Getting Started

December 7th
Friday

I recently stopped working at the company I had been with for over 9 years. It was a very good job, quite good salary, for the most part entertaining. But two years ago, I got married. This event rather caught me off-guard as I have been single much of my adult life. (I was previously married for five years; no children). I was 52 when I met my present husband at the local hardware store. We were married a year later.

Meeting Drew and getting married caused me to have one of those “life is too short” occurrences. It drastically changed my personal life, my personal outlook. I was not thinking about marriage, or even thinking about dating at the time I met Drew. These changes caused me to look askance at my daily two hour car commute over high speed highways with high accident rates and sitting in a windowless office for eight hours a day.

So here I am, currently unemployed by my own choosing. I am taking the opportunity to peel off the dead outer layers accumulated over the years, to see what is underneath. So far, I’m in that kind of shaky, vulnerable state of “what did I do?” As I have spent much of my adult life focused on my professional career in the food industry, it is unnerving not to be doing that at present. And just the mere circumstance of being at home when I normally would have been at someone else’s office leaves me a bit jittery now and again.

But on the other hand, being unfettered during the day has let me witness a side of nature hidden when one leaves the house in the dark and returns in the dark and sits all day in a windowless office. Recently, I have seen the snow geese flying in V-formations against a clear blue sky. I have seen our neighborhood Great Blue Heron fishing at his favorite spot down the street. I get to watch the antics of a large wild tom turkey, which has taken up residence with livestock (horses, goats and llamas) at three adjacent farms nearby. And I get to visit with our two sheep every day as I feed them and check over their home.

Today, I managed to sit in my car on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, covering five miles in three hours. This is part of my commute to work. It is one of the aspects that I have come to loathe about an otherwise decent job. The commute. I don’t usually get stuck for three hours but the idea, some version of it occurs often. My drive is normally about an hour on normally high speed highways with lots of merges.

Over the next year, it is my goal to work on becoming unstuck. This blog is part of that.

“Stuckness” was all part of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I read that as part of an undergrad philosophy class. About that same time, I was taking a drawing class with a wonderful teacher. His piece of lasting wisdom was when you get stuck in some part of making a picture, move to another part of the page. That still works for me.

I recently resigned from a job doing food and beverage sensory evaluation and consumer research. I was there for 9 ½ years.

My husband and I also recently adopted our first two sheep, Slim and Slam. They are wethered Jacob twins. We will be using their wool for spinning yarn to be knit into warm clothing. I’ve never had pets before that gave back in quite that way.