Free Agent

Song Lyric of the Day:

I got some wild, wild life / I got some news to tell ya

Talking Heads / “Wild Wild Life”

3:37PM.
I’ve been busy lately catching up on household-related business, including calls to insurance companies, finishing up our moving claims form, and the like. I suddenly have all this free time because I got laid off on Friday. To that end, I partially fulfilled a long-held dream of mine, which was to get in the gates surrounding HGTV (the headquarters is here in Knoxville). My goal was to personally deliver a copy of my resume. No sooner had I driven through the gates, though, than the nice security guard politely informed me that HGTV does not accept personally delivered resumes. So my time inside the gates of HGTV amounted to a couple of minutes. Long enough to get in, talk to the guard, turn around, and drive out. But I made it in the gates! Now to get hired there…Here’s hoping my emailed and faxed resumes land me an interview.

I’m trying to stay positive despite my newly unemployed status. Rich is pulling in a lot of freelance business, which is fantastic. All his hard work is finally paying off. Now I have time to not only take care of household business we didn’t have time to attend to before, but I can use my free time to get my query letter for my first children’s book written and sent off to publishers. I can finally finish my second children’s book. And I can write those articles I’ve been outlining, see if I can sell them as a freelance writer. I need to go to a Knoxville Writers’ Guild meeting, see if I can meet some actual freelancers, get some pointers. A mentor would be invaluable to me at this point.

Late last week I picked Samantha up from work and drove us to Big Ed’s Pizza in Oak Ridge for our planned dinner date. The pizza was, as always, delicious. More importantly, though, I had fun giving Samantha some wedding planning advice, the most important piece being not to let it drive her crazy. She’s a lot like me in that sense–we both get too easily worked up over things, both big and small, which does us absolutely no good. I decided on my own to work on not getting stressed over everything, and ended up getting some additional help with that in the form of medication used to treat my insomnia. At least she and her fiancĂ©, Shawn, live in the same state. When Rich and I were engaged, he was in Virginia and I was in Tennessee. Interstate wedding planning–now that’s stressful.

I had lunch Friday afternoon with Jonathan and Curry, where Curry impressed me with the fact that she knows Dr. William Bass, the forensics God who created The Body Farm. I told her if he ever offers to give her a tour, to please count me in. Preferably in the winter time.

Saturday Rich and I ran errands, had dinner with Tamara at Ye Olde Steakhouse, and then played Puerto Rico with Tamara back at our house. Not surprisingly, I came in a distant third, behind Rich and Tamara. If only I’d bought a harbor and an office, I could’ve been a contender.

On Sunday Mom, Samantha, and I drove to Chattanooga for a wedding expo. It turned out to be pretty small (the word “dinky” comes to mind), so we were done in only one hour. Tweaking on wedding cake, we then went to a couple of nearby malls to look around and walk our lunch off. We had a fun day together, and we all look forward to going to the Nashville bridal fair in January, when we can go with Vanessa. I have no doubt that the Nashville one will be a lot bigger than the Chattanooga one turned out to be.

And now, back to the business of running the house.

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