Well, I still don’t have a job. Technically. Although it’s sadly true that I haven’t been hired for a full-time position, my freelance business is – finally, thankfully, wonderfully – becoming another story.

I completed three websites in June. I photographed a house. I gained two new clients. One is a Microsoft vendor. While I’m not nearly at the income I had last year, it feels SO DARN GOOD to be turning out projects. And yeah, getting paid for it is freaking awesome too.

Today, I met with a new recruiter. It’s possible there’s another, bigger website on the horizon. Just possible. But before getting too excited about THAT, today I’ve been thinking about the fact any of these things are happening to me at all. And I’m really grateful, because if I were me and unemployed just 100 years ago:

• I would be an average housewife.

• All right, a less-than-average housewife. I can’t sew a pillowcase, let alone my own clothes.

• I also have a problem keeping plants alive. I’m thinking that’s important considering the ones that make, oh, say, FOOD.

• Forget about milking a cow. No seriously. FORGET IT.

• My house would be spotless, though. Boredom mixed with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) is like bleach for the soul. Wait. When was Clorox invented? There might be a flaw in this plan.

• I’d probably have an education, but I wouldn’t be allowed to use it.

• The only thing I’d be writing would be letters. Which would probably take about three and a half weeks to deliver and folks would still be wondering when I’m going to write. So, same as now.

• It’s a guaranteed bet no newspaper in the country would run my column. Crazy cat lady stories really don’t lend themselves to journalistic credibility.

• It wouldn’t matter what I thought about city issues, public servants or national politics. I wouldn’t have the right to vote.

• But somehow it’d be a huge dramatic deal to have an opinion on politics that say, caused me to throw forks at the TV and call the president a fathead on a regular basis. You know, detrimental to my husband’s image (and therefore my marriage) and all.

• I’d shortly be the divorced, unemployed, unskilled crazy cat lady living in a shanty town down by the river eating hobo soup out of my shoe.

• Kids would bring me wooden coins and rubber balloons and call me Mama SmackyGums

• I’d tell them crazy tales about things like magic mold, and 10 years later one of them would invent penicillin and make a bagillion dollars.

Yeah. Life today is pretty great.