A TexaPino in the Sun: Comeback Tour

Hello all! I'm sure I've lost a lot of readers over the years I was M.I.A. I accept that. I know, I know... I move to Tampa and it's like I'm too good for you guys. Nope. That was not the case at all. I had decided that my former blog was such an interesting and witty rememberance of my crazy and somewhat unbelievable life. This new one was only a shell of its predecessor simply because I did not have much to write about other than bitching and moaning about how I missed my family and friends in Houston and that I initially hated my job. I refused to become that. So there you have why I went radion silent. Recently, I started remembering how therapeautic it was to write about my life as well as how it was nice to go back and read about it as a memoir. So here I am, readers. I'm back! Let's see how well this little comeback tour goes, and let's hope that I can find my mojo to be entertaining again.

Let me give you a rundown of how life became, was, and is now to get you up to speed. My first few months here in sunny Florida was not always rays of sunshine. The job I started working was annoying at first because I dealt with immature pinheads. Eventually, I moved into management which made my professional life much better. I thoroughly enjoyed working for my company and learned quite a bit about starting a company which is essentially what we were doing with trying to get a U.S. operations of an Irish company off the ground. Everything was great until my boss let me in on a deep, dark secret prior to his resignation. It was brought to his attention that the owner of the company was, for all intents and purposes, embezzeling money from the company and fashioning the company business model to the infamous Madoff ponzi scheme. Needless to say, knowing that information made life harder to handle when I had to stare at 20 staff members in the face and lie to them on a daily basis that the company was doing well and act like I wasn't scared that the doors would be locked or paychecks would bounce at any moment.

As you guessed, I'm no longer with the company. Granted, they are still up and running today, but their time is coming. There's no eluding creditors forever when you're almost $10 million in debt at any given time with no end in sight...and that clearing the debt is not your main concern. My former boss had his own reasons for not blowing the whistle of the wrongdoings to the FBI's white color crimes, but mine were primarily that I still have people there that I care about - some who in my personal opinion may be used as scapegoats by the owner should the company go down. They may not get that lucky with the next person who finds out about what's really going on there. I'm just happy I'm not there anymore.

I've been a lady of leisure since then which is going on four months now. Sounds weird, but I don't really count the first month because it was the month before I got married. (Yes, I got married in February! We'll get to that in a later post.) I realized that I had a MILLION things to do before the wedding that I did not think about because I was busy working 60-hour work weeks. As you guessed, I spent about 8 hours a day for over two weeks in wedding mode until the wedding. Then, we had our destination wedding followed by our honeymoon which ran about another week and half. So all of February was a bit of a whirlwind.

Once the dust settled from all the wedding craziness, Husband and I decided that it might be time to start my own business. With all my experience in the travel industry as well as having learned almost everything I need to get a company started, I started doing my own research. If I put as much effort in my own company as I did for those I've worked for all my life, I can't imagine that I couldn't be at least somewhat profitable enough to make a decent salary. After it was all said and done, a plan was born. Website domains have been purchased, competitor research has been analyzed, discussions with web developers have occured, we've determined that a need is out there, and now it's just funding. Damn you, money! Why do we always need you in mass quantities to start a business? Right now, we're trying to decide how to go about it. The intial costs are a bit higher than anticipated, so in the meantime, I've decided to go back to work.

I started actively looking for a job a couple of weeks ago and have already gotten one job offer and another interview next week. I still haven't made any final decisions about work, but I'm definitely not shelving my dream of starting my own thing. Husband has been supportive and absolutely wonderful through all of this, but I'm getting kind of tired of having him play the role of Sugar Daddy lately. It's not my nature not to have my own income - and my unemployment check, although nice, is not the same when you only get about 30% or less of what you use to make. Husband and I enjoy our lifestyle, and we're not really ready to take it down a couple of notches just so that I don't have to work right now. Yep, we don't mind that people think we're spoiled and somewhat materialistic in our wants and needs. We are. Sue us. I don't want to have to give up random vacations, fancy dinners, and buying what we want just because we want it. We'll have to do that when we decided to have kids, but until then... I'll keep you posted about the job hunt.

So there you have it. That has been my life for almost two years. Pretty effing boring other than the getting married part, huh? Life was primarily work for the last year and half, and I'm pretty glad I didn't bore you all with it and took a hiatus from blogging instead. Now that I have the "Why did I stop blogging?" out of the way, I have more room for fun stuffs. Like below: