You know the saying, "A watched pot never boils"? Well, a watched inbox produces no job offers, either!
All of that time watching the inbox did give me an opportunity to clear out the 450 messages that had accumulated there!
As some may know, our family is in for some drastic changes in the coming months.
I have told Books Are Fun that I will not be able to continue my contract on a full-time basis. I need to remain active with BAF through at least the end of this year (for contractual reasons), but it has not been profitable enough to rely on for my primary source of income. This spring, I lost money just about every day I went out. The price of gas and heating oil is up, and we had a long hard winter here in Maine. My pay (strictly commission) was down because people are not spending the way that they used to. The price of petroleum is on everyones mind, and I don't see the fall as being much better. People are already saving for the coming winter's heating bills, or investing in alternative heating methods. In addition to my sales being down, my expenses are going up. Most days, it cost me over $100 in diesel to get to my account and back. On most multi-day events, I spent nights sleeping in the truck because I couldn't justify the price of driving home for the night.
So I've been bopping around on Monster and HotJobs, among others, trying to find some kind of full-time salaried position that would give me some sense of financial (and emotional) stability for the sake of my family. There is nothing in Dexter that would be able to pay my bills, and the options in Bangor are limited. Moving to be closer to Augusta or Portland would mean a dramatic increase in housing costs. Staying here and working there would mean a long commute, and a big part of what I don't like about my job right now is home much time each day I am away from the family.
Oh, and housing plays into the equation, too. As you can see by my previous post, our house in Milford is going up for auction next Tuesday, 8/19 (I'm hoping it sells for $365,000, but not likely). The house that we are renting right now is going to be foreclosed on. I've tried to figure out what was going on with this house, but each time I talked to the bank's attorney or the landlord, I just got more confused. I don't know who really owns this house, so I wouldn't know who to offer to buy it from. On one meeting with the attorney, he asked if I could get financing to buy it, and that our "rent-to-own" was not valid - the landlord had no right to sell it since he had no right to claim that he owned it. Upon talking to the attorney later, he said I'd need to talk to my landlord, since he was listed on the realty trust and would be the one to sell it. So this thing is confusing, and we've decided to just leave this house and all of the legal baggage behind.
Next Tuesday, while our house in Milford will be auctioned off to the highest bidder, we'll be loading up two Penske trucks with all of our possessions and getting ready to head out to Ohio. I've put in 20 applications at various companies for varying positions over the last two weeks. I've had 4 email me back to let me know that they were pursuing other candidates for those positions. I'm hoping to have something full-time lined up before the end of the month. We'll be continuing with Books Are Fun on a part-time basis for the rest of this year. We'll see how that goes and determine after that if it is worth continuing into the Spring.
Most of the house is packed up. I've got a couple of major projects to wrap up here, including removing several upgrades that we made (thinking we would be staying here for a while), and putting back in place the fixtures that were here when we moved in.
