I lost a follower! Bummer!

Here I am logging in every day to see if I have any more followers and I log in today to find out I lost a follower. Unacceptable!

Kidding! I appreciate each and every one of my readers (followers). Otherwise whats the point. You guys ROCK!

Momcat xxxx

So my interview of the week...

was rather a shocker...by Johannesburg standards.

I was telephoned by a young lady. I'm still not sure if she got my CV off an employment website because I'm positive I would never have applied for a job such as this (unless I was under the influence of the dreaded wine!)

Telesales and office admin for a security company. The one plus is that its only a few kilometres away from where I'm staying but get this - the salary R6,000 a month - the hours 7am until 5pm minus tea breaks and lunch break (which I generally don't take anyway plus its an industrial area!). So 10 hours a day at work minus breaks at the offered salary is about R30 an hour.

And I was considering taking the position just to get some funds rolling in. The more I thought about it though, the more depressed about it I was getting, no matter how much I tried to justify why I should accept the position.

My last position in Durban which was also only 5 minutes from home (and no traffic!) was only half day i.e. 8am until 1pm plus alternate Saturdays from 8am until 12pm and for that I was making R5,500 per month and still not coming out financially.

So now I'm in Johannesburg with further distances to travel and everything costing a bit more and that's the salary they're offering for a full day job. My goodness.

I went for the first interview and the young HR lady was lamenting the 'terrible' applicants she had seen so far who didn't seem to want to work for that kind of money, young people who didn't seem to have any kind of work ethic but were wanting R15,000 with no experience.

My first job at age 19 paid R500 a month but different time, different place. I made the shortlist and was supposed to go for a second interview today but when I discussed it with Robynne, laying out a possible reason to accept the position if offered it as at least having some form of an income as opposed to being at home with no income, she pointed out that I would be stuck in a low income job all day and unable to go for any more promising interviews should they come about.

With that reinforcement, I dropped an email to the young HR lady, thanking her for the opportunity but declining the second interview. I think I owe more to myself after more than twenty years of hard slog behind a hot computer than to set myself back so far in a junior position with no benefits.

Come on Jhb! Show me the money...!

I didnt want to say it....

but maybe Ive got a bit of the old addictive personality too!

I thought that was reserved for my kids courtesy of their father. (All bad habits come from dad of course!)

But recently Ive found some consolation in the odd glass of wine or two. It dulls the stress and realities, sharpens the concentration and focus and relaxes the stress of everyday realities.

Bradley has also started smoking (at the age of 16), a reality that he vehemently denies. But every time he goes to 'shower' there is that distinctive smell of cigarette smoke wafting from the bathroom.
I have never smoked, can't stand the thought but wine is my consolation at the moment. It doesn't matter what type of wine. Any box wine will do. I don't deny myself. Marco buys it, I drink it. I need the distraction at the moment. But I am fully cognisant of my need for this substance. Obviously addiction is a mind thing and I am in tune with the desires of my mind (and body). Even if I really think I need a glass of wine, I question the validity of that need in my mind.

But I don't restrict myself. If i need a glass of wine, I give myself a glass of wine or two or three. (Three's my limit, by the way. I do still need to function!!)

Its interesting to discover what your particular Achilles Heel is, what your particular addiction is..

Maybe this discovery about myself is an important learning curve in the understanding of others.

Trying not to let my Positive turn into Negative.

Why is it that once you decide on a certain mindset or course of action, life conspires against you?

The new job never got off the ground. Too many duties never before carried out, computer programs I didn't know and of course the switchboard. I think they thought I would just swoop in and know everything. Like Superwoman?! I left at the end of the first week.

Finding a job in Johannesburg is not as easy as the pre-advertising made it out to be. I have done so many skills tests, had my fingerprints taken twice, my qualifications have been checked probably about ten times, my former colleagues must be so tired of giving verbal references that they probably put the phone down when they hear its for me...

On top of that is all the family drama since Ive been in Jhb. My daughter and her father fell out and Ive been caught in the middle of this. As has Bradley who was staying with his dad but is now with me and this is also difficult as now its an extra financial burden on my daughter and her boyfriend. The good thing is that Bradley is able to do his homeschooling with me.

We are left with only one car at the moment because the other one has a suspected electrical fault. There are issues surrounding the animals. Specifically the Doberman which Robynne and Marco adopted in early December. This puppy is growing by leaps and bounds, putting pressures on the daily food preparation for all the animals and trying to establish dominance over the other dogs by virtue of its increasing size. The other dogs are miniature pinschers who are all related plus the oldest doggie, a cross Maltese/Dachshund and they all know their place in the pack.

The rapidly growing Doberman is putting a lot of strain on the household with her restless barking, bouncing all over the place and other anti-social habits like putting her paws up on the counters and knocking things off or stealing things, barking continuously in the middle of the night, stealing and chewing items of clothing and just generally trying to get her own way. Robynne has been driven to tears with this behaviour with her bf trying to defend the dog and I in turn am trying to devise a routine of discipline and boundaries on this doggie who of course is just being her normal Doberman self.

I did warn them against bringing such a large active breed into their existing pack but because they wanted a 'guard dog' and the Doberman looks similar in colouring, etc., to their minpins, they decided to get her. I am of the opinion that since the commitment to this big dog was made, just because there are issues, is not cause to give up and want to get rid of her. Effort has to be put in now because if she is left, she could end up doing damage to one of the other doggies or one of the cats. I am not afraid to be tough with her as I have had big dogs before and I know that big dogs need strong guidance. The problem is that she is expected to know right from wrong as if she were human. A big mistake is to try to treat dogs as if they were human babies. They are part of your family but a dog pack operates very differently from a human family. They don't have the same sense of right and wrong and 'being fair' as humans.

Anyway, the above is some of what is going into my difficulty in staying positive. Although obviously being positive is more important when times are hard than when all is rosy. Sometimes I feel that I have been totally dislodged from life as I knew it. And its hard under these circumstances to get a feeling of my sense of self when I feel as though I am a passenger in the vehicle of my life.