All the news that’s fit to print

Today, class, I will cover the following topics:

Seed catalogs
Job application
Mortgage

Seed catalogs: I received all of my favorite seed catalogs by early January and have already gone through them all to decide what I’m getting. My real find this year was the Seed Savers Exchange catalog, which a fed tipped me off to.

SSE is a network of people all over the world that grow hard to find things, save the seeds, then offer them up in a HUGE catalog every year to other people in the group. With the rate the food industry is going, everything offered in the grocery store is a hybrid now, or a clone, or something. SSE keeps the old seed varieties viable and available, which is a really big deal.

I’m going to be joining the group and will be purchasing from them this year: ‘Triamble’ squash , ‘Guatemala Blue Banana’ squash , ‘Prescott Fond Blanc’ melon , ‘Boothby’s Blonde’ cucumber , ‘Galeux d’Eysines’ squash , and Tom Thumb pea . I’ll also get ‘Aunt Ruby’s German Green’ tomato , unless I can find seedlings somewhere else.

From Burpee I’m getting ‘Walla Walla’ onions and ‘Kentucky Wonder’ pole beans .

From John Scheeper’s Kitchen Catalog I’m getting ‘Roc d’Or’ yellow bush beans , ‘Adelaide Baby’ and 'Royal Chanetay’ carrots , ‘Runaway’ arugala , ‘French Gray’ shallots , ‘Panache’ parsnips , and ‘Milano Black’ zucchini .

I already have lettuce, broccoli, kale, sugar snap peas and spinach seed. A few things I’ll have to start indoors, which I’ve had so-so luck with in the past.

Job application: a fed job recently came open on campus, and I’m planning on applying for it. It coincides with another round of BS happening here at my workplace, and it is just time to try again.

The position is a Program Support Assistant with the distance learning section of the Emergency Management Institute. It is not a secretary, but office work is the main thing. The pay range is what I get now up to $10,000 more, but being a fed job the benefits package is stellar.

The application materials are due 2/6, a week from Thursday, and I have a 4-day weekend during which I’m going to try to get my KSAs done and get a rough draft of my federal resume (many pages) done, and/or possibly the online application.

Matt and I talked about this job at length, because I’m just not sure a fed job is right for me. There are trainings, certain things that as a fed you cannot do, and being FEMA, this job would be on the emergency deployment list. This means that if my name is up when a disaster strikes I could be deployed to said disaster to help out. This could be very interesting in some aspects, but very…messy in others. And I don’t mean messy as in flooding. I mean messy as in 9/11 or Katrina.

When I was a kid, my mother talked at length about the difference between a ‘job’ and a ‘career.’ Many women, she said, just have ‘jobs’ so they can have kids, putting any hopes of a ‘career’ on the back burner, then find it is too late when they go back to it. The magic of ‘career’ was pushed at me.

I consider my current job a ‘job.’ I don’t want to work in libraries the rest of my life, I dislike librarians quite a bit, and I’m in a dead end job (unless I went back for my MLS *and* one of the current librarians left *and* assuming they’d hire me for that position). It pays the bills, that’s all.

This other job got me to thinking, though. Do I want to make a career out of being a fed? Is emergency management the field for me? Resounding ‘no.’ But is it a good job? Yes. It will pay the bills, and give me a lot more stability than I have now in my contractor’s job. And if I stick with a fed job for a certain number of years, I will have a pension, healthcare, life insurance and long-term care insurance for the rest of my life. That would be starting as early as age 57. Not bad at all. Much better than what I’d have now, which is whatever I can stuff into my 401(k) between now and when I get to retire, which would NOT be age 57.

So, what do I want for a career? I thought about the benefits of both ‘job’ and ‘career’ and decided something: I’d much rather have a life. I want something to pay the bills, and I want to have a life. I want to garden, travel, make jewelry. I want to play with the dog. I want to work on the house. I want to read, watch movies, eat good food out and cook good food in. I don’t want to worry about a career.

Mortgage: when the Fed cut the interest rate last week, I did a quick calculator search for mortgage rates and discovered that, despite the fact that the rate cut in question had nothing to do with 30yr fixed mortgages, we could refinance the mortgage, plus get out a chunk of money from our equity to do some building an still only be paying $20 more than what we’re paying now.

Great deal, so I called our current mortgage company, Countrywide. Yes, the one that has been going through hell with this subprime mortgage fiasco and was recently bought out by Bank of America. Hey, they’ve been doing well by us, we like them, might as well keep our money there. Besides, we don’t have to produce our bank statements, paystubs, etc etc because we already are connected with them.

So, we’ve got the ball rolling, we’ve got a great rate locked in (5.5%), and as long as our house appraises at a specific number we’re good to go. Now we’re just hoping and praying that our house appraises at that magic number, or else we’re going to have to renegotiate the whole damn thing.