Housewifery

Current Location: Tualatin, OR

For the past couple of weeks, I have been working a very important job. It wasn't the job I envisioned for myself this winter, but we all have to play the hand that's dealt to us. For the first time in my life, I am an official, full-time housewife!

As I've mentioned before, one of our primary intentions for wintering in an urban locale was to land temporary jobs. I will be the first to admit that we didn't set ourselves up very well for success. We spent too much of the Fall away and while those visits were wonderful and I wouldn't trade them, that took almost 2 months out of our job search time. It was about this time that we were leaning heavily to relocating to Portland and wanted to focus our job search there. But we had committed ourselves to staying in Washington through the holidays. We thought we could still search for jobs 180 miles away and figured that if one of us landed a job, we would come up with some temporary living quarters until we could get relocated. While doing the preliminary work remotely was not a problem, we found that the recruiters really didn't want to do much until we were local. Understandable. Then the tree incident happened and that set us back another 3 weeks.

We were still hopeful that something would materialize. We would be in Portland for almost 3 months and the feedback we were receiving was positive. Just about the time that we were getting a little dejected, Tracy received an offer and it was right up her alley. She is currently providing some accounting assistance to a local non-profit. We're not sure how long it's going to last, but they are very pleased with her so we're hoping they'll keep her through March. I, on the other hand, have not been so lucky. Unfortunately, I have found that most of the technical jobs are desiring a longer commitment. Although I was willing to do work that I was overqualified for, I'm not sure my recruiter was as invested in me as Tracy's was in her. I think it would have been much different if we would have been in town longer.

So now that Tracy is doing the 9-5 thing again, she has hired me as her official housewife. I've never been a housewife before and I don't think she's ever had one. It's a new fronteir for both of us! :) And I, for one, am enjoying it, knowing that it is only temporary. I don't think I could do this for the long term.

So what do my days look like? Well, the morning starts out with me getting up with Tracy and fixing her breakfast (ok, I admit she let me stay snuggled in yesterday when it was cold and pouring rain). I pack her lunch and get her out the door on time. I have to say that it sure does make mornings a whole lot less stressful knowing that only one of us is on a time schedule. My next important task of the day is to get Hunter out for his business. We usually try to do a 2-3 mile walk, weather permitting. Then the fun keeps going with laundry, grocery shopping, house cleaning, or whatever other mundane chore is on task for the day. About then, it is time to get dinner started so that Tracy has a hot meal waiting for her when she walks in the door.

In the midst of all of that, I am busy planning activities for the weekend. One of the downsides to Tracy being employed is that our play time is drastically hampered. So I do my best freeing up the weekends so that we can continue with our exploring. We still have a long list to conquer. Hopefully, I won't run Tracy ragged!

It is amazing how quickly my days fly by. It seems like I don't do much, but before I know it, Tracy is walking in the door. It is pretty sad that a trip to the grocery store is the highlight to my week. Yesterday, Tracy suggested that we do the grocery shopping in the evening and I immediately said NO! I told her she can't take away my only excuse for leaving the house. Of course, I was only kidding, kind of. I don't want to do much exploring without her, but there are still some state and city parks that I would like to check out as soon as the weather improves. There are also some museums and such which offer free or deeply discounted admission during the week, so I will try to hit those as well.

Although I miss spending the days with my best friend, we know that it will only be for a short time. We have taken away a lot of positives from this experience. The first being that temporary professional contracts are a viable source of income. Since these tend to be significantly more lucrative than workamping, we will probably continue to seek out these types of opportunities from time to time to rebuild/increase our savings. And that might mean, that occassionally one of us may have to play housewife. Next time it may be Tracy's turn, but I'm hoping to do such a good job this time that I'll get rehired for the next opportunity! :)