Over the last several weeks of sheer boredom, I have thought multiple times of my empty little blog, and that I really had no excuse not to be posting. After all, the top excuse for lack of blogging is "I don't have time!" Well, in my life, I have nothing but time these days! But everytime I sit down, I feel like I should be starting at the beginning of the story and trying to remember all the details since we moved. That's a month's worth of blogging! So I'm just going to jump right into the middle and pick up where I never left off...
Here goes life!
We've been in Camden, Arkansas just a few days shy of a month. Hard to believe it's been that long, and at the same time, it feels like I have been here for much, much longer. It's been an adjustment, to say the least. There is a vast world between my hometown in Wichita and our current location in Podunk, USA. Wichita is home to nearly 400,000 people. About 13,000 people call Camden home. It is a little, bitty town on the Ouachita river in south-central Arkansas. The town is pretty self-sustained as far as the essentials. However, there isn't much more to write home about. Movie theaters, restaurant chains & department stores are luxuries left to the outside world.
It's not all bad. Where the town lacks for commercial development, it abounds in tall green trees that force you to crane your neck back and shield your eyes from the sun in order to see the top. Behind our house is one such grove of trees, so that when I look out my kitchen window, I look out into God's garden. Wildlife is abundant, especially here on top of our little hill where our only other neighbor is the elderly pastor who lives in the parsonage behind the teeny tiny country Methodist church on the adjoining property. Looking out from our front porch, we see the parsonage, the church, and a big empty green pasture. In my four weeks of unemployment, I have been blessed enough to see deer (with babies!), racoons, a badger, a red fox, and a variety of birds (my favorite of which are the cardinals who have their nest in a tree behind the house and come to visit me almost every day by landing on my kitchen window sill). We also have a family of wrens living in a nest in an out-of-commission mailbox on the front door. Momma comes and goes at random, while her four young residents lie in wait for her to return with dinner.
Chris is loving his new job at Lockheed Martin and is quickly adjusting to the new pace of life. He is up at 4:30am every day and out the door by 5:30 to be at work by 6am. A very long 12 hr day later (for both of us!), he usually stumbles back through the door at about 5:30pm. His work schedule is Mon-Thurs, 6-4:30, but of course my responsible super hero refuses to leave the plant with everybody else and stays behind at his desk to complete his to-do list that has been interrupted all day by the various needs of the production team that work under him. Today is Friday, and he is once again hard at it, because several of those same production people milk the allowed overtime for all it's worth. Chris says the company is catching on and making some changes, so hopefully the Fridays will come to an end soon. Overtime pay is nice, but not at the cost of going in at FIVE AM. I think it does something to both of us, mentally, to hear his alarm clock start going off before 3:30am.
I am also adjusting to my new pace of life. When I graduated from college exactly two years ago, I had been in school full time and working three jobs to support myself and my education. That whittled down to two jobs, and then one full-time job, and finally, now that we are here, no job. This girl is used to being busy and active and useful. I'm used to being social and productive. Now the highlight of my day is my daily sojourn to the local coffee shop for lunch. There, I have made a few friends between the employees and a couple of other regulars, but apparently I am not good enough friends with the manager yet to talk her into a job! My only serious job lead has been two interviews with a bank, which looked really promising and resulted in a big fat "No, maybe this summer sometime." It has been a big, BIG change for me and hard to get used to. I'm still not used to it. But I am starting to get used to the idea that maybe God has something different for me than corporate America.
You see, God knows that I want to stay home with my baby. I want to be the mom who has time to raise her kids and gets to watch and experience all those "firsts." The thing I dread most about motherhood is the thought of handing my three-month-old infant over to a daycare center when I go back to work. I don't feel good about talking someone into hiring me, only to quit in 6 months because I want to stay home with the baby. I have been so fearing that firey re-entry into the atmosphere of Corporate America that is so hardened toward anything except building the almighty dollar. I do not want to be in a position where I am forced to make my company my number one priority in life, to the exclusion of all else. This is not a good time for that. My God and my family comes before anything else.
So, God is leading me to consider other possibilities. Before I started planning a wedding, I was planning a fiction manuscript - a project that has been on pause for the most part of a year. I have decided to take up writing again and continue working on that story, which has been constantly evolving in my brain despite the lack of opportunity to put pen to paper. He is also leading me toward a home business that I was introduced to around Christmas, and which has been knawing on a corner of my brain ever since. After being burned a few too many times by network marketing schemes, I have been pretty resistant to the idea of starting another one, even though I fell in love with this product long ago. He has slowly been showing me and convincing me that this is an opportunity that fits me & my goals perfectly. So, I took a deep breath last night and signed up. There is a waiting list until July, so I won't be giving the grand unveiling of my new business until I know for sure when it is going to happen. But watch this space, because it's gonna be good!
Well, hopefully my hubby is coming home soon, so I think I'd better go do something productive before he gets here!
Til next time,
Lorna
