One would think my life came to a sudden standstill once a new president was elected. It's as if I dropped off the planet. Not so! I'm still very much here, treading water, trying to stay afloat in the current economic state of affairs. I am not as fortunate as some but more so than many. Not having a great deal of money to begin with, nor a fine, fat nest egg in which I was planning to curl up in upon retirement has spared me much worry and grief over the current state of economic affairs. What does worry me is the fact that I very much fear I will never reach that holy grail of high-end middle age; that being the luxury to retire but will instead have to carry on until I drop dead. This really worries me.



Recent history tells me that we were going though much the same sort of thing back in the early eighties but I don't remember it being quite this severe. I was living an entirely different life back then and I don't recall that I was affected much by it. In fact, I was staying at home with my little girl in those days doing those things that I wanted to do: namely, all the things that were all I ever wanted to do in my life. Stay home, be a homemaker, make dinner, tend to my home, be home when my child returned from school, etc. My, doesn't that sound terribly unambitious and lame and boring. However, there's a lot more to being a woman who stays home to run the household and manage family affairs than you might think. But, as usual, I digress.



Work has been alternately difficult, challenging and rewarding. My hours have been cut by a half hour each day. This works out to two and a half hours a week but my net paycheck reflects the pinch bimonthly. The work has become more difficult, more demanding with less time to get it done. There is a freeze on all raises this year. As in so many other companies across the land, our dictum has become "at least we still have a job". While this is quite true at this point in time, I take little comfort in it. This is certainly not what I expected at my age and I have never put so much mental effort and pushed myself so hard in any job before this as I have over the past year and a half.