1 Month of Employment

Things are going incredibly, no actually I'd say insanely, well for us lately. My new job has done quite a bit, but I think the root of everything is that despite all the stress, pain, and anguish that being unemployed caused us - Becky and I were still pretty damn happy during that time. We spent 7 months pretty much the entire time being together 24/7, and we enjoyed it a hell of a lot. Possibly the most fun was in the beginning of the year when the 2010 Winter Olympics were on and we both were home all day. We watched nearly all of the events and it was awesome! So after that 7 months, despite the job and money concerns, we were happy and I think that is the root of why things are going so incredibly well right now. We were happy, and then a large amount of stress was relieved for us and I feel like we're finally able to use all that positive momentum we were building up over the first half of the year.

It really doesn't feel like that was half a year, and it's very nice to have so many good things that happened (with Becky for the most part) to look back on and not have that period of my life be a tarnish on things. A few other things that I enjoyed during that period of time:

• hanging out with Matt on random week days while everyone else worked
• Hanging out with our friends Andrew & Amber, and the birth of their baby boy Maddox on May 31st - also being free to spend a lot of time at the hospital and keep them company / bring them food during those stressful few days
  
• getting to play a few times in Dave's D&D game
• the last season of Lost
• working with our friend Ben on random house jobs for his home improvement company - installing insulation, doing (badly) drywall, painting - I quickly became comfortable walking around in attic spaces, which is a useful skill and helped with installing the ceiling fan for my home office
• working for Becky's dad the last month of my unemployment - doing drywall plan take-offs - it got me back into the idea of working every day of the week (haha)

I'm sure there are some other things, I may add onto this list later on.

Nerd-time: One of the things I'm really enjoying right now is running my D&D campaign more often since Becky has gotten a lot more into it and doesn't mind (or even encourages) me to run more often now. Just a year ago she was considering quitting the game, but now she's such an enjoyable part of the game for me when I run and an incredibly talented role player. With her and Dave in my party, it's clear everyone else is quickly improving in their roleplaying as a result. I started this campaign on July 4th, 2008 and after two years it's a treat to see how things have changed and relish a bit in the world Dave and I have built. His party (in the past of my game) is in the upper paragon tier and he will probably wrap his game up by summer or fall of next year. My party is just hitting level 14/15/16 but I'm hoping to speed things up and run more regularly so that it doesn't take another two years to wrap everything up in my campaign. Then again, if it keeps going strong and everyone is enjoying it - what's the problem with it running for 2 more years? We'll have to see how it goes...

Onto the reading front, you can see that things are going well because I'm 70% of the way through the first Harry Potter book and 5% through the entire series. Everything I do before July 19th is a buffer, once that date hits I'll need to have 25% of the entire series read by August 19th which evens out to just under 1% or 41 pages a day. Getting through the first book before that date seems reasonable, which would bring my requirement down to 38 pages a day which isn't much but it helps. The only reason this is even possible for me is that the books are easy to read and each page is relatively short on words, otherwise I'd be doomed because I like to read slow and enjoy my books (at least that's the excuse I use).