Hello there my lovelies!

Sorry for the brief hiatus – I’m back home from Iraq now, and have been so busy having fun and catching up with people I haven’t had time to write any posts!

Let’s see, since getting home I’ve been to Latitude Festival with some old friends, I’ve seen the family and been to the zoo with the niblings. I’ve caught up with various friends who have recently had babies (so many! It’s a baby-fest!), and visited a lavender farm, which was lovely! Photos to follow shortly…

I’ve also been on a mini-break to France via Geneva for a friend’s wedding, which was FABULOUS and there are many pictures of all the fun that ensued…

I’ve had lots of drinks with friends, and gorged myself on wine and cheese and other goodies, and spent plenty of time lounging about resting, sleeping, swimming, internetting, snapping pictures of my cats to put on instagram, going to the cinema and making movie dates with friends in Australia (we pick a time and a movie and watch it together, despite being on separate continents – it’s fun!).

My forays into swimming went slightly awry when I had a fairly major wardrobe malfunction half-way through the backstroke – I wasn’t aware of it until I reached the end, when a kindly (and thankfully female) lifeguard leant down and said “Excuse me love, if you wouldn’t mind just popping yourself back in, that would be great.” Awkward!

But in general it’s all been rather lovely, and an EXCELLENT funemployment break! This weekend I’m off to catch up with another old friend, and then whizzing up to Northumbria for a few days with the family in a cottage somewhere, followed by a trip to Edinburgh to see another old mate. It’s all busy busy busy!

And in there somewhere I have also managed to tart up my CV and ping it around to my growing network of people, as well as apply for a bunch of jobs. It’s incredibly nice, for the first time ever, to be in a position where I don’t need to freak out and panic about where next month’s mortgage payment will come from, and what will happen if I don’t find a job – I have ACTUAL SAVINGS! It’s practically a miracle, (and definitely still a novelty!) and I’ll most likely burn through it all in a month of partying, but it’ll be fun!

In fact, I’m already in the middle of a job dilemma – I was actually offered/head-hunted for a post on Wednesday, which is a short-term post here in Oxford with an NGO consortium. The job itself is really interesting – organising learning events on cash and livelihoods in Nicaragua and Burkina Faso, and including trips to Madrid and Senegal too. So plenty of travel, interesting experience, and it’s only until December so I could bugger off again somewhere else after that if I wanted to. I am really very tempted by it, although it wasn’t what I had in mind – I was hoping to ping off somewhere exotic again soon, and much prefer being in the field and getting my hands dirty. Also my lovely lodgers only just moved in in April, and weren’t expecting me to move back in with them, so there’s that too….

Anyhow, my friend at work had just about sold me on the job, and they need an answer by Monday, so I was planning to say yes, but then today I got an email from another org who are considering me for a post in Sierra Leone, and would like to do an interview, and there’s another possible job in Nepal that has just popped up on the horizon.

Neither of these jobs are certain, and I’m completely unable to decide what to do. One the one hand, I feel like if I take the job in Oxford, something better will come up immediately and I’ll kick myself for not waiting longer. On the other hand, if I turn it down, sod’s law says I won’t get the other jobs either, and it’ll serve me right. Although I’m in a unique position of not actually needing a job immediately from the financial perspective, I’m also still very conscious of how awful unemployment was when I went through the last 3 times, and it’s very demoralising, so 2010 Steph (and 2007 Steph, and 2009 Steph) are yelling in my ear not to turn down a perfectly good job offer!

Ho hum, it’ll be a tough weekend of thinking about all this, but I’ll decide on something by Monday I’m sure…