The end of a season

The end of tax season, that is. I can't believe it's come and gone already.

When we first moved to the island, the most pressing and frustrating thing was finding a job. Christin had finished massage therapy school, Steve had just finished his stint as acting general manager at the Ponderosa, and I had a master's degree in accounting. Should be no problem for us, right? Nope.

It's funny, I started keeping a short journal when we first got here so we could remember stuff once we got a computer and the internet or some kind of communication link with the outside world. After a while I stopped. The main reason was - it was extremely boring. Every day was the same. We would wake up and hit the job market.

We believed when we first got here that all the jobs would be at the big hotels. So we drove around to the Four Seasons, the Prince, the Fairmont, etc. It turns out this is a horrible place to start looking for a job when you need one. The interview process is insanely long - about 3 or 4 weeks at least. First you meet with the pre-interviewer, then the department manager, then their manager, then theirs. And inbetween each interview is a week at least. Most of the time you have no idea what kind of chance you have at getting the job because of the "don't call us, we'll call you" policies.

So really the first few weeks were spent dressing up, handing out resumes, going to interviews, checking the job posting boards, and hitting the beach whenever we got sick of it all. It was rough. Christin got desperate a couple times and worked a few days doing room service in one of the big hotels, and even a few nights working night shift at Denny's (which is a story in and of itself). She eventually found out that all the starting jobs are at the smaller spas and even doing some out-call work (where people call from their hotels and you take the massage to them) which Christin had no idea even existed back on the mainland. She's really happy doing that sort of work now and so things have mellowed out for her as far as a job goes.

Steve eventually got a job at the Fairmont as a bellman, but that only lasted a couple weeks. He's been back in Utah at the Ponderosa for the last couple months and we're anxious for him to come back to Maui.

So that leaves me. I had a couple of job offers the first 2 days we were here. But the only jobs I could get were doing taxes. So I accepted both jobs thinking I could swing both at the same time (I must have been delirious). It was nice knowing I had a job lined up, but the tax season really doesn't start until sometime in February. It got hard towards the end of January because money was tight, but eventually I started working and things turned out better than I could have imagined. (The pictures are of where I worked, by the way. Yeah, it's an old gas station and barn. It's a story for another day but I promise I'll tell it. Oh, and if you look really close in the first picture you can see my boss, Harold, in his office in the center of the picture.)

I guess I could sit here and type forever, but who would read it? So now that I'm temporarily retired (sounds better than unemployed, yeah?) I have lots of free time to write down some of our experiences here. Anyway, I'll sign off for now.