Just minding my own business, and been working my @$$ off.
A few random notes to self:
I really like my job. Not to get all Pollyanna and all, but most days, it's a fantastic reason to get up in the morning (although my morning is usually 5PM-ish).
I can work 10-day weeks. That's either stamina, or psycho-neuropathy.
The youngsters ask "How can you work so many days?"
Try unemployment for a stretch, kid. Overwork beats underwork by a country mile, and it's one helluva lot more fun when you visit the bank.
Time off is even better. Usually I've had time and no money, or money and no time.
Having time and money at the same time is positively fabulous.
I highly recommend this option.
It really cuts down on the BS at work when you're at work 2-3x more often than anyone on staff.
It also cuts down on the whining from other people about how hard their life is.
When you take some days off after a marathon stretch at work, they're just magically better.
A special bonus is that when you take those off days, they realize how much you've been doing.
If you don't go away once in awhile, they can't miss you.
Always remember, you can like your job.
But NEVER love your job.
Because it will never love you back.
Also remember that the way employers tell employees that they like them is in your paycheck. Balloons and cupcakes for Nurse Week don't pay your rent, or buy your tickets to Hawaii, Vegas, or Disneyworld. Money does that. If your employer isn't paying you whatever top dollar is in your area, all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, they don't like you.
If you think you're indispensable to your employer, check your assignment list ten minutes after you're fired, laid off, or have your days cut.
Always have a spare job in your back pocket that you can expand into a full-time substitute gig until things settle down. For the same reason you should have a spare tire in your trunk, and a fire extinguisher in your kitchen. You want to have it, but you hope you never need it. Until you really need it, right now. Don't wait until it's too late to find that out.
A work-at-home thing that generates cash flow isn't a bad idea either.
Always have at least one entire month's expenses squirreled away, in cash, somewhere you can get to 24/7/365. "In the bank" doesn't count: banks close, earthquakes and hurricanes knock power out to ATMs, etc. etc. That wad should be sitting in a fire safe under the bed, or rolled up in a ziplok baggie inside mayo jar in your pantry or buried in the rose garden, or somesuch.
Where you can get it if you have to hit the road at 3AM, or your employer shuts down with no notice, or the transmission falls out on the freeway, or whatever.
With a handy lump of greenback cash where you can lay your mitts on it now, without fail, you can solve small to moderate problems, or buy yourself time to think your way out of an emergency, and keep it from becoming a catastrophe.
Go places you haven't been, do things you haven't done, and talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to. (Not in a babbling homeless schizophrenic off his meds kind of way.) But be sociable, and explorative, and the world stays new, while your brain grows.
The alternative is dragging same-old same-old tracks in your daily rut, getting Alzheimer's, and then sitting in the same-old same-old forever, and just thinking you're going new places and meeting new people. Because one day your mind got bored and left town without you.
Option A is vastly more fun than Option B.
That's enough musing for the moment. I need to get some sleep, because I've got another busy day playing in the sun planned again for tomorrow.
