A Long Weekend...

Well, for me anyways.
The concept of long weekends has not really been something I've relished for the past several years, since I worked from home and basically worked everyday. But last week things changed and I started a new job that actually required leaving the house. By the time I got home each day more than 12 hours had passed. Matt would leave the house 3 and a half hours after me, but would still get home before me. To his credit though, Matt did come down with me on Monday morning (that's a 5 am wake-up call) and for a guy who loves his sleep, that was very sweet of him, especially on his day off. Still, you can imagine my reasons for not loving the new job...
Of course, when you're faced with the probability that you may lose something (ie. a job, or freedom), you realize just how valuable that thing may be after all.

In this case, just a week into the new job, all the new hires were told that some of us would be laid off. Ouch! And we wouldn't know who the company would be keeping and who they'd be laying off until later this week. If you've ever thought about slacking off at a job, well then too bad for you. Pretty much all the stuff we'd been doing for the past week was a way to rate who to keep. Not like they had been planning to get rid of people, but with the lagging U.S. economy, their projected sales were not as high as they'd expected so they don't have the budget for the amount of staff that was hired.

So if you haven't already guessed, I was one of the ones who was kept on. Hence, the long weekend. I had prepared myself for bad news, that it wasn't the end of the world if I didn't get called back. But it is a bit of a relief since it'd taken me about nine months of job hunting to land this position. That's a whole other blog post that I will hopefully get around to writing soon. It'll be interesting to see who else is at work on Monday. Toronto certainly doesn't have a shortage of artists and creative types, so I feel for those who didn't get good news.

Today I've been house bound and am loving it. Working on a custom calling card and my own business card which I ran out of weeks ago, but haven't really needed since my shop sales have been kind of slow. That's the downside of working out of the house. I don't have internet access and by the time I get home, I'm too wiped to do anything but veg. Ah, well. Gotta pay my dues. And pay those bills.

Tomorrow is UN Day. The image above is from a yet to be published book that I worked on a while back, the second in the TCK series by Jen Munnerlyn. No new photos or illustrations to show, so old ones will have to do.