Eric quit his job a few weeks ago, and Friday was his last day. This marks, without exaggeration, the end of an era of oppression around here. He worked for a large hedge fund with a slaveshop mentality, most recently imposing mandatory 14 hour days, 6 day weeks (“but you’d better not complain if it’s both weekend days, you’re damn lucky you have a job”) while cutting health benefits and compensation. This hedge fund has $20 Billion under management, not exactly working under a shoestring budget, so I find it hard for them to justify working their people to the bone and using the current economic situation as a whip.

Eric starts next week at a family friendly company, and we are both excited about his prospects there. But most importantly, he’ll be able to be home, mind and body, for normal chunks of time.

The past week or so has been a nice respite for me as well. Eric has been relishing the time he now gets to spend with EJ, which means I no longer bear the full brunt of holding him all the time. As you can imagine, this has been a win-win-win situation.

I haven’t really been knitting, but I did use my EJ-free arms to scrounge around in the closet and find my sewing machine. My first order of business was the make a supersized swaddle blanket – no more wussy swaddles for us. My next order of business is a skirt, naturally. (The Skirt, after all, is the Scarf of sewing).

In preparation for all this, I picked up Sew U by Wendy of Built by Wendy, and I must say, it is simply excellent. It is the first sewing book I’ve ever seen that has the Elizabeth Zimmermann mentality of empowering the knitter (seamstress?) to use common sense and boldly customize projects.

Love. It.

I also found a refurbished serger on sale at Overstock dot com and it arrived yesterday. (By the way, it’s like the Fates came together and determined it’s time for me to get my sew on. Don’t you think?) I can’t wait to unpack it and give it a whirl, which brings me to the question of why am I still working on this post?

There’s a serger waiting to be unpacked. I’ve been keeping an eye on sergers for 3 years now, and finally found a good one at a great price. I’m gonna get on that, right now.

(She’s lonely, and the only cure is more serger.)

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