This week I'll be mostly falling between the cracks

"That which does not kill us
makes us stronger"
- Friedrich Nietzsche

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.  Yeah right:

If you like a bit of risk, and you embrace change, then I can heartily recommend moving house or changing your job - say - once or twice a year.  It doesn't come without its problems though.  I find it takes around 6 months to recover financially from moving house.  It takes about 2 months to get back on track after changing job, plus another month for every week that I'm 'between clients' (what you safe non-risk-takers would call 'out of work').

This is all fine, of course, if you can get ahead of the game a bit:

But when you take a week off to pack up into storage, followed by a week on holiday, followed by a month living out of a suitcase, followed by a couple of days to move into a house in another country, followed by a few more weeks of work, followed by the end of a contract, followed by being asked to move out of the house you just moved into, followed by a gap of a couple of weeks 'between clients', followed by ... well, you get the point.

Then there's the problem of getting the timing right:

When it turns out that Jersey States don't provide grants for students until they've been resident on the island for 5 years, it might seem to make sense to move back to the UK a bit sharpish.  Except that it also turns out that UK student loans are not provided to any student who has been resident outside the EU during the last 3 years.  So our eldest nipper is not eligible for any kind of financial assistance in the year when university tuition fees have doubled.

And there are issues that present themselves when you do these things simultaneously:

For example, try moving house and getting your proof of income checked at the same point that you are 'between clients' and there is technically no income to provide proof of.  It's about as easy as filing a pre-contract check and trying to provide proof of address when you've only been at that address for a couple of weeks and haven't yet been sent any utility bills with your name on.

So basically I'm financially and technically (and mentally) tied up in knots, and the untying process is painstakingly slow.  Or, as I've been told more than once on the phone by various referencing agencies in the last few days, I'm caught between two stools.  Or, as has also been pointed out this week, I'm falling between the cracks.

Still, that which does not kill us makes us stronger.  Right?