This week Bridgit and I both started new jobs. I had been unemployed for three months, and Bridgit for eight. With new jobs, Eli starting preschool last week, and figuring our childcare we have been busy recently.

I am going to miss the three and a half month vacation we all had together. We had a great time and I feel blessed that we were able to spend so much time as a family. Job hunting precluded a canoe trip this summer, be we got away for a few weekends and sometimes midweek.

Having to get up early is taking some used to. We were able to reply on our mothers to watch the kids this week and that helped smooth the transition back to daycare.

Bridgit is back to teaching. She had a part time gig at a couple parochial schools at the start of the school year, but now is a full time teacher again. Now she is a middle choir teacher and loves it. It is also giving us health care.

I got a temp position at UM. I am in the hospital system, where exactly I haven’t quite pinned down. So far it has been good. I am mostly doing web development. Support has always dominated my time in previous jobs, and I am really excited to have the opportunity to dig into it more. There also seems to be a good possibility for this to turn into a permanent position

Unemployment does have it’s advantages. I have had the opportunity to get lots of small to medium sized projects done; the big downside is trying to fund them. Most have been accomplished using materials I have laying around or can scrounge. Some of the projects are ones I started a long time ago and never finished and some are new things that come up.

Shop (garage) Air Cleaner
I went with the classic box fan and furnace filter. I made the rig out of 15/16″ plywood scrap from the bunk beds. It is suspended in the dead space above the garage door. I had bought the filters years ago for this project, but never had a fan until one of our house fans needed some repair and I appropriated it for the garage.

Tire Storage
We have snow tires for one of the cars, but storing 4 tires is a big space sucker. They used to be in the basement, but we cleaned it out in the spring and they moved to my workbench in the garage. I have seen wall/ceiling mount tire storage units but don’t have the bank account for one so I hacked together one of my own design. It hangs above the garage door and since I only need to get to it twice a year it is accessible with the door down and out of the way.

Food Storage
A while back we replaced the old 1950′s fridge in the basement with a chest freezer to save some money. We have also been ramping up our basement pantry area with home canned items, buying bulk dry goods and storing home grown garlic, onions, and potatoes. The Fridge was in the middle of the wall and there was limited shelves. When we replaced the fridge we just put the freezer in its place, This too made no sense, so I moved the freezer to the corner next to the washer/dryer and put some metal shelves that were emptied in the big basement clean out in its place. We instantly gained a bunch of shelving for bags of flour, canned goods, etc.

Workbench (basement)
As part of the big basement clean out we are moving my work area. A workbench came with the house on the larger side of the basement. I am planning on keeping a good sampling of tools in the basement to live, with most of them in the garage. I don’t need a 8′ long bench in the basement and I have a 4’8″x3′ maple top that I can use, so I put that in the storage area where the strange basement shower used to be.

Normally I love the Ypsi Food Co-op, and we shop there all the time. Every once in a while I walk/bike/drive down to get something and get asked for my membership card, which I don’t have, so they look me up, and then I get shot down.

See, it is an individual membership, so only Bridgit is an actual member. This annoys me. The idea is that in running the Co-op one membership buys you one vote. But I don’t care about voting, I just want my 4% discount (which is only on some stuff). Bridgit could have just as easily gone down to get something. The food all goes into the same kitchen. For some reason this has got me riled up today and I have resolved that the next time this happens to enact my new plan: get a membership.

That is right, if I am asked for my membership I will just pay the $200 to become a full member and buy my goods. Then I will cancel my membership in protest. I was hesitant because I would have to carry around $200 just in case I wanted to buy a loaf of bread, but my wonderful wife (who is not down with this plan at all) had the idea that I could just put it on the good old credit card.

Alternate plans include creating a trust or a corporation and signing it up. If I make the whole family part of it we can all get the benefits of membership, but only with one vote. The cost of creating a trust or corp is the only downside. Bridgit thinks I should try to change the system (which only works if you are rich, or in a movie), but I am grumpy/lazy enough that I will just work within the system. Besides, I don’t have a vote anyway.

A while back I entered a twitter contest from Garmin to win a new Garmin nüvi 3790T. All you had to do was retweet something each week and they picked two winners from each week. Last week I found out that I was one of the week 2 winners. Our Garmin 250w was stolen out of our car about a year ago and we have been using my iPhone in a pinch or borrowing one for trips. I was really wanting a new GPS recently, but with two of us being unemployed or mostly unemployed there was no way to justify a $150 purchase for a new one. Well, we were blessed with a new $450, top of the line model instead. I am anxiously awaiting it and when it comes I will post some impressions on it.

The last week has just begun so if you want to try to win head over here for the info.

One of the big things on my layoff to-do list (along with getting a new job) has been to paint the garage. Well it is done! A power-washer and paint sprayer made it a one day job, and a sale at Sherwin-Williams made it cheap. We have been busy and the food coming from the garden has made it even more busy. You can check out some of that chaos here.

We started the month with three weddings in two weeks and for the past couple weeks we went to K-Zoo to visit family/friends and then went camping. Plus there have been lots of vegetables (and weeds) to harvest from the garden.

If you are in Kalamazoo the AirZoo is awesome and free. This was my first time since they redid it and I was very impressed.