Back on my feet?

Had my final check up with the orthopedic surgeon this morning! The breaks are fully healed, now it's just a matter of waiting for the tendons and whatnot to recover from being wrecked. Doc says the best therapy I can do is just walking on it every day - which is harder than it sounds. It's really easy to drift into a limp that doesn't actually use the ankle. It actually feels pretty good - like I'm recovering from a really bad sprain at this point.

My ankle is still pretty deformed, which is making shoes a bit of a challenge. I have one pair of very soft and flexible Sketchers tennies, but the sole on those is so narrow that it doesn't give proper arch support and I find them REALLY hard to walk in. Plus, I occasionally wear an ace bandage or a brace if I know I'm going to be on my feet a lot, and NONE of my shoes will fit over that. Walmart, here I come.

I still don't know how long it will be until I can start riding again. I'm trying to tell myself I'm not even going to THINK about it until September. 8 weeks in a cast seems like it should require at least 8 weeks of rehab, right?

A brief observation on vanity

I got my cast off this past Monday! After a couple thorough tub soakings, I've exfoliated pretty much all of the built-up skin (ew) and am no longer ashamed to go out in public in legwear that exposes my shins. A handful of people have even asked to see my surgery scars, and that got me thinking...

How many women do you know - are you one of them? - who are walking around in shorts, tank tops, flip flops, with ankle, knee, elbow, shoulder surgery scars for all the world to see? Who are almost proud to show them off, and tell the story of how they got them?

And yet, how many of those same women, even ones who are in good shape, would never be caught dead in a bikini because it would expose their pregnancy stretch marks? Are you one of them?

Taking back my garage

A couple years ago, Levi and I rearranged much of our house, and a lot - a LOT - of stuff ended up in the garage. I always swore I would never be one of those people who have too much stuff in their garage to park the cars, but guess what...yup. For two years.

*Not my garage. Ours is twice as big, and probably definitely worse.

So anyway, in preparation for moving out of our house at some point in the nearish future, we decided to have a garage sale. And to have a garage sale, you need a garage. We've set the dates - July 23-24, mark your calendars! - and now we need to start busting our butts to sort through everything, decide what stays, what sells, and what gets thrown out immediately.

The original plan was to spend ALL day on Wednesdays sorting junk, as in theory we've arranged it so we both have Wednesdays off in July. Unfortunately, things rarely go according to plan - our very first Wednesday, I ended up having to work most of the morning, and when I got home, Levi was down with a migraine. We finally got started around 2:30, and put in a couple hours work before we had to pick up Josh from daycare. Here's what actually got accomplished:

• I thinned my book collection by about 1/3 (this was not technically a garage project, but it was something to work on while Levi wasn't feeling well, since I'm still on crutches for another couple weeks)
• Levi dragged in, and I sorted, three good-sized boxes of miscellaneous...stuff. I think one entire box was full of old McDonalds Happy Meal toys. I chucked them all in the Toy bin for the sale, and will probably either label them 10/$1 or free. :)
• Brianna made a good start on cleaning her room. I told her anything she donated to the sale, she could have (most of) the money for. She cleared out three shelves of her bookcase and came up with a stack of untouched activity books, several outgrown computer games, and a bag of too-small clothes.
• Oh! Also not garage related, but I cleared out an entire glassware cabinet in our kitchen. Out of that cabinet we kept 14 coffee mugs (2 sets of 6 and two individual mugs with sentimental value), three measuring cups, one small baking dish, and a dozen cool plastic drinking cups. We moved out at least a dozen random coffee mugs, half a dozen insulated travel mugs, and TWENTY SIX MORE of the cool plastic drinking cups. Cause, they're cool and all, but do we really need thirty eight of them? I don't think so. That cabinet is BARE now. I love it. ;o)
  

So that's it, so far. We've got three more full Wednesdays (plus the entire week before the sale) to work on this project and a LOT of garage left to tackle. Wish us luck!

*P.S. I'll try and take some before and afters for a future post. :)

My war on perfectionism

I am a perfectionist.

I will start a project, and then tweak, and tweak, and tweak.

And more often than I care to admit, by the time I'm done tweaking, the optimal time for presenting said project to the world has passed, and all that effort comes to nothing.

This career counseling/job searching/resume building process is a prime example. Levi has said right out loud that he's concerned that I will get so bogged down in creating the perfect resume, etc., that I'll never get around to actually sending any out. And he's right -that is a potential pitfall for me. Instead of settling for a "good enough" summary section on my resume and banging out a "good enough" cover letter,and getting the damn resume sent off for this job I'm "so" excited about, I spent most of last night - until the wee hours - tweaking. Trying different fonts and spacings. Revising a word here or there. Googling cover letter samples, looking for the "perfect" template for my "perfect" cover letter. I found this job posting almost a week ago, and it's been active for 12 days. Mine is going to be just one in a sea of resumes, if they haven't already closed it to new submissions. I need to stop picking at it and - like Nike says - just do it.

Could it be better? Could my summary statement be stronger, my cover letter more compelling?

(oh God, I'm sorry for the alliteration. It was an accident.)

Of course it could. But I'll never forgive myself if I miss out on this opportunity because I was unable to settle for good enough.

Now, you'll have to excuse me, I have a cover letter to plagiarize write.

Brain Dead, a.k.a. job search update

Tuesday I had a meeting with Cindy; we spent the entire hour turning the list of my job responsibilities for the past 10 years into "resume speak." I was feeling pretty good about the changes, and thought I only had a few little bits left to finish up - the summary and technical skills sections, mainly.

That same afternoon, I was browsing the job postings on LinkedIn and found one that I was really interested in (and it's local, in case you're wondering). So instead of kicking back and waiting for next week's meeting with Cindy to put on the finishing touches, I've spent pretty much every spare minute of the last three days picking apart the job listing and inserting as many of the keywords as possible into the resume bullets I had already written (luckily for me, the listing was quite comprehensive).

If I had thought my resume was looking sharp before, it's freaking amazing now.

I was hoping to get that all done and a cover letter written in time to submit before the end of business on Friday, but alas, I didn't quite pull it off. So instead, I took advantage of the weekend to dive into a project that's been in the back of my mind, a little something I think of as "the whole package": I decided to whip up a basic "resume website" (www.fionapayne.info) and set up separate Facebook and Twitter accounts to associate with it. Oh, and I updated my LinkedIn profile with my new and improved resume info, of course.

I'm very pleased that everything is coming together as quickly as it has, and now all that I have left (on MY list, that is - I still have Cindy's "job search action plan" ahead of me) is to get Cindy to sign off on my resume, and to write my cover letter. I sent my new website live earlier this afternoon, and decided to completely put this process out of my mind for a couple hours (serendipitously, Levi's mom offered to take me and the kids to see Toy Story 3. For the record: it's awesome).

Tonight or tomorrow I HAVE TO compose my cover letter, as my goal is to have my resume waiting in that HR inbox first thing Monday morning.

Job searching is hard work.

Crossroads

So, today at my career counseling meeting, Cindy and I put a huge dent in the overhaul of my resume from generic blah administrative all-over-the-map-ness to laser-focused marketing guru-ness. There is still a bit of polishing to do, but the foundation is there, and I'm actually eager to start sending it out (who'd've thunk it?).

And therein lies the next challenge...Levi and I have to decide whether I should keep my job search local, or if we want to take the plunge and relocate out of Minnesota.

It's an idea we've been kicking around off and on for a while - we're both really, really tired of winter. California sounds lovely, even if the COL difference is intimidating. Neither of us have ever lived outside the state except for college, and how many people really take the chance to start over in a new place once they've got families, mortgages, etc.?

On the one hand, the timing couldn't be better for us...I'm actively looking for a new job, Levi also wants to explore other options and - well - we're going to have to move out of our house before the end of the year anyway (both of our families know that we're allowing our house to go into foreclosure, so I feel like I can finally talk about it "in public"). If we're going to have to move, why not go big, right?

On the other hand, we have to move out of our house in 6 months. Which means we need to start figuring out ASAP where we're going to live instead. Can I really squeeze a nationwide hunt for the perfect job, and a cross-country family relocation, into that time frame? Never having done it before, I just don't know.

Also in the back of my mind is the what-to-do about the horses. I'm extremely blessed that horseback riding has been a nearly expense-free hobby for all of my life, thanks to the fact that my parents are in the business. But if we moved out of state, either we'd have to increase our household income by an insane (and probably unrealistic) percentage in order to start paying all the bills for two horses - after all, I couldn't keep Twinks but tell Brianna that Merle has to go! - or we'd have to make arrangements for the horses to stay at home for an indefinite period of time, which, in addition to being its own kind of challenge, also makes me sad. (Selling them is not an option I'm willing to consider, but fortunately I don't think I would have to. I've told my mom that when her farm sells and my horses are finally homeless, I don't want a cash payout, I need a horse-maintenance trust fund - ha!)

Decisions, decisions...

Shame on me

Two months...TWO months...without an update?

There's just no excuse for that.

Here's some stuff that has happened in the past two months:

1. My new halfchaps fit like a glove.

2. The second time I wore them, my horse bucked me off before I was even properly on, and I broke my ankle in three places, not to mention had a nasty dislocation.


So yeah, I've been sitting on my butt 16 hours a day (and sleeping the other 8) for the past seven weeks. And haven't blogged a single letter in all that time. Shame on me. So what, you may ask yourself, have I been doing to fill that time instead?


Decorating my cast, of course. (more pics of my x-rays and my cast-turned-art-project can be seen here).

In truth, that's not ALL I've been doing; I also go to work once in a while. And shortly before I cracked my ankle into a million pieces, I made contact with a career counselor named Cindy (our first face to face meeting was a week after the accident!) and we've spent the past two months identifying a new career path for me and building a new and improved resume. I wish I had been blogging about this along the way, too, because it's been a really interesting process. But the homework has been intense! In fact, I should probably wrap this up and get back to it, since I have a meeting with Cindy in the morning...