No stress

I got a job.
A good one.
Which pays a decent amount of money, on regular times.
And they have all kinds of special things for employees: gardening, free sports, an enormous amount of holiday, courses you can attend, money to get your bike fixed.
This time, they even have a pension fund :)
And it is only about 15 minutes cycling from my house.
I can ride along every morning with my boyfriend. And every evening back together again.
And my co workers are really nice. And it seems the work is going to be pretty interesting. With all kinds of intelligent people.
And the committee was unanimous in their decision for me. Out of 30 applicants, they all wanted me.....

Yesterday we went out to the best restaurant we could think of to celebrate.
They even had a service to bring you home in your own car.
From now on we are going to try and eat mostly biological.
And I guess the first thing I did was order a pair of shoes on the internet.

I feel so completely relieved. I can finally let go of all the stress about not being able to pay the bills in December.
I can let go of the being on a tight budget. I can go and look for another house in a decent neighborhood. We can actually go on a holiday.

We can make plans again. My life is no longer on hold.

Routines

When searching for jobs, you develop routines. When they haven't called back when they said they would, the most likely scenario is, you're not the candidate of choice.
When you apply for a job where they ask for somebody experienced, most of the time it means they are not. When they are surprised I start talking about a strategic plan, you know clearly the other applicants haven't and most likely the interviewer has never thought about it either. In my world that's a red flag :)
But some organizations defy all the rules. No we haven't called you back. Because... well various reasons.... but still you made the cut.
I started today a little sad. It had taken them quite some time to get back to me. So I applied rule nr 1... They are writing a nice no thank you letter. So I called them.
And turned out.. they had another reason it was still in the pipelines... But i got through to the second round. At least I am the second best candidate for the job :)
At this moment I am just curious about my opponent...What did he or she bring to the table to make it this far?
Well at least I know they liked me and thought I was qualified for the job.
And for a change I am "the better candidate"... Celebrating now :)