An Update …

The last week has been busy, frustrating, and encouraging. I’ve had three job interviews and Ben has had one, with the prospect of several more. I registered with the local temp agency, though they didn’t seem optimistic about finding office work right now. Everything is focused on the eclipse, apparently. 

Right now, my most promising prospect looks like ESL work- teaching English to Chinese children online.  I had one in-person interview yesterday, but there’s still a long process before I can hope to be hired. So I’ll be working on that this weekend. The hours are crazy, but the pay is good and it sounds like fun.

Ben has applications out to any and all trucking companies that are hiring drivers for local work. Potato harvest will be starting soon, so hiring should ramp up in the next few weeks. So far, his best prospects are located about 100 miles from each other, so we’re deferring an apartment search until he’s got a job nailed down. We’ve been lucky to find a good place to park the truck, plugged into an RV hookup so we can run our AC without burning any fuel. Showers and laundry are close by too.  We’re still working with Mercedes on keeping the truck, though to be honest, the prospect is looking less and less attractive. We should make a final decision next week.

Our other big news is that we bought a car! It’s a 99 Taurus SHO – a souped-up Taurus V8 with a noisy muffler. A Camaro actually tried to race me the other evening. It’s low-mileage, and we got a great deal on it because it has transmission problems. Fortunately, Ben used to be a transmission tech, so he had some ideas on how to tide us over for a while. We got it serviced yesterday and it’s been running better ever since. He’ll do some more tinkering over the weekend and hopefully we won’t have to replace the transmission for a while. It might be worth doing at some point, since it’s a nice car in otherwise great condition and we got it super cheap.  So that was one positive thing.

The other was that my sister started a GoFundMe for us that has already raised nearly $2000! I’ve just been blown away by all the people who’ve shared and contributed. The money is a massive help, but even more, the knowledge that so many people care is wonderful for our morale. It really helps us stay motivated to do what’s needed. My sister has been posting updates on our situation there every two or three days. If you share, you should get those updates automatically. I’ll update here in a week as well.

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