What’s Your Part-Time Job?

The Mom Weekly Volume 117: November 4, 2025

You can read this, or any other previous Mom Weeklies, by going to the home page here.

Notes:

After I completed this, I realized that my part-time job is actually writing The Mom Weekly. It’s a joy and a privilege. And also related to my vocation of being your Mom, also a joy and a privilege!

Remember how much I love you,

Mom

What’s Your Part-Time Job?

As most of you know, we have a running joke with Dad about his love of reading, if not the entire, or maybe darn near close, the New York Times online edition. (Slight aside: We haven’t been able to get the paper delivered in some years, which is a tremendous relief to me, as we don’t need to recycle all the newspapers.)

Anyway, we started calling it his “part-time job,” especially on Sundays, and when we are the beneficiary of interesting commentary/curious travel/trendy recipes from Dad, we can say that it’s all due to the part-time job.

That got me thinking: everyone probably has this kind of “thing”—something that they enjoy, but they also feel the need to complete, that takes up a fair bit of time. It’s a fun thought experiment:

What’s your part-time job?

For awhile, I thought for me it could be the games that I like to complete—Wordle, Connections, Letroso, Spelling Bee, maybe some crosswords, the Linked Games line-up. But honestly, all of that doesn’t take very long—it’s more of a very freelance gig, rather than a true “job.” 

Perhaps taking care of the dogs? That takes more than a half-hour a day! And it does pay rewards in that the dogs are pretty attached to me and follow me around and are good cuddle buddies. And, like a break from a job, I truly enjoy my vacation from the dogs when I am traveling. So yes, taking care of the dogs is my part-time job.

My work coordinating points and miles travel among family members has become a part-time job, both in time and expertise. I would hazard to say that its “salary” or payoff is pretty high, if we consider some of the fun/comfortable travel we have been able to complete in recent years. So, I think I will stick to that part-time job.

Time for you: what is your part-time job? You’ll enjoy thinking about it, and if you don’t like your part-time job, what would you like to substitute it for something else?

Interesting/Notable: 

This YouTube video started playing when I was looking something up, and I watched every minute:

We turned a schoolhouse into our dream home.

Wow, what a crazy, incredibly involved project. Some of the items I remember doing when we first had our 1920s house. Yes, your Mom glazed windows and did a lot of other crazy stuff, because when you are younger, you think this is fun!

The spaces in this schoolhouse are very cool, actually, but so much work! I also don’t think that I would want to live in that big of a space. I wonder what their heating and cooling bills look like.