Golden Autumn

I awoke to an absolutely gorgeous fall morning. The sky was bright blue. The golden sun filtered through the falling yellow leaves on the trees over my porch. The air was cold and crisp and had that good woodburning smell.

I spent part of the morning doing job research. Not that I got far. I found one library assistant job for Voorhees (about a half-hour from here), but it also required handling the computer lab, which I've never done, and a handful of secretarial jobs.

The job hunting is just making me nervous as heck. First of all, I don't know if I can handle two jobs. I've never handled two jobs before. I don't have a car. Would I ever be able to find anyone who carpools? Would it be overwhelming?

I was really hoping to get out of the Acme all together. Is it possible? Can I do anything else, after 8 years of doing nothing but work at the Acme? If I can, why didn't the real estate office in Wildwood or the newspaper office in Atlantic County hire me years ago? If I can do all these things, why does no one want me to do them? How do you meet people when you're scared to death to talk to anyone you don't know well? Even just writing about anxiety is causing a knot to form in my stomach.

It was such a nice day, I went for a short walk in Veteran's Park next-door after lunch. The park looked stunning today, with it's green moss and gold and flame-colored trees. The views were amazing, with sun shining over bottle-green water and Crayola trees framing lovely homes and yards.

After that, I went to Doria's Deli for turkey lunchmeat (I used the last of it up on my lunch). When I got back, I thought I'd try to fix the chain on the cruiser bike myself, since none of my neighbors seemed to be around. It only took me about 20 minutes to turn the bike over and finally get it back on. It seems to be ok for now; it got me to work and back, anyway. We'll see what happens in the coming days. I may still try to get someone to tighten it a bit.

I left over an hour early for work. First of all, I wanted to check out the bike and make sure it ran fine (which it did). Second, I wanted plenty of time to pick up my paycheck and write down my schedule. Third, I wanted to check out FYE and Wal-Mart and see if they had the new special edition DVD for Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Alas, neither of them did.

Work was, thankfully after the last week or so, not a problem. It was busy when I came in, dead when I left, with a few rude customers but nothing on the order of Wednesday or Sunday. I treated myself to a bag of mini pumpkin-shaped York Peppermint Patties that were half-off after work.

My schedule's pretty decent, too. Slightly fewer hours, otherwise, no really early days and nothing later than 8PM, Monday and Thursday off again, nothing too bad.