April Fools Exile

As this April fool’s day comes up, it has been two years since any life changing events have happened so it is time to take matters into my own hands. With April fool’s day falling on a Sunday, I will have to make my exile official on Monday but such is life… I have been living in Texas and commuting back to my beloved Louisiana almost every weekend to see my family and take care of our home place. With all the preparation to ready the house for sale and the move to Texas once my youngest son graduates high school, I have decided to move my residency to Texas. While Texas pride runs deep and I am proud of the history that Brazoria County has with the birth of Texas, it is not my beloved Louisiana. I could have moved my residency over several years ago and since Texas doesn’t have an income tax there were financial benefits to such a move but it felt like betrayal.

While my job may have made the move to Texas a reality, my heart will always be in Louisiana and once I retire so will my bones!

April Fools and the State of My Economy

The economy seems to have little to do with April Fool’s day unless you are a pundit which I generally don’t consider myself but in January of 2009 I found myself in the office of Dow Chemical’s Plaquemine HR director getting the same new as the other colleagues in my department. We were getting the news that our department was being shut down and our services were no longer needed, we were being laid off. All the members of my group were 30+ year employees and one had planned to retire anyway so it wasn’t like we were going to be homeless and hungry but it was still quite a blow. We had about 2 ½ months to wrap everything up, ship off the good stuff and say our goodbyes. Our last official day of work was March 31, making April Fool’s day my first official day of retirement. At 48 I was too young to retire for real but I did decide I would do a few things for myself. A little adventure always makes me feel better. I spend a few days with a colleague who came over from The Netherlands for my retirement party and then I took a bike tour of Louisiana by starting at one end of LA1 on the Texas / Arkansas border and cycling to Grand Isle. When I got home I started looking for a job. The economy was in the tank so jobs were few and far between but I managed to find a part-time work in my field, working for an engineering company with some of the work back at Dow. Towards the end of 2009 my old manager sent word that they were going to post my old job in Freeport TX (where I was scheduled to move the first quarter of 2010) and would like me to consider applying for the job. I was hired and reported to work; you guessed it April 1 of 2010.

Since going back to Dow, I have seen spending pick up and think that unless the economy hits another speed bump that we should be coming out of this mess we have been in. We are seeing contractors jumping from one company to another for a little bump in their hourly wage and the groups I work with having money to spend on new projects. I expect we will see the economy on the gulf coast start getting stronger as the weather gets better.