even the best laid plans

don't crush the mouse

They say, “even the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.”  Actually I don’t know anyone who says or has ever said that quote but someone did at one point and they were absolutely right.

We’re now three days into 2011 and I can safely say that if you asked me just six months ago if I would be anywhere near where I am now I would have laughed in your face and called you a liar.  On new years eve my wife asked me what kind of a year 2010 was and just like every year I can’t really say that it was terrible or great what I could say was that 2010 was a year of change.

2010 was the year that my wife decided that she didn’t want to be a film actress after all.

2010 was the year that we both moved from Los Angeles to Seattle.

2010 was the year that I started eating only locally grown produce from farmers markets and organic grass fed beef.

2010 was the year All State Insurance sued me for more money than I’ve ever made in a year.

2010 was the year that New York seemed less and less like what we really wanted.

2010 was the year I didn’t drink a Dr. Pepper a day.

When we decided to move back to Seattle the plan was to come home for six to ten months and save up as much money as possible and then move to New York.  I’ll admit this was a lofty goal and I had my doubts about it from the beginning but like everything I do in life I figured we would take things one step at a time, keep our attachments low and in about 10 months we would be in a position to reevaluate New York.

Immediately I began to see this plan go astray.  We left our jobs when we moved back to Seattle which was made easier to deal with since we would be living with my parents for the first two to four months and we would need only to have enough money in our account to cover bills.  However without any income coming in money began to run out fast.  Jaime had hoped to be working by our second week in Seattle and not surprisingly work was a little harder to come by than we thought.

My goal had been to find a part-time job without much commitment spending the rest of my free time writing and let Jaime find a well paying job to pick up that slack.  We wouldn’t be paying nearly $1,4000.00 in rent and our car insurance would be going down about $100 which would help us out greatly.  At the end of our second week of unemployment I began to fear that this would take much longer than expected.  At first I was rather picky in my job search looking only for those that fit my plans perfectly but passing the two week mark I began applying for any job that had an opening.

My first interview was for a dispatcher at an exterminator in Kirkland which I knew immediately upon entering I didn’t want to work for and that they weren’t going to want me, but because I was desperate I had to interview and pretend that I would be a good fit for them.  I had to laugh at his jokes about Jerry Brown being reelected as Governor of California and his crack about how I was Clark Kent, simply because I wear dark rimmed glasses (I look nothing like Clark Kent, though I did for a time live in Kent).

They said I would hear from them in a week but I went back to Craigslist and in a fever applied to ever more jobs, ones that I would hate and ones that I was over qualified for and others that I was under qualified for.  Jaime followed a similar path as myself applying for nearly anything just to get a little cash flow going.  Our bank account was nearly bone dry and at the end of November most of the bills were going to go unpaid.  This wasn’t something new for us, we’d been in this position a number of times in the three years we lived in LA but I was beginning to find this game rather old.

The week before Thanksgiving I was thinking that I could have a successful career selling old records from the 1940’s on Ebay when I got a call for an interview at a well known Heating and Air Conditioning company for a position as a general office clerk.  I interviewed on Thursday and two hours after we were finished I got a phone call that I would be starting the following day.  It was a great company that paid nearly double what I was making in LA.  The following Monday Jaime went in for an interview and by Tuesday she had a well paying job for a company that she loved and wanted to grow with.

By Thanksgiving things had turned around and Jaime was apartment shopping.  Our original plan was to find something cheap, possibly something with a short lease, something that we didn’t love so that we could easily cut ties with it.  It was not surprising to me when she found something immediately that she loved, it was a duplex just down the hill from my parents with two bedrooms and a back yard for our dog.  Just like with job interviews, you can usually tell within the first ten minutes of meeting the landlord whether they want to rent to you or not.  I knew instantly that he wanted us.

So here I am sitting in this house typing about how all our plans have unraveled right before my very eyes.  Thats not to say that they’re impossible or that we still won’t find ourselves living in New York but as of today as I write this the thought of moving to another city and finding new jobs and settling in only to move back to Seattle again is just exhausting.