First, I want to thank those of you who have reached out with support and encouragement regarding this new endeavor. You shall be handsomely rewarded with more frequent exposure to the ridiculousness of my life. So, congrats all around really.
I guess I should start with a little family update. We are about two months into The Adventures of Unemployment. Tom has been faithful in applying to all sorts of jobs in several different fields. His experience is largely in education, but his former position was administrative and he did a lot of training, some media, and plenty of "go between" helping regular people use and understand the IT side of a virtual charter school. These are all skill that would fit nicely into a more corporate setting, which he is very open to. Tom is gifted in the areas of organization and he often dreams of sitting alone in a room stuffed with floor-to-ceiling stacks of disheveled paper records. He longs to take a room full of chaos and systematically create useful, digital archives. So, pretty much my personal hell. That's what he dreams of.
I say all this in case his skill set would be a good fit where you are currently working, or in case you are a wealthy benefactor with a large, and very disorganized, forbidden library that could use Tom's touch. If so, that would be very Beauty and the Beast of you. Which is weird but whatever... he can start Monday.
This time has been challenging, but also positive in that it has been a very stretching time - which is always painful and usually productive. God has used this time to deal with me on some pretty big things, particularly in the areas of trust, need vs. desire, and patience.
Okay, okay... maybe rage and pride have come up too, on just the rarest occasion. But I'm doing my best. The hardest part, honestly, has been watching Tom struggle against the lie that he is somehow "less" because he lost his job. It's hard for me to understand because I have seen so much "more" come out in him through this. More character, more faith, more desire to complete the LEAST pressing home improvement projects in history, and... a little more sass, if I'm being completely honest.
By request, ATATT will make a return appearance. All Tom All The Time has been a beloved feature during our annual Tour de USA, and since this year's road trip was canceled in favor of the Adventures of Unemployment... It seems only fitting to give ATATT it's proper stage time.
I'll go more in-depth about Jaylen in my next post, but suffice it to say he is doing beautifully! He's an absolute delight and we are seeing such significant improvements in his development that its actually kind of absurd. It's not as absurd as the sense of urgency with which Tom weeded a non-visible area behind our shed, but we'll save the home improvement stories for ATATT. 'Til then, lets comb those human resource departments and find this eager beaver a J to the O to the B!