New Gigs

Last week a friend asked me if I would sing Amazing Grace at her grandmother's funeral. They would pay me for my time, she offered.
"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "I would be honored to do it. " I love singing and rarely get a chance to do it. I was glad that I could serve my friend and her family in that way.

The funeral was yesterday. It went off without a hitch. The manager of the funeral home even wants to hire me to do other people's funerals... Maybe I've finally found my calling! Seriously though, I've wanted to find an outlet for my singing for a long time, but don't really have a great pop/rock voice. It can be a little country and a little more classical, but not quite opera, and I love singing slow ballads. So I guess maybe funerals are a good oplace place for me!
-----------------

I also had a job interview for a vacation ownership sales job this week. That's a fancy name for timeshare, which is probably one step above, or maybe even below, car sales in many people's minds. But for some reason, despite the fact that I'm honest to a fault, I am good at sales. What happened is I was paying bills last weekend and started panicking as I sometimes do when I pay bills. (I know that God is in control and I need to just trust Him. We're not going to go hungry and we have everything we truly need.) Matt's real estate business is doing really well and money is coming in. It just seems to be going out faster! My business is building slowly, but not enough to pay many bills right now. There really is no good way for Matt to get a second job and still run his real estate business.

So I opened up Craigslist and did a quick job search for real estate jobs, since that is where most of my experience is (10 years in December!). I saw the vacation ownership job right away and it caught my eye because an old work associate and friend was the hiring contact. I called him a few days later and went in for an interview the next day. It was one of those interviews that was more like me interviewing him to see if I wanted the job, since he already knows me and says he knows I would do well. The pay is pretty significant and it would help our family a lot. The hours are weird: evenings and weekends, which will be inconvenient as far as missing fun activities, but good as far as still being here with the kids during most days. It's the kind of job where you just show up and the people come to you: no prospecting and no follow up, which is the opposite of everything else we do. We're thinking it might be a good short term solution to help get us over this hump, and who knows what might happen. I was pretty impressed with what I saw there.

--------

Kate, our one-year-old, is sick today. We took her in to Urgent Care last night because her fever was above 105 and not really coming down. They did a bunch of tests (checked ears for infection, did a culture for strep throat, swabbed her nose for flu - including swine flu - and even had to put in a catheter to check for a bladder infection, poor baby.) But all tests were negative. Apparently it is just a virus and all we can do is try to keep her stay comfortable while her body fights it off. The good news is we have a rare Sunday where all four of us are home just relaxing with no place to be and nothing to do. Camryn is decorating us all, including Daddy, with temporary tattos: flowers, fairies and butterflies...we are beautiful :)