Working stiff again

Last week I started working at my old sea urchin job again. I'd left it in February with the idea of finding something closer to home, but during the break my priorities shifted from "make money for the future" to "spend lots of time praying about the future", and that made me wish I could find a part time job again. Then my old boss called me up, said there were lots of BACs in need of testing, and offered me my old job back-- beautiful timing!

They had wanted a full-timer in that position, and I couldn't stay at full time once I started going to Mass every day at a church an hour away. (Later I moved down there, making the trip to church easy but the commute to work long.) So they let me work part time for six months and I trained my replacement before I left. He had been the only decent applicant for the position and was an experienced scientist from the San Francisco area who introduced a number of improvements. But it turned out that his eyes just couldn't focus properly for the microscopy work, and that's a huge part of the projects he was taking over. So he eventually decided to resign. That was when I got the chance to replace my replacement. I hear he plans to take six months off. All the cool people do it! :)

I felt a bit guilty about the nice farewell party I was thrown only six months before returning. But I'm not giving back the gift card; it's spent. :) I brought in brownies on my first day back as a peace offering. I'm so grateful for all the time off; there were a lot of trips and retreats and outings with friends that I couldn't have done if I'd been working. Thanks be to God.

This beautiful working together of circumstances, which I neither worked for nor had a right to expect, puts me in mind of Bob the Dinosaur: