By Half
16-10-2016Life is busy, that's just a fact of...well...life.
In your youth you had so much time in a day to do anything and nothing. The world was your's to squander or conquer at will. Then you grow older and suddenly time becomes the enemy. There aren't enough hours in one day, not enough minute in a single hour. Before you know it you blink on December 27th and suddenly it is December 24th of the next year.
To combat this people generally opt for 'the quiet life'. They do as little as possible at the weekends to fully recoup from the working week. Maybe they get involved in their hobbies more, just to be doing 'something' but not be insanely busy. These people generally lead healthy lives and don't 'go postal' from stress levels being through the roof.
Of course not everyone is able to keep life from being busy all the time. People that go from birth to death without every having a single busy event in their life would be considered hermits, or maybe those monks that sit in silence at the top of snow capped mountains. Either way it is nearly unheard of for people to be constantly 'not busy'.
You change jobs or get married. Buy a house or have a baby. People pass away and funerals happen, birthday celebrations for 'the big numbers' occur. Without a doubt a person will have at least one of these busy moments crop up.
There are ways to control them, in so far as the chaos of life can be controlled. You can buy a house without trying to plan a wedding at the same time or get a new job without a baby coming along.
Then you get people like us, myself and the ladyfriend. We decided that rather than do things slow, simple and easy we would pack as many busy events into as short a time frame as possible.
First up, after a considerable amount of thinking and talking, we decided that with the arrival of Nugget our current home was no longer ideal. It was a lovely house when we bought it, large and with potential and over the last five years we have put our mark firmly on it. But with Nugget we realised a few failings of the area we lived in, mainly around transport. The pair of us work in the city, a mere forty minutes away by bus on a good day. In Ireland there are never good days with traffic, so that trip generally takes closer to an hour. Worse the options to get out during certain times of the day are limited if not completely missing. Throw in Nugget and all the things that can happen to a kid requiring ready transport and the house was no longer up to snuff. So we started looking for a new place. Talks were had with banks, approvals gotten, a new and much better house found. It was a chaotic time.
But that didn't keep us busy enough. I decided that current events in my job had pushed me to the point of 'go hard with a shotgun or go home'. I opted for 'go home' because visitation rights for prisoners are not that great and Nugget really should never see the inside of a prison. So, in the middle of filling in bank forms, one source of income for the house just quit their job. With nothing lined up.
The ladyfriend was super supportive on that front. She had noticed that in the past few months my mental health had not been the best and had started to silently worry. When I told her my plans she said it was the best move for us.
So, buying a house and down one income. What next?
Well the ladyfriend wasn't happy in her job either and hadn't been for some time. With some gentle prodding, using my patented jester 'helpful bullying' method, she hunted and found another job. A better job and one that she is ideally suited for.
For those keeping tabs. Buying new house, quit job, ladyfriend starting new job.
Now I had had a slight stay of parachute jumping in my job and was moved into another department. But that hasn't exactly worked out as advertised. Through a series of random events another job with a new place landed on my desk. One that I really liked the sound of. Five interviews later and boom: new job for jester.
Now the tally is sitting at new house, ladyfriend starting a new job, jester starting a new job in a month.
Basically we didn't want to do busy by half and just went full busy for the fun of it.
At a certain point we probably should be tested.
Blue_jester