Oh my poor neglected blog

Well, yet another week has passed and I have not posted.  Life has reached critical survival level and it is all I can do to get through the days and keep a smile on.  The kids are good, great in fact.  Finn waved bye bye, blew kisses and signed "more" all for the first time this week!  He just turned 14 months old yesterday and I can see us catching up, I am over the moon.  The rest of the crew is doing equally well, good schoolwork, decent behavior and being the all around swell kids I expect.

I met with the designer at my PT job so I could finally start designing the online course for them.  Good thing since they already paid me for it :)  PT gig is going well, I teach a class from 12-1 on one campus two days a week, and one of those days I also teach a class from 4:30-7 at another campus.  This gives me a huge chunk of time between classes that I plan to use for dissertation work, course design work and well...a job search.

Just when we began to think the FT gig was looking more secure earlier this week, the hammer kind of fell Friday.  I logged onto a call with a bunch of other faculty only to learn that our bosses had meetings Friday and Monday and that layoffs for faculty were looming.  I emailed my boss since we go back almost 7 years and she called me to discuss, and she sounded so sad on the phone.  She has no say in who stays or who goes or how many go.  Seniority means nothing, and while we hope that what we do translates through our reviews, and committees and course assignments, the truth of the matter is that the people who are making the decisions are not faculty and have very little contact with faculty, so who knows what is coming.  I have no choice but to explore other options, I have a family that I need to help provide for, and I cannot sit on my rear waiting to see if I have a job next week or not. Even if I make it through the first round of cuts, who is to say there won't be more?  So we made the hard choice, and I am looking for teaching gigs and industry jobs up and down the eastern seaboard.  It is hard to accept, especially since I love my job and my coworkers, but i love those five shiny faces more and they need stability.  Fingers crossed that I end up with time on my hands and keep my job, this may be a long week.