"So, why are you leaving us?" she asked.

"Well, I just got an offer on my book proposal!" This was also the point at which I expected to ride home on a unicorn via a rainbow, because that is another thing that only happens in dreams. I was probably the happiest exit interview the HR lady ever had the pleasure of conducting. I smiled and laughed and bounced around happily in my seat before dancing back down to my desk to reread the email I had just gotten. Then I told my boss and my coworkers about the offer and they were happy for me, and slightly stunned, but I'm sure the "I'm quitting to pursue writing!" speech I'd given last week suddenly seemed a lot less flimsy.

So yes, I have been all sneaky-like and wrote a book proposal, which I sent to agents, and one of them liked it, so we joined forces and she suggested revisions, and I made them, and then the other agents at her agency suggested more revisions, so I made those too, and then she sent it out to publishers, and I waited, and then one of those editors liked it and offered me money to sit at home and write it, which means I can afford to buy food, which will make the experience all the better because writing is easier with chocolate pudding on hand.

I do not have a release date yet, but I would guess my book will come out in 2010, perhaps 2011. It's tentatively called Chocolate and Vicodin: And Other Failed Cures for the Headache that Wouldn't Go Away and you can pretty much guess what it is about. As the announcement in Publisher's Lunch said yesterday, "[Jennette Fulda] humorously explores the twisted maze of eastern and western medicine as she visits doctors, acupuncturists, and chiropractors, and ingests pills, pot, and obscene amounts of ice cream, all in search of the elusive cure for her chronic pain." It'll be released by Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. Look! They have a cute little kangaroo for a logo:

Big thanks to everyone who helped make this possible with their advice and support, especially the fabulous Miss Holly, Rachel, Jen, Erin, Wendy and Jennifer (who I don't have a link for). I did not simply skip into the lobby of the publishing house and pick up a book contract at the receptionist's desk. I'm truly grateful this deal happened and I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to write another memoir. Just because you write one book does not mean you necessarily get to write another. But really, if you're going to have a headache for over a year, you may as well get a book deal out of it. There was a TON of work that went into making this happen, and the process only reminded me of how much toil and trouble goes into putting out those bound sets of pages.

I also wanted to thank you, my readers, for sending me crazy emails. They really made the proposal pop. Don't worry, I won't include your email addresses.

Copyright Jennette Fulda. Read more at PastaQueen

I am so grateful for having that job for the past 18 months. It gave me respectable health insurance benefits during a period of medical distress. It paid well enough for me to cover my medical bills while also saving up money for this leap. I got to work in an office where my coworkers genuinely enjoyed each other's company (most of the time). I learned a lot about web design and how corporate politics work (or don't work). I benefited a lot from that job, but it was time to go and there was no use in denying it.

At this point you may be hollering at your screen, "PastaQueen, have you not seen the eleventy billion reports about the economy?! Do you not know that 9.7% of the population does not have employment?! How can you possibly dare to quit your job? Have you been drinking the crazy juice?!" Why, yes I have, and mmmmm is it tasty!

If you have read this blog for more than 5 seconds, you will know I almost never do anything without a plan, a couple spreadsheets and detailed graphs. I have looked at my budget and my finances. I have written a business plan with concrete goals, dates, and numbers. I have paid off all my debts, save for a student loan which has such a low interest rate that it basically accounts for the rate of inflation. I have saved up 6 months of living expenses. I have cut expenses by moving to a new apartment.

Most importantly, I have mined several freelancer friends for advice. They've told me about the ungodly amount of work it is. They've told me how scary it is to have no work one month and then too much work the next. They've told me that I will not be able to find decent, affordable health insurance. They've let me know that if I do not socialize and stick to a schedule I will find myself "pantsless at 3pm, eating peanut butter out of a jar and staring at the television blankly." They've told me that this is the worse they have ever seen the business during their 10 years experience. They have told me all these things and still I have been thinking, "Sign me up!" I suppose that means this is a calling, though personally I wish I'd been called to be a rich lawyer or doctor instead of a poor writer/web designer.

This wisp of this a dream appeared in the back of my mind a couple years ago, and back in August of 2008 I wrote it down on paper and made it my secret goal, which drove many of you crazy. Sorry, I wasn't looking for a boyfriend like many of you guessed, though a husband with health insurance would be fabulous to have right now.

Yesterday I drank a big beer at my going-away party and this morning I slept until 9:30am and now I am officially working for myself. We are three hours into it and it is going well so far. As I said, I have 6 months of savings, plus some projects lined up which will earn at least another 6 months of income. I've been building up freelance web design clients on the side and have officially launched my blog design company, Make My Blog Pretty. If you are in need of web design services, please check it out. I will be at the BlogHer Conference in two weeks, handing out business cards and hopefully generating more business. I am also looking for writing gigs that will bring in the cash, so if you know any of those, feel free to contact me. I promise to keep you updated about any other projects I contribute to in the future.

I also want to say, "Thank you." If I didn't have this blog which led to that book, and if I didn't have all the support you guys have given me, I don't know if I would have the confidence to do this. I believe in myself. I'm betting on myself. Five years ago I wouldn't have done that. Sometimes people say weight loss is silly or vain, but losing all that weight taught me what it was like to make a dream come true. It taught me that absurdly great goals can be achieved. It's made me the type of person who will run off to Europe because she feels like it and who will quit her job because she wants to do something else with her life.

I am relieved to finally be here. There was a day back in April when I sat down in front of my computer and looked at my to-do list which included:

• Work at full-time job
• Plan trip to Europe
• Find cheaper place to live
• Work on a zillion freelance projects
• Exercise and eat well
• Maintain blog
• Make business plan for freelancing

As I reviewed everything I had to do in those next few months, I thought I might collapse on my mouse pad and be brought to the hospital for exhaustion, like Mariah Carey or Jay Leno. "I have taken on far, far, too much," I thought. But there was no stopping it. I couldn't place anything on hold. Somehow I soldiered through and here I am on the other side, still with many things to do, but significantly less stressed about it all. If I have seemed a bit distracted lately, or somewhat off my game, that is why. I hope to pay more attention to the blog now that I'm not running off in a billion directions every day.

Now I am three hours and 15 minutes into my new career, and things are still going well, though I'm getting a bit hungry and will go make myself lunch. I hope I don't start eating everything in the kitchen now that I'm working from home.

On the down side, I read an article announcing that tomorrow is the First Annual Freelancers Put On Your Pants Day. Sheesh, I'll only be one day into my new career by then and already they are setting such high demands!

Copyright Jennette Fulda. Read more at PastaQueen

"Did you hear about Michael Jackson?" my aunt Donna asked me. I mumbled, "Yeah," because properly attaching my beautiful, blue bike to the bicycle rack on her car seemed more important than the death of a pop star. Michael Jackson was already dead, after all, but if I didn't figure out these straps and plastic doohickeys, my dear sweet Bluebell might die too, underneath the wheels of an SUV not leaving enough following distance. (Three seconds, people! Remember that when you're renewing your license.)

Little did I know that THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD EVER had just died!!!

Yes, not even Ronald Reagan's passing garnered as much publicity and attention as the death of Michael Jackson, and it certainly didn't spur a tribute concert at the Staples Center, complete with elephants. I just wrote a big long paragraph acknowledging all of his accomplishments as a way to fend off any nasty comments from his fans, but then I deleted it because I just don't care. I know the guy was famous and influential and talented and eccentric, and I know if you were a fan you'd be really sad now and that's perfectly ok, but WHAT THE BEJEEBUZ, people?! Could we just shut up about him already?

I turn on Good Morning America and they're talking about his kids. I pull up MSNBC in my web browser and they're writing about his will. I turn on the nightly news and there's paparazzi footage of his ex-wife. I listen to my podcasts (that have NOTHING to do with music) and they're playing his songs between breaks. I listen to NPR on the way home and they're talking about his tribute concert. When I go to the bathroom, I half expect to see Bubbles the chimp using the cat's litter box because Michael Jackson has infiltrated every media channel in my life and I just want it to stop. STOP THE MADNESS, PLEASE!!!

As a way to fully purge the man from my life, let me share my one and only Michael Jackson anecdote. In fourth grade, we had one hour a week assigned to visit the computer lab. We'd all line up in a row to march down the hallway to play Oregon Trail and Number Munchers and Odell Lake or program the turtle in LOGO to spell bad words. Our teacher issued everyone folders to keep our worksheets in. She had gotten them free somehow since teachers never have enough money for supplies. I didn't know who the guy on the folder was at the time, nor did I care, but I really wish I had a photo of the 20 members of my 4th grade class walking down the hall in a single file line holding identical Michael Jackson "Thriller" folders. Needless to say, the pedophilia charges had not yet surfaced at that point, otherwise I bet we would have had to buy our own folders.

Copyright Jennette Fulda. Read more at PastaQueen

Lately, I have been working to clear my inbox every night. This doesn't mean I've necessarily answered every message, but I have at least archived or sorted what has been sent to me. I have folders labeled "To do" and "Respond to." This saves me time because I am no longer reading and re-reading and reading again the messages in my inbox and telling myself "I need to reply to that" and "Still haven't replied to that" and "I really need to do that thing that person is asking about." It's less repetitive. My mind gets out of a recursive loop.

Clearing my inbox also makes me act on messages I'm avoiding, so I get more done. I've also started replying to some messages right away, even if that's only a minute or two after the sender sent them. I used to hate doing that since I thought it was freaky to appear glued to your email, but now that everyone has a Blackberry or iPhone, it seems more normal to always be cuddled up to your inbox. It also helps clear mental space because an email is taken care of right away instead of taking up room in my inbox and my mind.

Merlin Mann wrote some articles about the concept of Inbox Zero, and after I read them recently I was happy to realize I was already doing most of what he recommends. I am fortunate that I'm not getting hundreds of emails a day, but I do get a significant amount. The only tip by Mann that I'm loathe to adopt is the habit of only checking email a few times a day. This is supposed to make you more efficient because you are not constantly distracted by pings of messages arriving one by one. However, I sort of like being distracted from my day job by little messages every hour. Also, being a web designer, sometimes emergencies do arise with servers or blogs which I need to be able to attend to right away. If I only checked my email occasionally I might miss something important. That said, I was perfectly ok with checking email only once a day when I was on vacation.

What does your inbox look like? Anyone else ever feel overwhelmed by the glut of messages?

Copyright Jennette Fulda. Read more at PastaQueen

My new apartment has a back porch which faces the back of another row of apartments in the complex, divided by a stretch of grass which probably has a proper name defined in dictionaries, but I don't know it. This means I basically have a back yard now, a back yard that people traipse through as they please, usually with their dogs or baseball bats or Gameboys. I grew up in houses with yards and I remember school kids taking shortcuts past our statuary and I remember being a kid cutting through strangers' flower beds, but this was all many years ago. It is odd to have a yard again and to have people pop up and pop out of my line of sight suddenly, but it is just one new thing I'll have to adjust to, just as I am learning all the new sounds of the apartment, like the crunch of the ice maker and the dripping of the air conditioner and the thumps of our upstairs neighbors who sound like they are practicing for the International Clogging Championships.

Copyright Jennette Fulda. Read more at PastaQueen

It has been nice living on the second floor. I don't hear people scuttle around above me. I'm not distracted by people walking past my windows. But dear Jesus, all those benefits come at the horrible cost of having to move all my crap in small, box-sized portions, down a flight of stairs in the sun and 90-degree heat and then jog back up for another round of misery.

The moving dragged on forever and ever and ever. After moving all the large objects in a rental truck last Monday, I was left with all the remainder items to transport in car loads. Each time I'd look around the apartment and think, "Ok, this will fit in two car loads." Then I'd pack everything up and think, "Ok, I guess I actually have two more car loads after this." And then I'd drive and unload and come back and pack up some more and think, "Ok, this is the final two car loads for sure," but it was not. Eventually I wondered if I'd ever finish moving out at all, but finally, yesterday, I got almost all of my crap out of that apartment and just have to go back tonight to spackle some holes in the walls and turn in my keys.

So, if you are thinking of moving, imagine how much work you think it will be and then multiply that by 200% and then hit yourself in the arms and legs with a wooden spoon a few times to visualize all the bruises that will appear on your body after lugging boxes and lamps around, and then you might have a small sense of how much fricking work it is.

I resumed my Couch to 5K training on Saturday and was sort of worried I might not be able to do the run because I'd taken 5 days off to move things, but that was silliness. I did perfectly fine and felt good to be running instead of doing the equivalent of 15 flights of stairs. I've even lost a pound this week, despite eating a carton of ice cream, half a pepperoni pizza and an apple pie dessert pizza from Papa Johns. As I have learned from this experience and from my recent vacation, the secret to weight maintenance is that you can eat whatever crap you want as long as you work like a dog all day long. Construction workers may have tough jobs, but they must eat like I only dream I could.

Copyright Jennette Fulda. Read more at PastaQueen

When I was walking around my city in the following weeks, I looked at every single statue or fountain or old building and thought, If I were from Britain, I would have to snap a digital photo of that. As a rule, when I was overseas I took a picture of every piece of statuary or art or plain old engraved boulder, just because I was in a foreign country and those things looked like culture.

It is odd to think that my life is exotic to someone else, just as it must seem odd to foreigners that I find their lives exotic too. Everything that is familiar to me is odd to someone else.

Copyright Jennette Fulda. Read more at PastaQueen

As much as people's lives are changing, mine hasn't changed that much. Sure, my job is as secure as a lockbox sealed with chewing gum, and I moved to a cheaper apartment to cut my living costs, but otherwise I'm living the same life I've always led. Financially speaking this means I save money, sock cash in my retirement accounts, and spend less than I earn. Evidently I was a radical ahead of my time for doing all these things.

I feel genuinely sorry for the suffering this recession has caused, for people who are stuck in houses that have lost value, for people who can't make ends meet, and for the retirement plans that have been torpedoed because the stock market went KAPOW!! I know that many people have done all the right things, handled their money wisely, and have still been screwed over by life circumstances. That said, I'm happy that the recession is making some people handle their money in ways they should have been handling it all along. People are saving more, spending less, and watching their budgets like never before. It sometimes takes a disaster to make you do what you should have been doing, and I only say this is because in my early 20's I learned the hard way how to manage my money too, which means I went SPLAT! into debt.

By the time I graduated college, I had about $5000 in credit card debt. I'd used all my student loans, but I could still use my plastic! I carried a balance for 3 months before I started playing a game where I would sign up for a new credit card that gave me 0% interest for 9 months. Nine months later, I'd sign up for another one and move the money again. I would not recommend this as a good way to handle money, since I have no idea what it did to my FICO score, but it did save me lots of money in interest. I was also fortunate that I'd never missed a payment, so I was approved for these cards.

Have you ever played the board game LIFE? Wasn't that game a lot more fun before it resembled your actual life? Over the next year I was hit with "Pay $7000 for gallbladder surgery!" and then "You owe $1200 in dentist bills" and then "You transmission breaks! Pay $2000 for a rebuild." I kept chipping away at my debt, but something always came along to bump it up again.

After two or three years of steady payments, I finally paid the credit cards off, leaving my only debt in student loans and a car loan. The number on those credit card statements had felt like the number of pounds weighing on my back. It was burdensome to be beholden to the credit card companies and to not have enough in savings to cover unexpected emergencies. That's why I bought some books on personal finance and educated myself about IRAs, compound interest, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, money market accounts, and figured out which places I should put my money first and in what amounts. It was a lot of information, and could be very confusing, but I never, ever, ever wanted to be in debt like that again. So I took the time to learn it myself.

When I bought my car I carefully made a budget and determined how much money I could afford to pay each month on the loan and purchased a vehicle within that price range. When I moved to an apartment, I determined how much I could afford, or what other expenses I would have to cut if I decided to move to a more expensive location. It wasn't fun, but it was necessary, so I did it.

These days, I use a simple budget program (called SimpleD Budget in case you were going to ask) to enter my receipts into every day. (Or sometimes every 3-4 days if I'm feeling lazy.) I can then look at the numbers and the graphs and get a sense of what I'm spending and if I need to pull back in one area until the end of the month. I've tried using more complicated programs like Quicken or Microsoft Money, but they have so many features that I feel overwhelmed. I just want to track my variable spending, not every single asset I have.

There are also free online programs that will help you budget and analyze your spending, like Mint.com or Quicken Online. I have heard great thing about these sites, but I am too paranoid to give a web site all my financial passwords. I've worked as a web developer at several companies, and I know how insecure some online products actually are, so no thanks.

If you are looking for more information on personal finances, Suze Orman's books and shows are extremely helpful and are targeted at newbies and women. I read a book called Girls Just Want to Have Funds simply because I loved the title, which taught me a lot of basics. Sites like The Motley Fool have loads of information, and a good blog on how to manage money is Get Rich Slowly.

Even though the recession sucks, I hope it helps people learn how to manage their money better, just as my young and stupid years taught me to open a Roth IRA and start taking advantage of compound interest. Hopefully we'll all keep our good "cents" even when this recession is over.

Copyright Jennette Fulda. Read more at PastaQueen

My body is sore, and I'm glad I have a week of wiggle room in my Couch to 5K training, because I need to recuperate. Near the end of moving day, I bent over to pick something up and stretched my right calf a wee bit too far. Now it hurts to push off of that leg. Plus, my back begins to protest every time I pick up a heavy box. I'm just plain tuckered out.

The good news is that the cable man came yesterday afternoon and hooked everything up, surprising me with their efficiency of service. Well played, Comcast. Well played. I no longer have to lean against the far bedroom wall to steal wi-fi from my neighbor's unsecured network. The kitties are adjusting well, and now that they have more space perhaps they won't try to kill each other every single night, just on high holidays. I also ate pizza for the first time in a long time as dinner on moving day and felt absolutely no guilt because of all the exercise I'd done in the morning and afternoon. Yum, pepperoni and cheese never tasted so good.

Copyright Jennette Fulda. Read more at PastaQueen

I decided early on I did not want to haul lots of groceries out of my apartment after I'd gone to so much trouble lugging them from the grocery to the kitchen in the first place, which is why my fridge currently looks like this:

On the plus side, my grocery spending is below normal for the month because I haven't been buying much new stuff. However, I think I started eating my way through the cupboards a little too soon, and for the past few days I've been opening and closing doors searching for something to eat besides peanut butter and olive oil. I opened up the freezer to see three bags of frozen mixed veggies I probably bought before Barack Obama was president. I had the best intentions purchasing them, but whenever dinnertime came I would decide I wasn't really in the mood for veggies. Yesterday I finally thawed them and sautéed them in a pan with some olive oil and soy sauce, and DAMN, they were tasty! Who knew?

Last night the cats were blissfully ignorant of the trauma they will be experiencing soon. I have told them we're moving and that the new place has a screened in porch that they will love. Krupke just sat in the office chair, napping, and unmoved by the news. Meanwhile, Java Bean reminded me that the only thing a kitty loves more than a laser pointer is a room full of empty boxes.

Copyright Jennette Fulda. Read more at PastaQueen