Welcome to Bob Peters 61's homepage.

Have you ever reached a point in life where you stop and take stock of where you're headed? Well, I recently have and saw a future that scared me worse than the only alternative I saw available.

So I resigned from a job that was taking a toll on my health in order to use my profit-sharing 401(k), less penalty, as a resettlement fund to move to a cooler climate, away from the Southern summer heat which is also taking a toll on my health. This was a frightening chance to take, embracing a brush with homelessness with only a few thousand dollars in the bank with which to re-enter the housing and job market in a new place. And doing so at the latest point in my life at which I can hope to start over again.

As someone who had struggled with cronic homelessness during my misspent youth, this was especially frightening to me, yet this experience also had let me know that it can be done, and what advantages I had then over my past situations. But not the disadvantages of the current economic climate at large vs. decades ago in my misspent youth.

As it turns out, I fell flat and ran out of money in the Puget Sound Area of Washington looking for employment and housing there.

It was a long, hard struggle. First to even get back to Nashville where I have friends, and where I knew there to be a more favorable job market than what I had encountered in Seattle. Then to get back onto my feet from a state of homelessness.

Eventually, I managed to get a job doing night stock at a local supermarket. Soon after, a room for rent at a rooming house run by devout Seventh Day Adventists in the Nashville suburb of Madison, TN.

Within a year, I was finding myself on the wrong side of company politics at the store level, as is a constant issue with corporate-owned retail franchises. Yet, I was solidly back on my feet and no longer homeless and therefore able to return to the fabrication shop I had quit before my misadventure.

By now, I'm back to basically the same work I was doing before, but no longer the lead man of my department. This suits me just fine. The slightly lesser pay is more than made up for by the lesser responsibilities without the authority to get things done.

And now, I have moved back in with a friend who has been a better friend to me over the years than I've been to him, and who now needs a housemate to make ends meet financially.

Safe to say I've come full circle back to where I was, but just a little bit wiser for the ordeal.