he gets a job offer in the future... (and you already know my struggles regarding not being able to easily get a job because of the discipline I chose to study).

In any case, we don't know what will happen, but we're confident that a solution will present itself. I just didn't want to go back to "life as usual" and not keep on fighting, but it's hard. Right now I don't have the energy needed to get this house into shape for staging and showing, but that's what our next step need to be. I don't know how... since K gets home late everyday and there are the boys to care for. I just don't see how we could add a job for me in the equation. What about the boys? Who would they be with? K keeps on saying that I need to get the job first and then we worry about this, but I just can't. But I'll blog about this separately.

Sorry for the disjointed post. This is some of what's in my and K's mind lately...

K just sent me this video and I think it's pretty interesting and very fitting for the times we're living in right now: