Opening Another Gate

My husband was doing very well as an independant contractor welding on a large project in our area.  He was making more money than he'd ever made as a ranch manager.  Way more money.  The project was also supposed to last awhile so there was a certain sense of financial security, for me at least.  For my husband there is never enough financial security.  Just knowing the job would indeed end in the next year made him cautious enough that we lived like it was  our last paycheck.  Thank goodness.  If it had been me making that much money, I would have bought every known appliance we needed, stockpiled clothes on sale, bought a new car, and so on....

He never really settled in to his new identity off the ranch.  The new job gave him more time to be on his family's ranch, which was also a full time job, but we didn't live there.  When the family ranch was split after his grandfathers death, his parents were able to keep their part but the other part of the ranch was sold.

 The part sold was the headquarters which had the house on it and the part his parents retained did not have a house so there is no place to live and that is why we live in town.  So even though he drove out to the ranch all the time, it wasn't the same as living there.
 
He likes to know what's coming, when it's coming and how much it's going to be.  Being an independant contractor provides none of those scenarios. He would have made a great businessman because he's very talented at managing tasks, keeps his word, and he's extremely ethical.  But I also knew that he would never be at ease and he would be in a constant state of worrying when the next job would end.

In April he received a call from a man who owned a large ranch in the area.  I knew the man because he actually owned the resort I mentioned in earlier posts.  He was a successful businessman and owned land in the area along time.  He offered my husband a ranch job of a lifetime.  My husband was thrilled to be offered the opportunity, but it wasn't an easy decision.  He never makes hasty decisions so he thought about it for days.

When we first moved to town I decided that if the opportunity arose that I would probably not want to live so remotely again.  I'd like to live 10-15 miles out of town maybe, but not drive an hour again.  I had become accustomed in a short time to buying groceries and getting home before the ice cream melted, or frozen meat for that matter.  I liked walking out to get the mail and not having to drive an hour to receive a package.  I'd bonded with the UPS guy.  And for the first time in years, we had people deliver pizza.  Real pizza.  (If you can call what we have here real pizza.)

On the other hand, writing out checks every month for the mortgage, the water, the electricity, cable, taxes, and insurance made me realized that it actually all evens out.  Typically, when you run a ranch all of those things come with the package.  Plus, we would be moving in to a very new house, which never happens on ranches, at least not in my experience.  It didn't hurt that the ranch was beautiful.  It's hard to go from having mountain vistas as your view to having a backyard fence.    The quality of life that we'd led on the ranch way outweighed the threat of ice cream melting in my back seat on the way home from the store.  And I can't eat pizza much anyway.



So he took the job and I instantly saw a sense of relief come over him.  He would again be doing what he's always done, something he really takes pride in and is good at.  Money is not the most important thing to him, saving money might be, but making large amounts of it isn't.  He would again be dealing with cattle and deer, not clients.  And as a family we'd make the decision to go back to homeschooling and leave the chaos of both parents working behind us.