Certainly 2009 has been a year of highs and lows for me.
The year started really badly, I had been unemployed around a month after being the victim of a nasty coworker's backstabbing and childish games. The winter weather was cold and snowy leaving me trapped inside, my investments were down 10's of thousands of dollars, and to add insult to injury, my former work was contesting my unemployment benefits.
In mid February my unemployment hearing came up, and my old work never even showed, so I won by default. Things starting getting somewhat better after that. The days were getting longer and warmer, and my investments started slowly recovering, which helped lift me out of the depths of my depression.
By March my side business started picking up and it was great to get out of the house and do something productive. With the warmer weather I was able to get back to work on my new garage finishing taping and painting the drywall that I'd put up in fall, along with organizing stuff out there.
And by late April or early May the weather was nice enough that I could pull the cover off the convertible, fire her up, and start another show and cruise season!
In late June we had some bad news, my 15 year old niece had been diagnosed with Hodgkin disease in 2008 and after going though a lot of miserable chemo had been in pretty good shape for the new year so far, but she started feeling bad and the docs found her cancer was back and had spread.
After having only a couple interviews so far that whole year, I had two in July and I was getting optimistic I'd be back to full time work soon. Also, I started doing some soul searching. My big goal for 2009 before getting booted from work, was to buy a new Challenger. One of the big reasons I had built my new garage in '08 was so I'd have room to park 3 cars safely inside, one of which was to be a new one.
My investments had come back a lot, and I had some savings in a money market account which had an interest rate that had gone down to 0%.
I thought about my niece, and about several of my local car cruise friends who had passed away recently. I thought about how I wasn't getting any younger, and if I was to keep waiting for life to be hitting on all 8 cylinders, I may go to my grave with many dreams unfulfilled because I had put them off for life waiting for life to be perfect.
I plugged some info on options I wanted on a new Challenger into an online car buying service, and much to my surprise a dealer 90 miles away had a Challenger just what I wanted, and they would sell it for well under MSRP. As crazy as it seemed to do, I drove up there and wrote them a check out of my money market account and drove the car home!
Also, despite not getting either of those jobs I interviewed for, it got me motivated with a kitchen project at my house that has needed to be done for years. When I refinanced in 2008 to take money out of the house to build my garage, I had also got enough for my estimate of what it would take to do the kitchen. The first half of the year I never got off my butt to get going on the kitchen despite having money in an account earmarked for the job.
So in late summer I hit that project hard, with the help of a handyman. I did a complete remodeling of my kitchen, we finished in about 2 months, and it came out great! I was general contractor, and "go fer", painter, etc, and my hard work paid off because I ended up doing the job a little under budget even.
I had a good car show and cruise season too, I hit a ton of cruises and a number of shows. I even won a trophy, a plaque and a silver medal at shows in '09.
And in November I took some of the leftover money from my refinancing and bought insulation and a 220V electric heater for my garage, I insulated the roof and installed the heater, so I can keep it nice out there.
By December, the weather started getting crappy, my side work has slowed down as it usually does in winter, and still unemployed from my full time work, so am feeling a little blue. Hopefully this period of unemployment will be a good thing in the long run, as is unfortunately the case for many engineers, my career seems to have run its course by middle age, and finding a new job in my field is difficult or impossible even when the economy is good.
But I've used my time off to get caught up on a lot of things, I can finally have people over again, my old kitchen was getting so ugly I didn't want anyone to see it!
I am looking for new career opportunities, I took a class in IT storage area networks last fall that was interesting. Maybe that or something else will lead to a new career in 2010 for me that has room for me to grow and has opportunities and job security.
I spent much of the last decade worrying about my job, was out of work a good part of 2006 and all of 2009, seemed like I was always under a lot of pressure and looking over my shoulder. That was no way to live, and when I find something else to do I will look back, be glad those days are behind me and be happy at work!
So I have high hopes for 2010, that my nieces cancer treatments will be successful, that I will find a new career, and that my T/A will finally get painted and this time next year it will be out in my garage with me out there trying to figure out how to put it back together!
