Moose had my lunch box in his mouth at 6:52 last Tuesday morning, and I was standing in the carport in my office shoes, bargaining with a beagle mix. I won. I usually do, but it costs me about two minutes, and on office days two minutes decides whether I merge onto I-565 ahead of the trucks or behind them.
That's a fair picture of my life right now. I'm Meredith. I'm 38, and I live in a 1956 brick ranch on the southeast side of Decatur with my husband, Ben, our daughter, Harper, and Moose, who howls at the mail truck like it owes him money. Ben is a physical therapist at an outpatient clinic here in town. Harper is ten, in fourth grade, and reads at the dinner table when she thinks we aren't looking, which is always.
Fourteen years in HR, then a turn
I grew up in Florence, studied business administration with an HR concentration at UNA, and in 2009 took a job as an HR assistant at a manufacturing plant on the river here in Decatur. I became the HR generalist there, and in 2016 I moved to a regional hospital as an HR business partner. I left the hospital at the end of 2023 making $71,500.
Somewhere in those fourteen years I noticed that the parts of the job I liked best weren't the policy questions. They were the projects: a department move, a new scheduling process, a unit opening on a hard date. I liked the plan, the deadline and the Monday when everybody finally knew what they were supposed to do. So in 2022 I studied for four months at the kitchen table after Harper's bedtime and passed the PMP exam in November. On January 8, 2024, which was also Harper's ninth birthday, I started as a project manager at an engineering services company in Cummings Research Park in Huntsville.
The starting salary was $88,000, a $16,500 jump. I'm going to write about numbers like that here, plainly, because I spent years on the other side of the desk watching smart women guess at what they were worth.
What a week looks like
I'm hybrid. Tuesday through Thursday I drive 38 minutes each way to Huntsville, park at the far end of an enormous surface lot and walk a third of a mile to my desk, where the conference rooms are kept at roughly meat-locker temperature. Monday and Friday I work from our third bedroom, which became my home office last year. The work is government and commercial projects, which in practice means schedules, budgets and a lot of meetings. I won't write about the specifics, and I won't name my company.
Ben works late at the clinic on Mondays and Wednesdays, until 7 p.m. Harper has piano on Tuesdays and soccer in the fall, and Ben coaches her team. His mom, Carol, lives fifteen minutes south in Hartselle and picks Harper up from school on Wednesdays. My parents, Gary and Donna, are about an hour west in Florence. Every week has a shape, and most weeks the shape holds.
What this blog is for
Here's what I said to Ben when I told him I was starting a blog: "I keep answering the same five questions by text. I'd like to answer them once, properly." He said, "That's fine, as long as I'm not in it much." He'll be in it a little.
Those questions are mostly about work and money. How do raises actually get decided? Should I take this offer? Is it too late to switch careers in your late thirties? What does a family of three in North Alabama really spend in a month? What do you wear when it's 96 degrees in the parking lot and 68 in the conference room?
So that's what you'll find here, in six categories:
- Career Moves: raises, reviews, job offers and the exact words I used.
- Money Talk: our real numbers, from a household budget spreadsheet I've kept since 2018, one tab per month.
- Workwear: what I buy for a hybrid office in a hot climate on about $600 a year, and how it holds up.
- Family Life: schedules, logistics and what things cost.
- Self-Care: practical habits, not spa talk.
- Weekends: inexpensive days around Decatur, Huntsville and the rest of North Alabama.
From the HR side, I'll say this once up front: most people undersell themselves on paper and oversell themselves in the hallway, and the paper is what gets read in the meeting you aren't invited to. A lot of what I write will be about getting the paper right.
I'll also be honest about my own mistakes, and there are plenty. I left six vacation days unused in 2023 and four more in 2024. I once accepted a job offer without asking a single question about the number. I'll tell you what happened to me, not what will happen to you, because nobody can promise that.
So, hello from Decatur. Moose says hello too, mostly to your lunch.
