I'm feeling a bit better this morning, but I'm not sure how the day will go. I'm a little more settled, shut off the early alarm and slept more, actually getting a full 8 hours of sleep. Well, 7 hr. 55 minutes, but I'll count that as 8 hr. Sleep helps my moods so much.

My husband came home from work more optimistic yesterday, and that helped me a lot too. At this point, we still do have options. There are people he can contact to ask about better paying jobs, one person who said at a recent wedding my husband attended that he needs to hire a person to do data analysis for his business. He said it as an off-hand comment, but my husband said he does seem to have money & a good company, and my husband can totally do data analysis. The couple that got married are coming here to do role-playing games with miniatures with my husband this evening (one of hubby HUGE hobbies). It can be costly, but my husband has not spent much money on this in years. He has been molding his own miniatures for the games and painting them, and the cost for that is not beyond the realm of a person having a hobby like painting. Anyway, he plans to ask the couple if that guy was serious; they actually live with him in his very large house, where much role playing goes on. It would really be good if hubby to visit them more often because he needs to unwind.

He knows someone from his time at a nanofab facility who was needing to hire an electron microscope tech for the Texas area. It would mean a lot of traveling and over night stays but would pay better. My husband can totally do that too. I do not exaggerate when I say he is brilliant and has taught himself so much, highly advanced math, complex physics, CAD, programming in many computer languages (if it exists, he can easily learn it if need be), 3D printing, laser cutting, and then he is very artistic too. Making miniatures is just the tip of the iceberg for him. He even joined an area blacksmithing group from Houston - another hobby (the annual cost is only $25), they provide everything else and has made so many good looking projects, and he hasn't even done that for a year yet. I could go on. The only thing he is not good at is spelling. It might be a mild form of dyslexia, but he can read books just fine and enjoys reading history and historical fiction as well as sci-fi.

There are a couple of other contacts he has. If no job emerges, he said it is better we face the problem now than kick it down the road a month or 2 and disrupting everything and still not getting by, such as selling the house and moving into someplace cheaper, or renting it if need be. There are places we can live with family, my parents for example although my dad drives him crazy, my grandmother though her house is tiny & she is in her mid-80s (only this past year has her health diminished), but I could help her with her house, cooking, feeding her chickens, taking care of her plants. I could do that even if living with my parents. My parents do own an 80 acre farm land area passed down from my father, but they are barely making it themselves, have 0 retirement; selling the farm is there retirement. My dad is self-employed and 64 already, and business has gone down. There is a very rundown house they rent on the farm. Needs tons of work done on it, but it's a possibility, and it has survived many hurricanes & tropical storms, so that is to it's benefit. Failing that, should we sell or rent our house, maybe we could afford a mobile home, which my parents would let us put on the property right at any time as they don't need to sell it just yet, and it could be sold with 1 acre less. There is oil on the property but too deep yet to get to for the the cost. Oil companies have gone out and surveyed it, paid my grandmother (before she passed) very well to search for it.

One of my sisters owns a giant house in Plano. She could not help us financially, but there is space that we could have 1 large room there, her guest room, and we would be in a house with my 2 nephews.

There are a lot of teaching jobs in a nearby school district as Houston sprawl is spreading out towards that area more & more & family farms are breaking up. Or he could probably make some money (not great) working for the husband of one of my aunts (my dad's sister) whose husband does gigantic cotton farming, and he is a good guy.

So we wouldn't go homeless.

My mood is still a little up now though. Having my husband go through these options at least make me feel a little better. Especially if we moved near my parents, my daughter would go to the same school district I did (growing now though from being a small school), but it is an excellent school district, one of the best in the state. So there is that too.