Job update

 Soooo ... the bad news ... remember that translation job I've been waiting for?  Yeah, it's been delayed.  Pretty much indefinitely, in the sense that nobody knows exactly when the funding will come through.  It could be within a couple of weeks, or it could be a few months.

However, there are significant silver linings.  I can't even imagine how despondent this news would have made me, if I were still sitting at home (im)patiently waiting.  Instead, I had a ready-made job to step into.  Yes, now it is an official job, on the payroll and everything.  I'm making as much as I would make as a substitute teacher, and I don't want to look for anything more permanent quite yet.  I really want to do that translation job.  But in the meantime, I'm paying the bills.

Plus, this job is actually turning out to be surprisingly fulfilling.  I kinda expected to be mostly a personal secretary / errand girl ... not so much.  In fact, Ernesto has been in Italy for the past three weeks and I've never been busier.

 And, as most of you know, I'm really not a 9-to-5 kind of worker.  I spent TONS of extra hours as a teacher, and I really invest 110% in any job I care about.  As a result, even when I thought I'd be working elsewhere by now, I was really worried about leaving my position.  I've taken on some projects that nobody in the existing personnel pool has time to take over, and -- modestly speaking -- replacing me at this pay level would be nearly impossible.  So it feels good to be able to follow through a bit.

AND, I have learned a TON over the past couple of months. Mostly things that I never really aspired to know, but still ... good and useful things.  For example, I actually have a pretty decent idea of what it  takes to start up a restaurant, since I was instrumental in doing so (in fact, I'm constantly being asked if I'm the owner!). A couple of days ago I sat in on a meeting outlining the policies & responsibilities of mall tenants ... who would ever have thought I would be in a position to know about that?  I've interviewed and hired two BYU interns, and will probably be their primary go-to person.  I've created a menu for a weight loss program, calculating all the nutritional information and adapting the recipes for the needs of a restaurant kitchen, and I run the whole thing on a day-to-day basis except for the actual cooking of the food.

In other words, I have quite a lot of new skills for a resume!  I still hope to get back to work in the language field -- translating, editing, writing, teaching -- but you never know what life is going to throw at you.  Job experience is never a bad thing to have.