Traveling plans

I've decided that I'm going to take advantage of all this extra time off I'm getting this year – three weeks of paid vacation, plus at least two weeks of unpaid leave (and probably more before the year is up, as the company still is hemorrhaging money). 

Since I've been working my fanny off with two jobs for the past several months, I'm thinking I can probably afford to travel on my second furlough. So I'm going to the Dominican Republic (for the third straight year) with two of my Minnesota friends during the first week of June. 

In July, I'll use some of my paid vacation to go to Branson with the family. In August, I'm taking a week off to go to Cedar Rapids in preparation for my sister's wedding. 

And after that ... who knows? I'll still have a lot of vacation/furlough time to burn up. Any suggestions? It would have to be a fairly cheap trip (I'm not exactly rolling in dough here). 

Here We Go Again ...

I'm going to have to take another week off without pay in the second quarter, so sometime between April and the end of June. My first furlough was awesome, because I went to Hawaii to visit Missy – and it was relatively cheap because she was kind enough to let me stay with her. 

This time around, I don't think I'm going to be so lucky. I could go to the Dominican Republic again, because I have friends who are going in June. But I'm very, very hesitant to do that knowing that I'm probably facing a huge loss of income this year after I'm furloughed in the third and fourth quarters as well. 

Read more about the furlough fun here.

Lenten sacrifice

When I was a kid, I always used to give up either chocolate or candy for Lent. As an adult, I've pretty much given up on "giving up" stuff for Lent. I don't eat that much chocolate or candy anyways, so that would be pointless. And I'm not going to give up something that I really, really can't live without ... like Diet Coke or a glass of Cabernet every once in a while after work. 

So I'd resigned myself to not really making any kind of Lenten gesture this year, until I overheard a girl at Younkers talking about how she'd given up shopping for Lent. And I immediately realized that is the perfect sacrifice for me. Because A) I love to shop, and given that I'm still working part-time at Younkers, the opportunity to do so is ever-present, and B) Most of the stuff I buy when shopping is stuff that I really don't need. 

I've now gone almost three weeks without shopping, and it's a lot harder than I thought it would be. Younkers is having a really good sale right now, and I see people snatching up all these good deals and look wistfully at them walking around with their shopping bags filled with bargains. 

But I'm just trying to think how nice it will be not to have to pay any charge card bills this month. And how I can use all those savings to go on massive shopping spree on Easter Sunday :)

The Onion weighs in

This is awesome, the Onion decided to do a "man-on-the-street" interview story about the Gannett furloughs. 

The best response comes from Rex Kelley, who says: "Great. Let's just tell all the world leaders, terrorists, scientists, executives, artists, athletes, celebrities and people of local interest to take the week off too, so we don't have to worry about missing any news. Although, that would kind of be a news story in itself. This is turning into quite a pickle."

Pity Party

As if the fact that it's -20 degrees outside isn't depressing enough, I also found out yesterday that I'll be forced to take a week off without pay sometime before the end of March. It's part of the company's efforts (so they say, anyway) to avoid layoffs, which they just did in December.

This means that a fair number of my co-workers are in panic mode, scrambling to think of different careers to get into because everyone is convinced that newspapers are dying. Someone asked me yesterday, "So what are you going to do now?" My response: "I guess I'm going down with the Titanic."

Honestly, I can't think of any other jobs or careers I'd like to do. I've kicked around the idea of teaching, but I'm not positive that I would like that – I'm not really that fond of children, especially teenagers.  So I don't want to invest a lot of my time and money into something I'm not 100 percent excited about.  

Where does this leave me? Stuck in a piss-poor economy with absolutely no job security and pretty much no skills that would be transferable to a different line of work.

My only hope is this: Even if newspapers go under, there will still be a need for news and journalists, just in a different environment. So if I hang on and go down with the ship, maybe some Internet company that rises up to fill newspapers' void will throw me a life preserver. 

And if not, there's always Younkers. Hello, minimum wage. 

Always the bridesmaid ...

I can't believe my little sis is getting married. We went wedding dress shopping in Des Moines on Sunday with my mom, two aunts, baby sister and cousin. And after much soul-searching and stress, settled on a very pretty – yet simple – dress from Schaefer's, which apparently is where my mom bought her wedding dress 30 years ago. 

During our stop at Davids Bridal, my sister had her co-maids of honor (myself and my other sister) try on bridesmaid dresses. And even though this is my third time as a bridesmaid, it's still fun to try on the pretty dresses and twirl around. Actually, I think it's more fun than actually trying on wedding dresses, because you don't have the pressure of having to make a decision – it's all the fun and none of the hassle.

These are the ones my sister the bride liked the best, and I think it's a good choice, despite my initial reluctance to go strapless. I think it will look good on everyone. 

Tiring schedule

Wow, I've been super lax in my blogging lately, mainly because I'm now working two jobs. So that doesn't leave much time for pondering the mysteries of life – or giving short, crappy updates about how things are going in the snowy Upper Midwest. 

On Thanksgiving, I had to work at my real job from 3:30 to 1 a.m., then I had to be up and ready for Black Friday at 8 a.m. (Younkers actually opened at 4, but I wasn't scheduled to be in until 8, so that's lucky, I guess). From 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., I confronted the sheer insanity of hordes of crazed shoppers scavenging for bargains (and getting very upset when we didn't have what they were seeking). Then I went to the real job from 3:30 to about 1 a.m. once again. 

That means that even though my schedule at the paper recently changed so I'm now a normal person who has actual weekends off, the only thing I'll probably be doing tonight (one of my first work-free Saturday nights in a very long time) is take a nap. How lame is that? Oh well, there's always next weekend – assuming I'm not too tired to do anything again.