2015 has been kicking my ass

Regular readers will recall that a little while back I said we’d be away for a while due to the death of a friend.  Truth be told, his loss was, at the time, the latest in a long string of Very Hard Things 2015 had handed us.

It seems, however, that June might bright A New Hope.  (Sorry)  But, before we get to the good stuff, let’s go over where we’ve been, shall we?

Pretty much since Geoff came to Boston in 2008 and we moved into the apartment we live in now, circa March of 2009, things began to fall apart.  We’ve both been laid off more than once, money dried up, the economy fell apart, Geoff went back to school (TWICE) and I have been averaging 60 hour work weeks at multiple jobs to try and keep us afloat.  If not for the generosity of family and friends (you know who you are) we’d be living in a box somewhere or locked up in a ward for the terminally cracked.

Through it all we got engaged, got married, lost Smoky, buried family members, and hung on the knife’s edge of family fighting disease and war.  Phew.

Then, last spring, Geoff got a job.  A full-time benefitted job he liked and that used his not inconsiderable skills.  (Insert Liam Neeson Taken joke here.)  A job with nice people and reasonable pay and hours.

Then 2015 arrived and between January 1 and today the following happened:

• Rerun died
• I was badly injured commuting to a new job after a winter storm in the first week of February.
• Geoff’s job was outsourced and his last day of work was March 20th.
• Unemployment took WAY longer than usual to get us Geoff’s UI benefits because they were convinced he was on furlough.  3 phone calls and 2 visits in person finally straightened them out.  Sort of.
• I got a full-time job which I was working on top of my 4 part-time jobs, my singing, and my jewelry business.  Yes, really.
• My full-time job, which isn’t in my resume so don’t bother checking, turned out to be an unmitigated disaster for reasons I won’t go into.
• Just as I was starting to heal from my February injury we got into a car accident, courtesy of my new job, and I was injured all over again.
• The beginning of May brought the death of a friend, and we’ve since lost Geoff’s great-uncle, and an acquaintance from our former church.

June 1st is Monday.  Things are beginning to look up.  Really.  Then again, without challenging fate, it was hard to see how they could get much worse.

• Geoff was able to secure sponsorship into the Reserve Police Academy.  He is only the 2nd person ever to receive such backing from his sponsoring agency.
• In his required pistol training class he graduated tied for Top Gun in his class (just don’t call him Tom Cruise, Geoff is a better actor and totally a better shot.)
• I was able to resign from one of my part-time jobs (I had 5 of them, now I have 4 not including my singing and my jewelry business)
• I had an incredibly successful Cambridge Open Studios.
• I was accepted as a vendor into the super popular Jamaica Plain Spring Craft Fair.  It’s a juried show and I made it in a highly competitive category.

And in a related series of events that happened in the last week:

• Geoff got a job.  He starts on June 1st.
• I tendered my resignation from my full-time job.
• I am in the final stages of interviewing for a much better part-time benefitted job that is right near Geoff’s new job.  I should know if I get it this week or next.

I’m not going to get all Pollyanna nor am I going to assume the worst is over.  I’m just going to hope that, perhaps, the Universe has stopped dropping trou and relieving itself on us.  At least for a while.

So, welcome June.  Don’t screw this up.

~Kelly