I skipped a few days in my daily blogging this week. My husband was out of town and, well, life happened.
I attended a parenting talk and in the process of catching up with people I only see once a year, I mentioned that I was getting up at 4:45 am to make lunches and she noted that it was a whole 3 hours before walking the children to school at 7:45 am. It’s been bugging me ever since. It takes 2h to make lunches, until 6:45 am, then I feed, dress and sanitize the children. I don’t have breakfast and I don’t get dressed. I just work flat out and I simply don’t understand why it takes so long. Does it make sense to you that it takes 2h to make 6 lunches? Then a full hour to get 5 children fed, dressed, brushed and winter-geared? It behooves me. But so it is.
I’m going back to work in 10 days (more on that later) and I’m going to have to shave 30 minutes off my lunch-making or wake-up at 4:00 am, which is getting uncomfortably close to “middle-of-the-night” territory. I will need to be done making lunches at 6:00 am to have time to get dressed in grown-up clothes, put my face on and catch the bus at 6:46.
I’m sure that at this point you are throwing shoes at your screen wondering why (A) I make lunches in the morning, and (B) make lunches at all. There’s a reason for both and maybe I could be convinced to write about it.
With Paul gone for the week, I had to wake up at 4:30 am to walk the children to school (late) at 8:00. Before running out of daylight hours to write things, I started writing a series on marriage and several friends asked me to write about sex and marriage, which I know something about. I mean… we did it 9 times, which is more than the average Canadian who only does it 1.6 times. But there’s knowing about it and knowing what to write about it. On a blog. That might be read by my kids, my parents and my boss. It was ok last week when I was still sleeping with my boss but that all changed when my contract ended and I found a new job.
I bet you’re dying to know about my new job.
The long story started 6 months (or maybe a year?) before we moved to Stittsville. I was having a coffee at Quitters with my bottle of Advil when a charming young lady approached me and said she had peppermint oil and it might help with my headache. We hit it off, met a few times for coffee, I made her pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. I fed her, she was mine.
Fast forward 6 months and we were moving to Stittsville, a community in the west end of the City of Ottawa, just as the municipal election campaign was gearing up. As a former political aide and campaign manager, I noticed that a candidate in my neighbourhood was challenging the incumbent and running a remarkable campaign. I thought “I should probably volunteer,” but my husband was in Latvia, we were selling our house and we had 6 children starting in 3 new schools so it wasn’t looking good. I stopped for coffee at Quitters — it’s a theme — and found myself standing in line right behind the candidate in question. First I thought “this is uncanny” and then I thought “How weird would it be to ask him if he’ll need staff once he gets elected?” I decided “Probably too weird” and let the poor man buy his coffee in peace.
As predicted, he won. Deservedly.
Then I wrote a blog post about looking for work with a resume that screams “I PUT FAMILY FIRST!” You can read it here.
Then my friend (see above) read the post and sent me a Facebook message saying: “Our new Councillor just published a Facebook post about looking for staff, maybe you should apply.” And she added: “By the way, I applied too.” I laughed and told her he was probably hiring more than one person so we could both be hired and we har-har’d, ok bye.
He received 100 resumes, from which he and his campaign volunteers culled 15. The volunteers called 5 people each — including me — and came down with a short list of candidates that he would interview in person. I got a giant pimple on my face, so of course, I was invited to have an interview in person. That apparently went well because he asked me for references. I gave him three names, including one person I was married to and one person who used to be an elected official. Wisely, he called the one I wasn’t married to and made me a job offer as his Committee Lead.
(As I was writing this — I swear this is true — I got a call from my former boss, which gave me an opportunity to thank him for the good reference and he joked “I told him you were a bit scary but as long as he didn’t ask you to work on this or that he should be safe.” )
So there you have it. I’m heading to Ottawa City Hall in 10 days to work as the committee/policy assistant to Glen Gower, the new Ward Councillor for Stittsville. I sent a message to the friend who had tipped me off about the job to say thank you and she said “Guess what??” and I said “Noooooo…” and she said she’s been hired as his ward assistant, and now we’re like two 8 year-olds who just found out they were in the same grade 3 class.
Life. It’s been good to me lately.
Hey Vero 