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Let's do a little recap to catch you up to date. For those of you just joining me, I spent my summer in Montana filling in as the sous chef for an Italian restaurant. It happened quite by accident: My first weekend home, I called a friend I know from NYC (who happens to be from the next town over in MT) asking if he wanted to get a beer. The short of his response: I'M WORKING, AND CAN YOU? I was there all summer, tossing pasta, reviewing mediocre restaurants, drinking more beer than I thought it was physically possible to consume.

Then I came home to find myself unable to gain employment. This makes no sense to me, as I am smart and able-bodied, and have twice as much experience as your average recent CIA grad but half the ego. Right about there I stopped food blogging; without a job in food, I had nothing to write about. New Jersey did not see my family emergency(s) as a valid reason to retreat west for mental vacation, and thus they chose (repeatedly) not to grant me benefits of any kind. No money meant no eating out meant no restaurant reviews. I eked through my savings, teetering multiple times on the edge of the very breakdown I left Jersey to avoid. This went on for two months.

Enter the "hobby". Before I went west (Go west, young man!) I started modeling. It started as a way to explore my exhibitionism and be pretty and not feel as though fryer grease was my daily application of foundation. Well, I found I'm pretty good at it. Not only that, I discovered I'm a very popular model because I have boobs and a butt and a space between them that looks like a waist. These things are very rare on your average model, have you noticed? So while my modeling was, in the beginning, not profitable, I counted it as one of the irons in the fire that might one day heat up enough for me to poke something.

One day in November an iron got hot. A photographer with whom I had shot in September remembered my saying I was a chef. (While I was home I had business cards made emblazoned with this fact, as well as the name of my phantom restaurant, "Jossie", in the hopes handing them out would keep me focused on opening such a place.) He asked me to cater a party for a friend. The first party turned into a second. Then I catered Thanksgiving dinner. Which turned into catering New Year's Eve. Which turned into catering a film shoot. Folks, I think I own a catering company.

I poked into the modeling profession, also, and now about a third of my weekly hours are spent getting paid to sit in front of classrooms full of art students. I have a respectable job where "naked" is the uniform! (You can read all about it on my other blog, "Model-logue": http://model-logue.blogspot.com)

Three things about my last six months amaze me: 1) even under delay and duress, hard work and determination pay off; 2) when you have nothing else, you start to treasure that roof over your head; and 3) my mom was right when she said "everything will work out in the end". Check in on me next week! Who knows what could happen between now and then.