Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

It's been a year and a half since I stopped serving. And it's been a great year and a half. Actually ... I take that back. In a lot of ways, it's been a really, really shitty year and a half. It's been the worst period of time for my family as a whole that I can remember, and it hasn't been all rainbows for me personally either.

But there have been some good things about it, things that are a direct result of leaving the restaurant. Like the fact that when I wake up in the morning, I can walk normally right away instead of hobbling because the tendons in my feet have clenched up during the night. My chronic upper back problems have lessened. My knee pain is gone. I still have cracks in my heels, because I run around barefoot all the time - but they're not as deep and they're not split open by being walked on constantly.

And of course, it's definitely comforting to know that every other Friday I have the exact same amount of money coming in (excepting overtime). It's nice to have my own desk (with a kickass view of the mountains!) and be able to store my own things there and put up my own pictures. I enjoy the fact that my manager pretty much leaves me alone as long as I do my job. Yes, there are definitely things I enjoy about being a cubicle monkey.

Problem is ... it doesn't pay enough. It pays my rent, and my basic bills, and leaves about $40 a month for food and gas. While I could work overtime, that wasn't a problem - and I milked the overtime cow for all it was worth, to the point where I was totally burnt out, actually. But now we're caught up on our backlog, and we have enough employees, and so that means no more overtime. It's frustrating because I don't even need that much more a month - I find I don't miss having cable, I can eat reasonably cheaply, my animals are doing just fine on cheaper food, my car is very fuel efficient, and there just aren't a lot of things that I want to buy.

On the other hand, I owe my cousin a thousand dollars, I owe $500 in taxes for last year, and I want to buy a house next year since I could get a mortgage for about what I pay in rent. I thought about getting a roommate, but the spare room used to be a garage or something that was very crappily walled in - so the roof leaks in one spot, the paint is growing mold and flaking off the wall in one spot, and there's no insulation so in the winter you can see your breath back there. Basically the only way I'd be able to have a roommate in this house is if it were somebody who was sleeping with me. And I looked in to moving but unless I share a room in an apartment with strangers, which would mean getting rid of all my pets, I can't find anywhere cheaper.

So what to do? Well .... it'd be nice if I could just find a replacement job that pays what I need and doesn't suck. But honestly, that's a challenge. Due to my own repeated fuck-ups, I'm a few credits short of a degree. I have no training in anything that would earn a higher wage, and I'm just not particularly good at anything that makes money. And I like my current job, most of the time. I'd like to make it at least a year from my official hire date, since right now my resume kind of looks like I'm a habitual job skipper (mostly because the first four+ months at this job were with a temp agency so I didn't officially work for this company until the last week of January).

So with all of that .... it's second job time. And as we all know, the easiest, most profitable job where I can get evening and weekend hours is going to be food service. I'm officially on the hunt for a serving job again. I wish I could go back to my old restaurant, now that CL is gone - I miss working with Work Wife and Mistress J, and even Accent Girl. I miss some of the customers. And I might put in an application, now that the new GM has had time to learn that CL was psycho and maybe he shouldn't believe her Notebook O' Bitchery she left behind. But I'm not counting on it, nice as it would be to rejoin familiar surroundings.

But hopefully I'll find something soon, because eating peanut butter sandwiches every day gets old really quick.