I don't believe what I just saw

Turns out, the people in the community surrounding my community college thought it might be a bad idea to lay off half the administrative staff before the fall semester started. So my layoff is cancelled. For now. Doesn't mean I'm not still looking, and it doesn't mean I feel any more secure about my job than I did three weeks ago. It's been a rough couple of weeks. So that's why I felt so good about a recent string of good luck I've had.

Despite getting the reprieve from getting laid off, I've still got a lot of resumes out there and I'm anxiously awaiting some responses. The last time I was looking for work I averaged a call-back for 1 out of about 10 applications. Well I hit 20 applications the other day and I haven't heard back from anyone yet. So I thought why not check my spam to see if I've missed anything, even though it's probably a waste of time.

Turns out it wasn't a waste. I didn't have any job responses in there, but I did have a note about winning some ryobi power tools, and when I opened it it actually looked like it was real, with a link to a blog post with me as the winner there at the bottom. Well holy shit. The email was a couple of days old, so I fired off a response and tried to patiently wait for a response.

Which turned into waiting patiently for confirmation of shipping on my choices, which seemed to last forever. But I eventually did get two new tools showing up on my porch this week! Say hello to my new table saw and router.

I've had a fair share of luck good and bad in my life, but this one came around at just the right time. Part of me thinks karma has a little to do with it, with this happening just when I was starting to panic about a job. Plus, I had just posted our landscaping pond as a freebie on craigslist after pulling it out of the ground. That's a good time to win a contest.

A half-finished media stand made for a decent extra shelf but also made it just about impossible to actually reach any tools I needed to finish putting this together. My own fault for making it so damn big. Whoops.

These probably would have really helped with the media stand build, but what can you do. It's clearly coming along pretty well without one and the shop is kind of a mess right now. Kind of like my brain. B/c there have been a couple of ideas rattling around in there lately where I'd wondered if a table saw or router would be needed, so I think my to-do list just got quite a bit longer. There's a bench at the in-laws that needs refurbishing, a painter's canvas that would be easy to put together now, and who knows what else I'm going to come up with. I just have to figure out where this is going to fit. Good problem to have though. This has definitely put a much-needed spring in my step this week.