It's starting! (eeeek!)

I sent out a mass-email to my fam & friends yesterday, outlining our plan (as much as we have one) & I've been talking about it in Facebook & Twitter, so I figured I'd make it all official and shit by writing about it here too.  (Since we all know I'm so good about writing...)

We're leaving Ohio on Friday!

The stuff that we had out here at the in-law's has been crammed into our now over-stuffed storage unit, awaiting further instruction.  We'll stuff our clothes into suitcases, fill up a cooler with caffeinated beverages and beef jerky, drug the bejeezus out of the pets, and down the road we'll go, across I-90 through such joyous places as Mitchell, South Dakota, until we land in Spokane.  We'll crash there for a couple of days, then dump the pets on my mom and drive down to the booming metropolis of Coquille, Oregon to meet with some folks that might actually want to hire B, and pay him to do watershed-type-stuff.  The job seems to be in the bag, so when we get a confirmed "welcome to the company" we'll drive around down there to find a place to rent.  Thankfully there are a couple of good-sized towns nearby where we should be able to find a place - otherwise we'd probably be shit out of luck in that tiny little town.

Now, obviously there are a plethora of ways this could all go south of cheese.  I started listing all the possible things that could go wrong, then I started getting the shakes.  Traveling across the country is one thing, but traveling with two cats and a dog is another.  Then there's the whole, what if B doesn't get this job bit, which... while the idea of living and trying to find a job myself in such a smalltown-rural-middle-of-nowhere area kind of makes me a bit OMG, I'd much rather face that challenge than face starting all over again on the job hunt for B.  Me, well, there are dream careers and then there are jobs, and I can find a job doing whatever.  B needs this job to kick-start his career, and I'm willing to wait a couple of years for him to catch up before taking the next step with mine.  Besides, I grew up in hickville, and the area down there looks awesome from what we've been able to see.  I think I can make it work.

I'm still left thinking about what I'm going to do though.  I'm getting the federal unemployment extension and have about 5 more months on it.  It's possible I might get a second extension too, since I last worked in Michigan.  So I could keep leeching off the government for a while.  Or I could find a retail job and have flashbacks to those despairing years right out of college, which wouldn't be too bad but might wind up paying less than I'm getting from UIA.  There are a couple other complete-leap-of-faith ideas, in other words absolutely insane and not entirely realistic, that are floating around in my head.  But both require either a good amount of capital or a good amount of experience, neither of which I have at the moment, so I think they will continue to sit on the back burner.

A couple of things I know I'm going to do though, are the farmer's markets and volunteering with the watershed association that B will (hopefully) be working for.  I don't want my marketing & PR skills to get rusty, so I figure I'll loan them to the CWA.  And I've always wanted to have a booth at a market to sell not only our garden veggies, but my crafty bits & bobs too.  Smalltown Oregon seems to be the perfect place to start, so I'm really looking forward to that.

Also, this:

"Neah da beech, boyeee!"