What Do I Want to Be When I Grow Up?

Long overdue for an update here, I see. Well, life intrudes and the blog gets forgotten. Sorry!

First, my voice: I have had great improvement over the past few weeks. My voice is not completely back to normal, but it is so much better than it was. If this is as good as it gets, I'll be happy. Most of the time I sound pretty decent. I know it's not exactly my old voice, but most people wouldn't really notice anything weird about it. Occasionally, when I'm tired, my voice gets a bit grumbly sounding, but again, it's not been too bad and anyone who notices it thinks I'm just getting a bit hoarse. I did speech therapy exercises for one whole week, and my voice was improving so much that I didn't see much need to continue with the exercises. If my voice should get worse, I can always restart the exercises. The main improvement is in volume level. I'm able to speak at a normal volume, so I'm no longer competing with ambient noise. Overall, I'm extremely happy about my voice. Yay!

Next, work life: I have been taking a break from copyediting for the past few months. I edited for ten years, and although I absolutely loved it when I started, the work over the past year or three has gotten less enjoyable. When I took the break, I started doing some volunteer work at a couple of nonprofit agencies here in town. I have really enjoyed doing something worthwhile, which I expected, but the unexpected part was learning how much I had missed working with real live actual people, not just disembodied voices on the phone or, worse, inanimate e-mail messages. It has slowly occurred to me that I have spent the past ten years holed up in my dungeon office in the basement, alone far too long! My job was perfect for a stay-at-home mom of a school-age child. I was able to set my own schedule, work while she was at school, take off when she needed me to, and still bring in a bit of money. But now that I've had a taste of the real world again, I can see that I'm way overdue to rejoin the land of the working stiffs, following someone else's rules and schedules, trudging in the corporate cesspool, . . . Oh, wait, I'm supposed to be excited about this.

Yeah, I'm going to get a REAL job. Of course, Brigid still has one more year of school before she's off to college, plus I still want to continue my volunteer work for a while longer, so I'm trying to find a part-time job.

What do I want to do? Well, I'm starting out looking for an office job, clerical work of some sort. But I'm also relearning C++. Yes, I used to be a programmer way back in the Stone Age, and I hope to eventually return to a career in programming. We'll see how it goes. For now, I'll be happy if I can find someone who wants a Monday-Tuesday-Friday office worker!

And, yes, I actually am excited about this.