Thanks everyone. Many times we have felt we were the only ones.

We call everything leading up to the Great Crash a perfect storm. It started in summer 2007 with me losing my hearing in my left ear and having to have major surgery. Because of this, I put my engineering degree on hold and took a sabbatical from teaching to heal. By the time I was ready to pick up where I had left off, business was dropping quickly (to the tune of $1.3 million dollars, according to our accountant) so I thought it best to help try to keep the business afloat. Then our 16 year old son developed a pericardial effusion and was in and out of the CVICU in the children's hospital for 4 months. By the time he recovered, we could see the writing on the wall. I tried going back to teaching, but my program was cut due to budget issues - elective classes are considered nonessential in spite of the fact many required multiple disciplines. So teaching was out. My husband and I both sent out hundreds....literally hundreds of resumes. Meanwhile, we were slowly selling off anything and everything we could that had any value. One tough lesson we learned was that you can only expect to get 10% out of the dollar. We even sold off our wedding rings. By the time we left Florida, all we had left was the clothes on our backs, a couple of suitcases, and family pictures and keepsakes (only the ones we couldn't sell, though).

We both found part time work and took the bus to and from. It really sucks when you have to work a whole hour just to pay for the bus fare to get there. I remember one day walking past a Hallmark store on my way home from the bus stop and seeing in the window a refrigerator magnet that simply read, "When you're going through hell...keep going. ~ Winston Churchill" I didn't have the money to buy the magnet, but I remembered what it said and we kept going. We have come out the other side completely different people. I would love to have my old life back. I'd be lying if I said otherwise, but things are so much simpler now, and that's definitely not a bad thing.

We have even learned to laugh at the boxes and piles of subpoenas, unpaid bills, and nastygrams. At some point it all gets so ridiculous and you realize there's nothing you can do except ignore it, walk away and start over. After a while, they all go away, believe it or not.