Down the stretch

This drama should be ending soon.

I stopped blogging because as things progressed I thought it best to keep the developments to myself because I am friends with people involved in the progress and I realized I'm going to have to pick one opportunity over another.

I have a job offer and I have until Monday to accept. I really have/had three solid opportunities. I had a solid knowledge of the starting salary of one and an idea of another and no real idea of the third.

Each of the three had different lengths to the training program. One was for 30 months, the other for 24 and the third I was told "we'll know in six months to a year if it's working out."

All three really are sales, either selling myself to a person or my organization to a business. All three will be a marked difference to what I was doing.

The one where I had an idea of what the initial might be was the first to come in with an offer -- and it was significantly better than I expected.

I wasn't sure what to do with the other two if I accept the offer. I messaged a friend who owns a staffing firm and was advised to drop out of the hiring process of one -- which was going to take another five weeks and I wasn't 100 percent sure I was going to be accepted -- and to message the other saying I have an offer and was wondering if they could speed up their decision making process.

So I've done both. I've heard back from the one I'm still hoping to get a competing offer saying they'll call me today or Monday to discuss what they were thinking.

I don't want to say either way today what I'll be doing, but I'm confident that by Tuesday I'll be meeting my old coworkers at the District for Taco Tuesday to celebrate this new direction.

In any case, it'll be nice to be back to one job again -- or one real job, I plan on working some of the side stuff in.

Three weeks ago, I still wasn't sure when this all would end so I re-upped for the UPS graveyard shift. I've found even if I can sleep in the morning after working so late at night just messes up your body clock. I'm exhausted all the time. That ends Dec. 23 and I may ride it out until the end, depending on what the new employer says will be my start date.

We're inching closer to basketball season and that means 30 or so days/nights at Jefferson High School in December, January and February. I'm expanding that business though. Charles Kluzak, who does the announcing at Jefferson, found out they need someone to supervise keeping statistics during Rock Valley College games. Charles suggested me. I exchanged a few emails with the RVC athletic department and boom, I'm scheduling myself and two friends to do those games. Those start next week.

I also have to wrap up a book I'm doing for a friend. I'll need this one off my plate by the time the new job starts. I just won't have enough time for the first year to do both. That's going to be my focus next week.

I've now been gone from the Register Star for two months and two days and I still haven't missed it. I found a platform to continue to do statistical research and write through Transform Rockford as a volunteer. I'll get to look into how the Rockford area got this way and be part of the team researching how to get out of it.

My old Register Star friends laugh at this because I've been skeptical so far of Transform Rockford. At first it felt like group therapy, which in itself is helpful. But there have been so many different efforts to fix things over the years and few have made a difference so I've become jaded. But now instead of sniping from the outside, I get to be in the process at least a little bit. I'm not exactly Theodore Roosevelt's man in the arena, but at least I'm closer to the arena and out of the safety of  the press box.

Look, I love to write and I love to do research, but with the way the newspaper industry was going it just wasn't going to be a career that paid well enough to put two girls through college. I'd win awards or launch new products, whatever, and made the same regardless. There's nothing more meaningless in life than doing your annual self evaluation knowing that it was pointless. Your pay was going to be the same. Your benefits were going to be the same. To me it was like the band of the Titanic that continued to play as the ship sank. Heroic? Yes. But really they should have run for the lifeboats.

The incentive was no longer there. Now, the better I do for the organization I pick the better my family does in what we make.