Old news

Right before my Thanksgiving trip home, I was laid off (or "made redundant," for the Brits) from my job.

Now, let's get this straight: being laid off sucked. Huge donkey balls.

But...but...

This does rather solve a lot of problems for me and The Limey. The silver lining shone quite brightly, as a matter of fact. My commute was getting increasingly unbearable- almost everything had moved to the science park outside of Southampton and I was spending upwards of four hours a day getting to and from it. And the golden lining behind the silver one: there is now no reason for us to stay in Woking!

Oh yes, as soon as I find a new job, we are out! And now, of course, I have a much better idea of what kind of commute I can tolerate and what kind of work I want to do.

Sure, job-hunting sucks, as it always has, and not having my income sucks, but we can live pretty much indefinitely on The Limey's salary. I'm so glad now that I insisted on renting a place we could afford on one income. Without my hugely expensive monthly train ticket, we can get by pretty well. There's not much money left over, mind, so I can't go jetting off to London whenever I want, and- horrors!- we've had to stop shopping at Waitrose, but we're comfortably in the black. Plus, I got some redundancy pay, which went directly into a savings account for the house/flat/whatever we want to buy eventually.

Anyway, what this means is I have the luxury of time in finding a new job. I'll need it in this job market, for sure, but it does mean I can look out for exactly what I want.

I didn't post about this on the blog because, unlike the last time I was job-hunting, it is now easy to find this blog with a search on my full name. And any hiring manager worth his/her salt would do such a search, I believe. But not working has such a big effect on my day-to-day life that not blogging about it seemed weird to me. So, although I won't blog about the job search itself, I will be able to talk about what the heck I'm doing with all this free time.