AVanBoeningMHT...No More! (#305 and #306 on the life list:)

Hello, internet.  Its me, Allison.  Remember me?


Yep.  You recognize me with a martini, right?  Well, I have a lot of words for you.  Its my last night of being an employee of the hospital.  My last night of being someone else's employee, period!  I'm kind of a mess.  Let me elaborate, as you must be bored, if you are reading my blog.  First of all, I'm downright sad to be leaving the hospital.  Much as I can't stand the way our program is being run these days, I have always had such good, close friendships with a good chunk of my coworkers.  I'm not sure if its the fact that we work in mental health and therefor have similar personalities or sense of humors or what but I have formed some really great friendships here.  This has been my employment home since I graduated from college.  Eleven years.  That's one third of my life thus far.  For about 8 of those years, I came here for more than 40 hours a week.  I got attached.

Aside from missing my current coworkers, I'm really going to miss the kids.  Its a pretty rare opportunity that we have in our program, to spend time with kids who are in crisis.  Since I started working mostly night shifts, I haven't spent a ton of time with the kids and I miss them.  It will be so strange not to have that connection to youth any longer.  I have to say also, that doing this job felt sometimes like I was actually making a difference.  Obviously I got paid, its not like I was volunteering.  And more often than not, the kids don't seem to visibly take much stock in what we say, but there were those rare moments that I saw kids improve and learn and smile and laugh because of something that our team of people did and that just kind of gives a different meaning to a job than just being the place that signs your paychecks.  Our cleaning job is hugely rewarding as well, but its for much different reasons.

And the biggest question of the night...AM I MAKING A HUGE MISTAKE?!?  I think I've said before how much I hate grown up stuff, like retirement funds, insurance anythings, blah blah blah.  I might be the most immature 33 year old that exists.  But when you work for a company big enough to take care of most of those things for you, it doesn't really matter how immature you are.  When you ARE the business owner, you have to start figuring those things out.  You have to learn about IRAs and mutual funds and The Affordable Care Act and, like, budgeting.  GROSS!!!  Can we please just go drink martinis???  Somewhere in my brain, I just always assumed I would have the hospital job to fall back on, if cleaning didn't work out or didn't quite pay the bills.  Or heaven forbid, I get injured.  I mean, my business largely depends on my physical health!  Poop!

Now that I have deep breathed my way through my 43rd panic attack of the last 24 hours, maybe I should focus on what is good here...I will have more time for my family and friends.  There will be no more scheduling around my night shifts for a family or social life.  Or holidays.  I have worked at jobs since about 1997  that have required me to work holidays.  It will be so awesome not to have to miss out on festivities because of work any more.
I will have more weekdays on which to clean.  I am freeing up 6 weekdays per month for cleaning and that is pretty huge, considering how much Tosha and I can get done in a day.  Hopefully more time for us to work on the side of our business that we currently neglect like marketing, paperwork, other grown up things.  I think I am rubbing off on her in the area of immaturity:)
I can sleep like a normal person.  The girls that I work nights with and I have had many a conversation about how NO MATTER WHAT, your sleep is never good enough when you work nights.  And most of the time, you only allow yourself a few hours of the crappy sleep and that is just so bad for your health.  So bad.  I am certain that an improved level of health and energy will come along with my new schedule, which leads to so many other positive changes like more exercise, more cooking, less snaking on junk food just to stay awake.

While I know that this is a very good decision and the natural progression of things for my business/career, I am nervous about the next few months.  I need to buy a new car and its been years since I have had a car payment.  I have never before had to make health insurance payments.  Its the winter months, so Brad's paychecks are leaner than they are when the weather is nice.  I may have to drink fewer martinis.  They are expensive.  But I am thankful.  I also need to thank my little family for allowing me to participate in my own little experiment of being solely a business owner.  Well, I go back and forth between wanting to thank them, and wanting to take Brad by the shoulders and shake him really hard and scream, "Don't trust me to do this!  We will be homeless by June! Who allows their wife to quit her job when they need a new roof???"  If I did, I'm sure he would just calmly tell me, as usual, that it will all figure itself out and be fine.  

Brad and I had dinner at Jack and June a few weeks ago before we went to Catching Fire (which was an AWESOME movie).  This is my food.  Maybe its lame to take pictures of your food, but this was a caramelized onion grilled cheese and roasted Brussels sprouts and soft pretzels with blue cheese dipping sauce.  So there.

  In case you're curious about how "Obamacare" is affecting my insurance shopping experience (and since I can't ever resist giving my completely uninformed political opinions), I will say that it seemed shaky at first.  There was not a singe insurance agent who could give us any information for a few months.  And the quotes I got seemed high with very high deductibles.  It was frustrating, but I had a feeling it wouldn't be left at that.  And low and behold, I spoke with my agent just the other day and she said we needed to meet asap, as provisions were being made, policies were getting cheaper, deductibles lower and so on and so forth.  I also had to remind myself that up to this point in my life, my insurance has always just seemed free to me.  It comes out of my paycheck before it ever reaches my pocket and in my limited little brain, that means its free.  I am very confident that The Affordable Care Act will undergo enough revision and tweaking that it will do what it was intended to do, and have little more than the normal rate increase impact on folks who already have insurance by the time all is said and done.  I will be the first to admit it if I'm wrong though.  I do really think we need to give it a year or so and see how things are in 2015.  Rome wasn't built in a day, kids.

Because, wine.

I'm not exactly sure what the theme was for Summer, 2012 but I have decided that 2013 is all about the vineyards.  Wine is gluten free.  Vineyards are beautiful.  Yes, I realize we live in Nebraska but I'll take what I can get.  And the place we visited on Friday evening was the bee's knees.  Glacial Till is near Bennett, Ne which is a decent drive from our house, but totally worth it.  The Chambourcin was red and dry and I had the whole bottle to myself.  The music was fun.  I danced with Willa.  They had a visiting brewery, which made the gentleman happy.  You know where to find me every other Friday night from now until the end of summer.

And...if you don't get the title of this post then you have not been following my directions all along.  Shame on you.

Sometimes I wonder where I go

And then I'm like, look!  Here I am!  A few months ago, Tosha and I took our better halves (cough, cough, choke. Hahahaha) out for a night on the town.  To include sushi, drinks and intelligent conversation.  When I was checking on the blogs tonight at work and realized how long it had been since I myself had updated my blog, I decided to share this picture and blame Tosha entirely for my lack of blogging.  Not Tosha so much as Purely Maid.  I love my business.  I love cleaning.  I love (nearly) all of our clients and (nearly) all of their kids and pets.  But seriously!  When we get extra, super-duper busy, it seems to come in spurts and right now...we are massively...um, spurting?  To the point that we have very little time for things like sushi, drinks, our other job, sleep, cleaning our own houses...I think you get it.  It will start slowing down now a little.  I think.  After this next week maybe.  At least enough to get in one last, good long run I hope!  (The marathon is less than a month away now.)

As for a marathon update, I did a little work on what I'm going to wear.  Isn't it nuts that I would stress about that?  But I do, and I wanted to be able to wear everything a few times before that day, to make sure I knew how it was going to perform.  I got some new shoes and shorts.  Kinda surprised myself on the shoes, as I've been loyal to the New Balance Minimus for a few years now, but these are waaaay comfortable.  And my choice of shorts was largely determined by cuteness, brand loyalty, and number/size of pockets.

Tosha and I can be twins again

Just a few cute pictures from Tosha's 32nd birthday party, out in the big town of Panama.  We had 32 tons of fun.  And maybe each took about 32 jello shots.  And Brad and Jared stayed up about 32 hours too late playing Rock Band.  But what the heck, you only turn 32 once!!!

Greenish Black Friday

FOR REAL!  Purely Maid has a website!  We've talked about/wanted one since, oh, probably that first fateful day that we cleaned together at Marcia's house 5+ years ago.  We were like, hey, let's clean a house together, go drink some bloody marys and eat some sour patch kids, and then have a really awesome web site all about it!  Now that we have built our clientele from 1 to over 30, we have a website!  Thanks 110% to my fantastic brother in law, Brant Van Boening.  For now, the website is just featuring our Green Black Friday sale but very, very soon it will have our info and then the business can just go ahead and pour in:)  Because apparently I think we need more than 30 clients?!?  Yes.  Yes we do.  We will start cleaning on Mumphday if we must, even though now that is our day off where we do all sorts of enjoyable activities together and with our families.  You've never heard of Mumphday?  That's because we invented it.  Go invent your own day. 
In my previous post, I mentioned that I was very thankful for this business, my business partner and all of our clients and I really meant it.  As strange as it may seem, some of my best memories of the past few years have come from cleaning or cleaning related situations.  I have also met some really wonderful people, some who clean with us, some who we clean for, and some who have given us lots of help along the way.  And as an extra bonus, I get such a good feeling from cleaning.  I like to leave someone's house and know that it looks so nice and fresh and they are going to come home to that and it will alleviate just a little bit of stress in their lives. 
So, check out our Black Friday sale.  Check back later this week to see the regular website.  Email us.  Call us.  Buy a gift card for someone you care about.  Hire us to clean your house.  Or just come downtown and have a drink with me when I get off work this morning.  It promises to be entertaining, as sleep deprived as I am:)  Go Huskers!