Onboarding Lucky Noodles

I am doing New Employee Wizard XpressHR Onboarding (online) this morning, for my new job--initiating a background check, filling in tax forms, and so forth.
I don't like that word, 'onboarding'--it reminds me of waterboarding--but this boring bureaucracy is like a refuge after the Wild West Garage Sale (thrift store), which had no HR, no intake, outake, nothing. That deficit mattered.

I'm in shock, a little bit. Last night, I kept waking up remembering the good news. I'm glad I started a month ago to stand in my workplace and look around as if I were leaving soon.
Which, it turns out, I actually am--my last day is two weeks from yesterday.
I feel nothing but happy about it--no tugs of regret. But after six years in one place, it's a huge change.

I'm not so shocked, however, that I couldn't take immediate action on the most important front:
Noodles (new dolls) are coming!
Penny Cooper said, "now you will be rich", the time is right to buy another blondie. The old one (who was missing her toes) had gone to live with mattdamon "because he needed a friend with bad feet like his", and she is missed.
I found one in play clothes, with a friend:

$20 for both, and I don't mind because Penny is right: I am going to be rich!
I'll be earning $9 more per hour (+ benefits) than the minimum-wage (no benefits) the thrift store has always and will always pay, world without end.

You can imagine, by middle-class standards a teaching aide's salary is still kinda low. But nine dollars more than poverty wages?
So many pennies, says Penny. She counted. Nine hundred. "Noodle can keep them."

This, below, is the new Noodle. I took her home yesterday. I had her on my work desk, to remind me to lighten up. Stamped 1965 on her back, she's a coin-bank sprite. (I signed up for direct deposit though.)

I'd asked Big Boss if I could have her as my Going-Away Present.
"Ask Manageress," he said, without looking at what I was holding.
"No, look," I said.
When he did, he rolled his eyes. "It's all yours."

NewCashier, who is 23, was all about it though. "She's a Sonny Angel!"
Sonny Angels are from Japan, b. 2004 and clearly modeled on kewpies. They "give you healing and make you smile."

Her name is Lucky Noodles, because she has brought me luck.
And tomorrow starts the Year of the Dragon--extra auspicious.
Many good signs.

I am splurging! To celebrate my new job, I took bink & Marz out for tapas at the corner Spanish restaurant after work. Camino reunion😊

Aside from rent, I don't have many expenses, and I don't intend to spend much more money than I do now. Mostly I intend to pay back my savings (thank you, dead relatives 💓).
I was drawing on them to supplement my income--and, sometimes, other people's. Once, I gave Grateful-J money for new (used) tires for his car, after one exploded on the way to work.
And three--no, four--times I gave (or lent with no expectations) coworkers rent money when they were about to get evicted--or had been,
like the cashier who was living in her van with her dogs.

Yesterday she asked for my phone number, to be sure she could find me to pay me back. I gave it to her, but I told her that I'll be making so much money, she should consider that loan a gift.
"No," she said, "I don't want to write off my future--I won't always have no money."

"You're right!" I said. "You're going to do great!" (She's actually an amazing jewelry-maker, for instance, if she could focus on that.)

I've been happy to share, and I will keep sharing, but getting old with no money looks bad, and I'm happy, too, to put the brakes on draining my savings. Now I can share out of my earnings instead.
RICHES!

And a new field to explore--now, there's riches.
Lucky Noodles, that's me.