In which...reality bites

Apologies for the radio silence over the past week; life has caught up with BM a bit and the job search took precedence over pretty much everything else.  Anyway, happy to say that it looks as if it paid off and things might be looking up for the BM exchequer very soon.

These past few months have been a strange mixture of anxious 'in-between jobs' time and re-charging the batteries, after what's been a fairly tumultuous 10 years or so.  Back then BM and BH were both young professionals about town, me expecting a baby, he starting a political career.  Like everything in life maybe, we could have had no idea how those 10 years would pan out.  
Flash forward to 2010, both pushing mid-forties, when even the most clear-headed tend to take stock, and what does the balance sheet look like?   Well I suppose it depends on how you measure these things.  In pure financial terms, it's pretty bad, particularly if you compare us with our contemporaries from 2000 who continued to pursue a legal career.    In non-monetary terms we have packed a lot into those 10 years, met people we would not otherwise have met including the famous and not so famous and experienced another way of living beyond a concentration on the self.  And we have a lovely family, which I treasure above anything else.

The way I see it, I have another 20 years or so of useful working life left ahead of me and (and yes I am aware of just how cliched this sort of mid-life assessment is) so it's important, within the constraints of family finances, to make them count by ensuring that the work is meaningful and life-enhancing, instead of soul destroying.   At the moment that might just be possible.  That's the plan anyway, and I have to have a plan, however flaky. 

But if the last 10 years have taught me anything, it's that things don't always go according to plan - or at least plan A.  I've not worked out a plan B yet but I'll keep you posted.