Job search chronicles, Days 8-9

I am balancing guilts right now.... procrastinators guilt, shoppers guilt, emotional eaters guilt..... all my bad habits are manifesting themselves these days. At least I am exercising! I have managed not to do very much on the job search the past two days and I am feeling a little bad about that. Yesterday was spent working on real estate stuff --trying to work on this business with my investment property, so I guess I can't feel too bad about that. That does have a financial payoff. But today....... after meeting with my former co-workers for the second job searchers breakfast, I decided to head over the the mall. You see, to this point, my laptop has been set up downstairs in front of a big TV. This is because 1) when I was working, it was primarily used for recreation and 2) I couldn't get very good wi-fi signal in my office upstairs (I think there are some old concrete walls lined with wire mesh or something that interferes with the signal) I recently bought these wireless repeaters to hopefully extend the reach of the signal into the office but have not really tested it extensively. So I decided that I need to move my butt into my office so that I can have a space where I can have distinct, dedicated job search time, without a TV or Tivo to distract me. Which brings me to my shoppers guilt.....


A couple weeks ago, I was looking in the Pottery Barn catalog that they so sneakily sent to my house, and I saw this really cool charging station. It basically have a drawer with a shelf on top and in the back are holes that you can thread the charging cords through. Then, in the back, you plug them in to an internal surgeprotector thing and the cord of the surge protector comes out of a hole in the back panel and it plugged into the wall. I said to myself "I need that! That is cool!"

It comes in black which is the color I like.

And then I noticed that it is a part of a collection that has a matching desk. Another thing about my office is that the filing is over flowing. Partially because I don't do it often, but also because my filing cabinet has seen better days. It got beaten up in one of my moves. Also, the door on my desk has become misaligned and doesn't close anymore. It is one of those inexpensive, vinyl coated, pressboard desks but it has served it's purpose for a few years. But now, I think I have outgrown it. So I was considering getting a grown-up real desk to spruce up my work space and solve a few space problems.



So, after breakfast, I decided to head over to the Pottery Barn store to see if they had one of the desks in the store that I could see..... they did..... And I liked it.... A lot.... I thought that it might be the kind of thing that would have to be delivered so I asked the sales lady what the benefit was to me to get it from the store. Well, they load the stuff in your car and you have NO shipping cost, which would be 10% of the purchase price. Um yeah, I would say that is definitely a benefit. I also had this girt card that some old co-workers had given me over a year ago when I was changing jobs and bought my new house so it could help defray the cost a little. So I bought it. It will help me be more productive, right? Turns out after I bought everything, the sales lady told me that one of the end pieces was actually not in stock so they would have to get it shipped to the store for me to pick up in about a week so I won't be able to set it all up until then :-( So then, after I was leaving the store, I felt guilty, not so much because of the money I spent (only partially) but because I spent most of my afternoon shopping for this thing. (Oh, did I also forgot to mention that I stopped at Williams-Sonoma on my way out!...) I will admit though, that I am a bit of an emotional shopper, something that I probably shouldn't be doing much of since I don't have a job!

Also, the past couple days I have been eating in a very balanced way. Well, Monday started pretty good. I have leftovers from my dinner on Sunday for lunch but from the evening on it has been the pits.... I had guacamole and chips and apple pie (and drinks at the show) for dinner, a late night snack of scrambled eggs with smoked turkey and cheddar cheese when I got back from the show, yogurt with granola and honey for breakfast today and apple pie for lunch/snack. Not a good thing and I have healthy things in the house because I just went grocery shopping....

Okay well, enough beating myself up. Knowing is half the battle, right? Tomorrow is another day and an opportunity to refocus!