The Word for the Week is Change.

So one day you wake up, get in your 15 year old car, drive to work, drive home, and at the end of the day, your life has completely changed-- you are heading home to buy a new car and a new job offer has been approved, all in one day, and it sorta makes your head spin. Purchasing a car is a very exhausting process, going to the dealer, and waiting for hours to get all the paperwork done can take forever, so make sure you eat before you do this. I love doing the research ahead of time, kelly blue book prices, edmunds reviews, consumer reports pricing, but the actual negotiation is totally not my thing. So I channeled my inner Alec Baldwin and made a go of it, went toe to toe with the dealer, and played a nice hand of car dealer poker. Here is the result, a beautiful new Mazda3 4 door in automatic. I drove to the grocery store today and for once, did not have to put them all in the passenger seat, I could actually use the trunk..., and I did not hurt my shoulder doing a 12 point turn in the parking lot. Yeaa! D got a matching 5 door manual which is gorgeous to drive, don't make fun of us, this car is so much fun to drive. Isn't it lovely?

So precious, we match, I know.

So the other big change is a job offer from a company here in town for a corporate librarian. The job sorta landed in my lap two fridays ago when a friend asked me if I was interested. She was leaving for another job and thought I might be interested. At first, I wasn't sure if I was ready to go back to the corporate arena, but the land of cubes and corporate perks were calling my name, and here I go. My commute will go from 15 min to 50 min, so the nice new ride will help me adjust to the longer car time. I will just have to listen to some books on cd, or podcasts, and perhaps try to relearn spanish, in only 2 hours a day. The job was too good to pass up, and darn it, I will be an official librarian for reals, so I am looking forward to rolling up my sleeves and jumping in. Just when I mastered the last job, but alas, isn't that what they say, life happens when you are planning for something else? You thought giving up my car was hard, giving up an academic lifestyle will be triply as hard. But you gotta do what you gotta do, and I would be stupid not to do this, so here I go. I am hoping that opportunities will circle back to the land of academia some day, and who knows, perhaps going over to the dark side as librarians like to say about corporate librarians, will suit me.