What do I do with my life.
So let's look at the bullshit as it stands right now.
Basement flooded during the Mpls tornado. The final cost of my losses is about $600-700 in materials. Don't know how much the electric bill will be (keeping the fans on for a week and a half to dry it out), but it can't be good. It may not sound like a lot, but we live pretty tight, so I'm out a lot at this point. All I can hope for is that I continue to sell through my Etsy stock, which was either off the floor or upstairs at the time.
Ryan got fired the day after the tornado. He qualified for unemployment, but rather than compare it to what he made as a supervisor, they averaged it with his training time in the previous months (he worked weekends while he was at another job) and they've qualified him for a whopping $150. Which is bullshit. Especially since in the last month he worked there he worked 50+ hours a week.
Our van is a piece of garbage. We had my mom's SUV for 6 weeks while she recouped from her foot surgery. But we just gave it back and now we're back to our van that is good for only city driving. The transmission, which we bought last year, had a 1 year/30,000 mile warranty. It was about 50,000 miles and a year and a half. It SUCKS because a dodge caravan transmission is shit, but a rebuilt dodge transmission is BETTER, so it should have lasted at least 100,000+ miles...which it didn't. So before Ryan got fired we had planned on getting a new car because he was making fairly good money, we were almost caught up on all of out outstanding bills and he was commuting an hour to and from work everyday. Now we're stuck with a piece of shit that can't even take us on the highway.
And now on to the new big thing:
So Ryan may be going to school for the next two years to get his bachelors...in Marshall...which is 3 hours from here. It is the only school in MN, and one of only 15 schools in the world, that offers Culinology, the program he needs to finish his bachelors.
So I am faced with two choices:
Go with him and be depressed in an all white (seriously, 3% black people), small town full of gross assholes, no fabric stores (thus no resources for my business) and if we're lucky, one car.
Stay in the cities, and only see him on holidays and summer break. This will involve me having to find a place to live, getting a real job for the first time in 4 years to offset the weird randomness of my fashion income, which will essentially cut the time I can put into BC drastically to where I was 4* years ago which means I'll be moving backwards.
If he gets accepted and can go, that is the only choice for us. He's been unemployed several times in the last 4 years due to things such as the home improvement market taking a downturn (in a recession, it's one of the first things to go, and tile setting was his trade). He went to college for culinary only to find that being a cook, unless you're en executive chef, is not enough to support a family. He recently got a job in his field, but was fire the day after the tornado because some of his employees who were the lackeys of the woman who had it out for him (someone who feels she deserved his job even though he had a degree and she was a former addict who skipped work all the time) complained that he made them feel dumb with his tone of voice. He was on the tale of his new hire probation and they essentially had to let him go "with no hard feelings." But with this school, he'll be assured a job. Culinology is a degree that will get him 100% placement after school with a minimum of $50,000 a year and as high as $100,000. This is the only option for us to be comfortable and him have a job he likes at the end of it.
So everything else falls to me on this one. I don't know what to do, but both options result in us putting off kids longer (1- don't want to be pregnant away from my support system and family, 2- don't want to be pregnant and raise the kid for the 1st year without Ryan) and going backwards in my business.
I feel like I'm on one wide of a bridge and I can see a paid off house, a nice car, a kid and happiness on the other side of it, but that the bridge itself could give if I put my weight on the wrong parts of it.
I don't know what to do. I don't want the last 11 years of BC to have been a waste. I don't want to give it up. I'm not really good at anything else. I'm good at fashion, art, and event planning. That's it. I just don't know what to do.
Basement flooded during the Mpls tornado. The final cost of my losses is about $600-700 in materials. Don't know how much the electric bill will be (keeping the fans on for a week and a half to dry it out), but it can't be good. It may not sound like a lot, but we live pretty tight, so I'm out a lot at this point. All I can hope for is that I continue to sell through my Etsy stock, which was either off the floor or upstairs at the time.
Ryan got fired the day after the tornado. He qualified for unemployment, but rather than compare it to what he made as a supervisor, they averaged it with his training time in the previous months (he worked weekends while he was at another job) and they've qualified him for a whopping $150. Which is bullshit. Especially since in the last month he worked there he worked 50+ hours a week.
Our van is a piece of garbage. We had my mom's SUV for 6 weeks while she recouped from her foot surgery. But we just gave it back and now we're back to our van that is good for only city driving. The transmission, which we bought last year, had a 1 year/30,000 mile warranty. It was about 50,000 miles and a year and a half. It SUCKS because a dodge caravan transmission is shit, but a rebuilt dodge transmission is BETTER, so it should have lasted at least 100,000+ miles...which it didn't. So before Ryan got fired we had planned on getting a new car because he was making fairly good money, we were almost caught up on all of out outstanding bills and he was commuting an hour to and from work everyday. Now we're stuck with a piece of shit that can't even take us on the highway.
And now on to the new big thing:
So Ryan may be going to school for the next two years to get his bachelors...in Marshall...which is 3 hours from here. It is the only school in MN, and one of only 15 schools in the world, that offers Culinology, the program he needs to finish his bachelors.
So I am faced with two choices:
Go with him and be depressed in an all white (seriously, 3% black people), small town full of gross assholes, no fabric stores (thus no resources for my business) and if we're lucky, one car.
Stay in the cities, and only see him on holidays and summer break. This will involve me having to find a place to live, getting a real job for the first time in 4 years to offset the weird randomness of my fashion income, which will essentially cut the time I can put into BC drastically to where I was 4* years ago which means I'll be moving backwards.
If he gets accepted and can go, that is the only choice for us. He's been unemployed several times in the last 4 years due to things such as the home improvement market taking a downturn (in a recession, it's one of the first things to go, and tile setting was his trade). He went to college for culinary only to find that being a cook, unless you're en executive chef, is not enough to support a family. He recently got a job in his field, but was fire the day after the tornado because some of his employees who were the lackeys of the woman who had it out for him (someone who feels she deserved his job even though he had a degree and she was a former addict who skipped work all the time) complained that he made them feel dumb with his tone of voice. He was on the tale of his new hire probation and they essentially had to let him go "with no hard feelings." But with this school, he'll be assured a job. Culinology is a degree that will get him 100% placement after school with a minimum of $50,000 a year and as high as $100,000. This is the only option for us to be comfortable and him have a job he likes at the end of it.
So everything else falls to me on this one. I don't know what to do, but both options result in us putting off kids longer (1- don't want to be pregnant away from my support system and family, 2- don't want to be pregnant and raise the kid for the 1st year without Ryan) and going backwards in my business.
I feel like I'm on one wide of a bridge and I can see a paid off house, a nice car, a kid and happiness on the other side of it, but that the bridge itself could give if I put my weight on the wrong parts of it.
I don't know what to do. I don't want the last 11 years of BC to have been a waste. I don't want to give it up. I'm not really good at anything else. I'm good at fashion, art, and event planning. That's it. I just don't know what to do.