Well, Spring Break is over for me. For an entire week, I put school stuff, specifically my job cut, as far out of my mind as I could. I read three of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels and thoroughly enjoyed each of them. I’ve never been a fan of series fiction, but I do believe I’m going to make an exception in this case. The-Reason-I-Get-Up-In-The-Morning and I had a great many plans made to accomplish this week and in true G.S. Feet style, we did nothing. It’s the thought that counts, right? In the spirit of not being totally useless on Spring Break, I did manage to get our rather eccetric riding lawnmower going this afternoon and cut the hayfield that was masquerading as our backyard. I put it off as long as I could because I have such godawful allergies, but when Beau and Jack start disappearing when they lie down, Budge insists that I cut grass. It didn’t help that the neighbors on each side of me cut their yards — naturally making mine look even worse!

But anyway, I’ve spent the last two hours checking out job leads in every school district within an hour’s drive from my house. I’ve even included neighboring states as long as they meet the hour’s drive criteria. I’d be willing to drive even farther, but once I get much past an hour, fuel and car maintenance costs start becoming so prohibitive that I begin to see the point of diminishing returns. I’ve updated my resume’ and I’ve already sent it to a couple of places to get some feelers out. I’ve got to be honest, though — I despise job hunting. I’ve never been very good at it and dumb blind luck has always played a greater than normal hand in most jobs I’ve worked at over the years. For example, I got my first job without even trying when my grandmother went to get groceries at the local Community Cash and the manager told her to send her grandson up to see him for a job.

Well, I started working there as a stockboy and bagger two weeks after I turned sixteen and come to find out about six weeks in, Mr. Caldwell, my manager, had confused my grandmother with another woman who had been actively seeking a job for her ne’er do well grandson. I knew the boy and he thanked me profusely for affording him the opportunity to mooch and laze around for several more months.

My first teaching job wasn’t much more glorious. I still remember that first summer out of college. I didn’t have my own computer then so I TYPED my resume’ on an old portable typewriter with a thermal transfer ribbon. I sent out 92 resumes in that two month span and got ONE interview that puttered out. So, I went to work with Mama at the textile plant as a cloth dyer and general flunky. About three months after school started, I was called to the communal pay phone in the break room to take a call and it was a principal from a nearby school who knew someone who knew me and wanted me to come interview that afternoon before 5:00. I asked her if I could go home and change first and she said, “No, I want to give you this job and I need you here at 5:00 if not sooner.”

Well, as I mentioned, I was dyeing cloth for a living at the time and when she’d called me I was in the middle of switching from one color and fabric type to another color and fabric. As a result, I had been INSIDE the dye tank and washer cleaning all traces of the previous color off the various rollers and surfaces. The color I was cleaning was a rather striking deep royal blue and, since it was very tight quarters in the dye vat and the washer, I had as much dye on me as I had on the cleaning cloths. Basically I looked like a giant mutant Smurf on steroids. I had blue hair, blue clothes, blue work boots, and blue hands. The dye wasn’t indelible on skin and hair, but it didn’t come off after the first washing either. As a side note, I’d always preferred the blue to the burnt orange we dyed some furniture cloth. Whenever I had to clean up after a run of that stuff, I looked like the demented love child of the Clemson Tiger mascot and an Oompah-Loompah from Charlie’s Chocolate Factory.

So, I got off work at four and washed up as well as I could and drove out to the school. The principal’s jaw hit the floor when I walked in. I told her right then and there, “I tried to warn you, ma’am.” I had to stand up for the entire interview because the dye WAS indelible on polyester fabric and that’s just what her brand new office chairs were covered in. As luck would have it, the color I was drenched in was almost a perfect match to the school’s main colors. The athletic director thought I’d done it on purpose. The last question of the interview was, “how long will it take that stuff to wear off?” I told her about four days. That was on a Monday and I started to work much the next Monday much closer in hue to UNC than to Duke.

So now I’m back out there looking again. I’ll have to interview, of course, and I truly hate interviewing because I never know what the “right” answer to the question is, and we all know that, no matter how open ended the question seems, there is a right answer and woe unto you if you don’t give it. I just hope I find something before TRIGUITM gets anxious and worried. I hate it when she gets anxious. If she just wasn’t so used to hot meals and a roof over her head, it’d be different.

As it is, I guess I’m going to have to really scrub my feet because I don’t think many interviewers will take kindly to a real live set of G.S. Feet, do y’all? I just hope I don’t have to break out the Clorox! 🙂