Back on Track

I'm taking a writing class to improve my creative and copywriting skills and by all accounts, I really should be doing my current assignment right now (since it's already a week late). However, I had to take a break from my 3,000 word story that I'm frustrated with right now because I no longer care about the plot or characters I have thusfar created. This indicates a major problem and probably means that I should start over with something new, but since I'm short on time, the prospect of starting over makes me groan. I therefore feel obligated to continue muddling through the structure I have already set up.
Anyway, I wanted to take a break to express how happy I am that J has this marketing job. It's fun to be watching TV with him and when a commercial comes on hear him say "Hey, we did that." For the first time in two years, he's not hating his job and for the first time in three and a half years, seems to really be enjoying his job. That's priceless.
Until May 2003, we were trekking through life at a relatively amiable pace. We were financially and otherwise independent, both working, and had bought a house. Suddenly, our lives were run off the road and brought to a screeching halt when J's boss took a dive off the deep end of sanity. Added to that major problem was also the issue that our mortgage company had originally mis-estimated our mortgage payment and sent us a letter in May stating that the monthly payment would go up by 20%. That was 20% we didn't have.
Before we knew it, J was out of work in a dead economy, and we had to sell our little house and move to Texas seeking shelter from my parents. We lost everything we had put into the house that we had only lived in for ten months, were unemployed, and J was still recovering from the emotional hell that boss-man had put him through. The situation wasn't helped by the fact that our beloved puppy, Japp, escaped from the yard the day we arrived in Texas and was killed by a speeding driver.
Since that point, try as we might to get back on the track of life and progress over the last year and a half, we seemed to be doing little more than spinning doughnuts on the side of the road. J bounced from junk job to junk job, each time getting further from his intended field (we soon discovered that the job market in Dallas was not much better than the job market in Seattle) and while I was generally steadily employed, it was never enough to pay the bills. For the first six months of our stay in Texas, I was working for my Dad, and although I enjoyed the job and took it very seriously, I couldn't help but feel that it was something of a handout. A handout I was extremely grateful for, but I still had the need to earn my own way.
There were times when we were able to save a little money, but something always came along to instantly eat away the savings that we had painstakingly accrued.
And now, J and I both have jobs that we love and obtained "on our own." Even better, we don't have to choose each month between paying the bills or paying rent (gasp!). Though it may have suffered some dents along the way, it appears that our little car has made its way back onto the highway and is once again heading in the right direction. Hope is a powerful thing. And God is good.
And now I'd better get back on track with my writing assignment.