Working

Well, we seem to have lost (misplaced?) 1,910,000 jobs in the U.S. so far this year. The owners of Christmas Mountain Village -- part of the resort up the road that sits on land that once belonged to Tom's family and where some of our friends live -- recently laid off about 150 local employees because the housing market is so bad.

Sauk County's job site, which lately has only listed jobs for nurses pretty much, is now blank. (Not sure if this is just an internet glitch or not, though.)

The big job opportunities in the Dells are for ticket-takers at a recently opened indoor park at the Kalahari. If my hopes for the library don't pan out, I may be signing up. Although if the economy keeps tanking, I suspect the tourism market (which was down locally about 30% this year) may take another hit. Again, who knows? People may hit those indoor parks just to escape what is going on outside.

The other job sites who are looking for employees are (1) car dealers (and, really, who is going to take a job as a car salesman right now?) and (2) collection agencies. I guess every financial cloud has a silver lining for some industries.

The railway will hire me again once they start their season, but that won't be until Memorial Day. Meanwhile I continue to teach my distance learning courses for the Carmelite Institute, but I am beginning to have reservations about continuing to work for any Catholic institution. I am already committed to teach the spring semester, though, so that will give me time to make a decision about that.

I just mailed off the writing project I have nearly completed for Holy Hill, but I don't expect Jude to have any time to deal with that until after the first of the year. He will insist on paying me, but I don't think I will ask for much. It is only about fifty pages of text. Although I put quite a bit of time into it, the Carmelites invested years in me and I would be happy to donate this back to them.

Meanwhile ...

Tomorrow is the last day I will work at the railroad this year. Sunday Tom and I have other commitments, so this will wrap up my work on site anyway. We are still working on the proposal for an online store, for example, and I need to continue researching that. Dave has indicated he would like to hire me to handle such a store, but I am beginning to doubt this is the time to take the store online, even if it does seem like a doable project in the future. Even if we did get such a store up and running, it would probably only mean a few hours of work a week. I certainly can't bank on that providing any income in the foreseeable future.

I am not at any real risk, of course, but this does mean my discretionary spending will be even more discretionary than before.

I knew we should have kept those turkey bones!