2023, Family, Theatre, Uncategorized, work

December

47 Comments

December. Wow. That was fast, wasn’t it?

Hasn’t been a lot happening on the farm this past week. Since I finished all the tillage last week and it was cold, too cold to work in the shop, I had to go back to work work, or at least, pretend I was while I did other things.

I had a straw delivery, more HVAC work at the Rochester Repertory Theatre, a lot of work on the final essay for my English class (turned in by the time you read this) and a couple hours spent trying to teach my mom how to use her new talking watch. She’s had a talking watch and would use that before she got the Alexa. But she’s out of practice now. I tried to encourage her that the watch would give her something to occupy her time. We’ll see.

A group of theatre students from the drama club at the college came and helped haul out the demolition detritus from the HVAC project at the Rep. Some years you get a really good group of kids, and this is one of them. A couple students are new and some I’ve known from previous years, including the ringleader, and I say that with the best of intentions. She’s the cheerleader, she’s the one that inspires them, and influences them to be so friendly and so willing and to make them all feel so included. And that extends not only to other student members, but to me as well. And I’ve told her, she’s the reason this bunch has coalesced as they have. When I asked if the drama club would help with some demolition, she sent a chat message to the group, simply saying, from what I heard, “Ben needs help”. And nine students showed up. Or maybe it was the fact I promised them food.  Some days we sure get lucky. To me, camaraderie has always been the best part. See the header photo of the group.

Still waiting to hear from Crop Insurance. The other day, on the back of an envelope, I spent some time on the computer finding the current balances due on various loans from this year. Machinery part loans through John Deere, crop loans for fertilizer and spraying, loans for seed, plus rent that I owe, estimate an amount for combining, an operating line of credit that I’ve made a lot of use of this year with the shop project, plus a credit card balance, all written on the back of the envelope. Then I would look at my checkbook balance. It was a larger gap than I would hope. Wild card being what to expect from Crop Insurance. I know it won’t be tens of thousands, it will probably be a few thousand dollars, and if we strictly focus on this year‘s crop loans , it will come out pretty even. Again, we are so lucky, and so fortunate: we own our home, we don’t have a mortgage on any of the land, Kelly continues to support me in the fashion to which I have become accustomed, and we have a warm home and warm clothes, and even with my shriveled-up eyeballs, we are healthy. I have nothing to complain about.

I saw a survey recently, asking if you would rather have a job you loved but that didn’t pay much, or a job you hated but it paid a lot. And most people said the job they hated because money gives you options. I have to agree, money does give you options, but I feel like I’d rather take the job I love. Maybe that’s because we are already in a comfortable spot, and we have a few options.

This weekend I think we really need to get snow fence up, it’s not gonna get much warmer. I have that old disc that needs to be cut up and loaded on the trailer for scrap iron, I would like to get that done this weekend. I bought some tarps that I intend to hang in the machine shed to create a bit of a fourth wall so I can try to contain some heat in the shop end and work in there a little more. There are a few things on my summer 2023 ‘to do’ list that I’m beginning to think I may have to move to my 2024 list.  Again, if I finish the list, I didn’t have high enough goals.

LOVE OR MONEY?

47 thoughts on “December”

  3. I did once take the job with more money when I moved out of San Francisco where I was teaching in a parochial school, down to Half Moon Bay area where I landed a public school job. I also was ready to get out of The City, so it wasn’t entirely for the $. But looking back, it was my mid-twenties and I was just searching, searching… ended up staying in HBM just a year and a half, and then heading out to NYC. (long story involving Wasband)

    Luckily, I’ve never had to make that choice again…

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    2. In the pink shirt. She’s a nontraditional student, so she’s a little older, and she’s been out in the world a few years before she came here. The other girl, standing on the left side of the photo, is also a non- traditional student, older than the rest, and studying mortuary science. Both girls taking 16 or 17 credits and working. These kids amaze me.

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      1. I’m beginning to understand why some of my teachers at SIU expressed gratitude that I was in their class. Not that I was an exceptional student in terms of being endowed with brilliance, but I was an older, perhaps a little more thoughtful one, and they appreciated that.

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        1. Yep. I’ve had professors tell me they like having older students in the class; not only for the different perspective, but it can raise the standard for the others too. Online it’s hard to tell. Next semester will be an in person class, so that will be more interesting.

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        2. Older students (myself included) was a great thing at Metro State when I was there. Seemed as if everybody was more serious and not wanting to waste any of their time/effort.

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      2. I had students like your pink shirted student when I was working the local community colleges. Fabulous, every one of them. I still remember finding out I was pregnant just as we were starting the build of a show – and that means paint fumes of any sort are a no-no. Had one student who was a dad of young kids – he know what I could still do and what I shouldn’t, so kept others off my back when I was up on a ladder, and rallied the troops when it came to painting. There was also a young mom in that group – weird but also oddly reassuring to get advice on tiny babies from a woman just about young enough to be my own kid (had I had her at the age she first gave birth)…

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  5. We could have worked in urban areas in the private sector for more money, but stayed in ND working for the State, and we are happy and have what we need.

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  6. Love vs money is something of a false dichotomy. If one is talking about career decisions, and the money element suggests that, there are considerations like opportunity, congeniality, security, family and friends.

    In any decisions I made in the course of my working life, money was incidental to those other considerations.

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  7. Rise and Do What You Love, Baboons,

    Love. I found that if I was not doing something that gave my life some meaning, I just could not do it for more than a few months. Early on I had many jobs for the money, especially during college. Key punch (data entry) paid quite a bit on campuses and allowed me to support myself. But that was in the service of getting an education.

    I also found working in bureaucracies to serve my working knowledge and experience, but after tolerating restrictive bureaucratic structure for about 5 years, I was done and moved on. What I discovered about myself was that really, I am an entrepreneur. I had no idea that this was the case until I was 50 years old. My mother ruthlessly criticized every personality characteristic that supported entrepreneuralism, so I thought I was a failure, when I was in the wrong setting, trying to survive bureaucracy.

    Of course, had I been born a male with the same characteristics, I would have been a CEO.

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  8. Love. But money never hurts anything – until it does.

    I was very happy to return to my simple career of taking care of disabled people. I enjoyed the camaraderie with my coworkers and I missed that so much during my long, unhappy years at the DNR. My nursing job paid more money too, but it gave me the opportunity to care for people. That opportunity was missing from my life and I needed it back.

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  10. In college when deciding a major, I knew teaching would not pay as well as some other options. The other options I could do but the course work and the job work would have been tedious. I knew at several points I would regret the lower money choice. Sandy’s health would limit her earnings and we wanted a parent home until the younger child was through second grade. I did earn money other ways. My classmates had richer lives but not happier lives y any means. My kids are happy with their Arrowhead North Shore childhood. Right now it all seems fine.
    But it was a real choice. Not so much love vs money, but purpose vs. money.
    Clyde

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  11. Our wants these days are simple. I told Husband this morning that if a person has all the ingredients for their Christmas baking, they are rich. My goal this weekend is to make Russian Tea Cakes, Andes Mint Cookies, and Pebbernodder. That leaves five more kinds of cookies and one marzipan confection that I hope to have done by the end of next weekend.

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  12. Husband and I joke about needing to get up to the lake to get the lake home closed up for the winter (we don’t have one) and to get the camper and pontoon put away (we have neither). I would rather have a modest home and a fancy dog.

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    1. The awful thing about “lake” homes here is that they are all mobile homes on the bare Northern Plains on “Lake” Sakakawea which is a dammed up part of the Missouri River.

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  13. I have never had a strategic plan for my career, and I have never thought of the work I have done as being a career, but I suppose it is. The idea of thinking strategically about what a job would look like on a resume has really never been part of my considerations. In retrospect, I can see that’s not particularly wise, but the fact is, I don’t regret it.

    Arguably, at eighteen years of age, enrolling in the local community college or trade school made more sense – career wise – than traipsing off to Switzerland to work in a children’s hospital as a cleaner. After that, exactly what part of applying for a job as a nanny in Moscow looks like a smart career move? “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going nowhere in a hurry” seems to have been the impetus for applying for the job in Greenland. Looking back, though, those three years were every bit as formative as my four years of college, probably more so.

    I don’t think of myself as exceptional in any way, but I do know that because of the choices I’ve made along the way, I am where I am today. I am responsible. I am not a victim.

    Could I have made better choices? Absolutely. Would I have been happier? Possibly. Perhaps part of the secret to success is focusing on the gratitude for what has worked out as opposed to all of the shit you’ve have to overcome?

    I agree that money can make your circumstances more “comfortable.” Looking at Melania, I doubt that it makes you happy.

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    1. I haven’t had toast with peanut butter in a long long time.
      I grew up with sugar cinnamon toast, but I quit doing that, Maybe when we got married just because Kelly didn’t do that.

      I think I know what I’ll be having for a snack this afternoon

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  15. 33 years ago I was absolutely miserable in my job. Nauseous-in -the-morning miserable. I had applied three times at the same company for a job that I knew I could do but couldn’t even get an interview. Fourth time around, they were looking for four folks to do a “support” job in communications. This was the job I got – I took a massive pay cut (think 25%) – even though it wasn’t the job I wanted. I did negotiate three reviews/raises in the first year so made some of it up pretty fast. Company had a “stay in your job a year before you switch departments/jobs” rule. Almost 12 months to the day, I applied for the job that I initially wanted, a job that I did for 31 years!

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  16. I talk about becoming a teacher like it was a rational choice. In one ed. course we read a good little book called When Teachers Face Themselves. Lots of the students were angry about some of the things in the book. The first chapter was a profile of who became teachers. I assume this study is no longer valid. It fit me very well. So how much of my choice was just sociological forces at work in me?
    I also chose teaching because I could work in small towns. The first place I chose was in an area I liked but was an area that had powerful emotional significance to Sandra, the Lindstrom Taylor’s Falls area where she spent much of her childhood to get out her stressful home to live in a warm home with a great aunt on a farm. Then we went to Two Harbors. I never thought I would go home. But the North Shore was another place of strong emotional meaning for Sandra. And the principal sold me on coming back to fix a problem , which I did. Decisions are never simple

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    2. I wasn’t too excited about any of them…I’m trying to come around on them.

      There are some nice designs for the state seal.

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    4. I liked the yellow star and white snowflake on the blue background the best. It’s not a brilliant design, but it’s fairly simple and a kid could draw it.

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      1. Except it’s not a snowflake. Snowflakes are always six sided. An eight sided figure is no more a snowflake than a square or a circle would be. Nothing like announcing that your state doesn’t know or is willing to ignore a basic fact of nature

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  19. I have found I can survive most anything if I have good co-workers – whether that is processing claims or navigating the waters of reduced budget and doing more “break/fix” work than building new stuff… Husband fretted that he wasn’t making enough money, to which I countered that he got us really great health insurance for less than what my corporate gig would have and he had really great co-workers (this usually got him off the proverbial ledge and kept me from then having to spend years dealing with a husband who was miserable in his work, which would have been worse). And my Corporate America gig is pretty good – good coworkers, supportive and inclusive organization… and it is allowing me to not fret about keeping the mortgage paid.

    Years ago when I was coming up on a milestone year college reunion I went through a bit of a crisis of… something. Like I hadn’t done “enough” with myself, like I had somehow failed to live up to the expectations of graduating from my smarty pants college. The dear friend who was listening to me agonize gently reminded me that while the college friend I was then foolishly comparing myself to had a fancy job title and a nicer home… I navigated life with a baseline of contentment. I wasn’t chasing the next thing that might be “just the thing” to make me happy – I found contentment and happiness where I was and that was not nothing. I had work I enjoyed and a good family and time and means to do things that fed my creativity and my soul – and I found joy in all of it. She knew this friend and was pretty sure that all that chasing of titles and the fancy home was not bringing her contentment the way I thought it might. And she was right as it turns out – a few years later when that college friend was at turn in her career she confessed that she was always a little jealous that I had found joy and contentment so easily without chasing a job title or money or really chasing anything, by just being present and living. Huh. So I guess I do wind up answering that “love” would be what I choose, but maybe more particularly, “contentment” and the rest follows.

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