Weathering the Recession

Laurie Powell Anderson is a writer. She didn’t know it until she heard the words, ‘You’ve been let go’ last March.

Suddenly, she watched her entire career as an engineer in quality management-- complete with a cushy job and fat paycheck-- slide down the drain.

“It was a shock to the system, here I was, kind of rootless,” says Anderson.

With a 21-year-old senior at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management and two young newly adopted children from Kazakhstan at home, the 52-year-old found herself jobless for the first time in 30 years.

“I got in my car and I had a flash of inspiration while driving home,” says Anderson, a 16-year Minnetonka resident. “I wanted to do something so different than what I had been doing – auditing and telling people what they were doing wrong.”

Not knowing how to aptly deal with the thought of telling those closest to her she’d lost her job, that night after dinner instead of picking out her outfit for the next day, Anderson sat down and began to write.

”I thought this is something I should be doing because it just feels right. I just thought I’m going to do this.”

So she did, until around 3 a.m. when she looked up and saw her first piece of public self-authored literature; a blog entitled ‘Klowns in my Koffee,’ a name based off of the misconstrued lyrics to one of Carly Simon’s most popular hits, “You’re So Vain.”

“This is my vanity project,” says Anderson about her now almost-famous blog.

After years of admittedly writing “pretty dry stuff” as an auditor, Anderson says her creative imagination now flows from her fingertips. Most days it can be found streaming out of her living room, a coffee shop or other said-blog location of choice in the form of a ‘Daily Kup’-- Anderson’s generally witty take that day’s subject of choice.

“People send me things about some weird things that happen, some of the frustrations in life, current events, green and frugal living kinds of things, mommy bloggy kind of things maybe a week or so,” says Anderson. “I put in weird and funny links when I can find them. I made a Lady Gaga out of a Barbie doll and dressed her with polenta loaf after the meat dress came out.”

At first the mother of three says she sent the blog to a few of those closest to her whom she thought might understand her quirky humor, just to show that she was “doing something.”

But as it turns out, it wasn’t only her family logging on.

“I started checking my analytics and I started wondering why are people in Poland sending me comments about my kidney stones?”

That’s because this ex-auditor was catching the attention of more than just her mother-in-law. She is now tracking between 500-800 readers a month from people in 30 different countries and 19 states.

Klowns in my Koffee: ‘the journey from bean counter to human bean’ has taken on a life of its own. Her creative outlet to help forget her years working for “klowns at Porkus” may turn out to be her next job, afterall.

Anderson was recently contacted by Blogher, a blog advertising syndicate that helps advertise for 2,500 blogs aimed at women and by women. She is currently being considered as a waiting list candidate.

 “I feel pretty cool about that,” says the young-at-heart Mom. “Probably not something I can make a living off of, I wish that it could be.”

Anderson admits while she’s been able to find her true voice once again, it hasn’t come without some serious budget issues. Without Anderson’s paycheck, as the higher income earner of her and her husband Terry’s household, the Andersons have had to take a 2/3 cut in their family budget. Now relying solely on her technician husband’s hourly wage, Anderson says there are no more frills or ‘extras’ around their Minnetonka home.

But, there is more time.

“There’s being a participant in my life that we’ve learned to do without an awful lot. Being cheap isn’t that awful and the tradeoff for a certain level of freedom has been definitely worth it,” says Anderson.

For years Anderson says the only place you would find her between the hours of 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. would be her cubicle at a local computer manufacturer. Now the mother of 6-year-old Teagan and 8-year-old Noah is all over their Glen Lake classrooms, Girl Scout meetings, baseball games and dance practices more often than not toting her laptop alongside her.

“I realize how much I’ve missed out on,” says Anderson, ““I’m never going to go back to an 80-hour a week type of thing I was doing. I want to be a real person.”

A real person writing about entertaining, inspiring and, Anderson hopes, thought provoking things that will enable her to live, laugh and write about life - by now living it.

“I felt like I was taking from the world a little bit more and now I feel like I can give something. That’s a rare gift and I’m grateful for it.”

Click here to check out Anderson’s Klowns in my Koffee blog.