Happy New Year!

I'm looking forward to a year with less trials. Ha ha. If only it would be so easy.

We spent the night at my brother-in-law's house in Brigham last night. It was an enjoyable evening. Although I was feeling tense and a bit anti-social at the beginning of the evening. I knew my hubby wanted to go spend some time with his older brother, so I took one for the team. We stayed up til 2:15. :( It was a long night too. I'm sure I'll be sleeping soundly tonight. In fact I might take some Tylenol Simply Sleep to make sure I do.

The new job is going well. So far I've been doing some data checking. It's relaxing really. I think that the others don't really like doing it because it can be tedious, but I get to relax and listen to iTunes while i do it, so I'm good. Yesterday I was told they'd be locking the front door at 5:45 and if we left after that we'd need to use the stairs by the break room to get out. at 6:00 a guy came up to me and told me he was about to turn the lights off. ??? I wasn't told we had to leave by 6! So i quickly closed out of the applications I was in and shut down my PC, but he turned the lights off before I was done and I ended up having to use my cell phone light to find the break room and the subsequent exit. I was a little bugged.

Oh well. Just one of those misunderstandings where I am completely lost. I'll get over it.

Happy New Year! I hope everyone has a great year and many wonderful experiences.  :D

Final Grades

I got a 4.0 this semester! (No thanks to my french teacher, she would have given me an A- but luckily I already got an A in the class via Clep Test. *blowing a raspberry at teacher* So there!)

Ian passed all of his classes and qualifies for a certificate of achievement (or something like that) = an associated degree! We're planning on moving to Weber in the fall and that will make thing so much easier to transfer over. (According to his brother who is an advisor at Weber.)

It will also be nice to be closer to immediate family.

:)

Merry Christmas!

I doubt I'll have time to write another blog before Christmas, so here's my holiday blurb.

Good things are happening. Ian got his job at the beginning of the month. While it has been difficult to get the hours he needs because they send him home early when it's slow, he's happier now. 
I was offered temporary work starting next Wednesday!! I got the work with the first company I interviewed with, Conservice. It is only temporary, but has the possibility to become permanent employment in the future. I'm very excited and grateful.

The Lord has answered our prayers. Things don't always happen when we want them to, but in the Lord's time. 

The past few days have felt so blah. I've been sitting at home, checking job boards for updates (not much out there), and really just trying not to go crazy. Now I have something to look forward to!

I'm hoping we get a ton of snow for Christmas. We supposedly have a storm coming in on Sunday and another one might come Monday night. We shall see. I'll be glad for any snow we get, but I hope for a lot of it. I know people don't like to travel in it, but I can still wish for a beautiful white Christmas.

Money is still tight. I wish we were able to buy more Christmas presents for people this year, but I'm afraid we have to limit it for now. It stinks. I love giving presents to people. Oh well. Next year, right?

I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays as well!

He got a Job!!

So finally, after 8 months, Ian got a job! He's working at Papa Jay's. It's a small sandwich and jerky shop located by Hastings here in Logan. So we'll stay up here and do spring semester before moving down to Weber. That makes things a bit easier. We won't have to rush out and find somewhere to live just yet. Thank goodness!

Finals are this week. We have our French final tomorrow morning at 7:30. Luckily it's going to be a toasty 12 degrees outside while we wait for the bus. That will wake us up!

I don't have another final until Thursday. Though I have an online one that I can do at any time. I also have a final project due by Friday at noon. Hopefully I can get that done by Wednesday and I won't have anything to worry about after my Thursday final.

Now it's time to get ready for Christmas. We just put our wreath on our front door and lights in our windows. We're going to do snowflakes here shortly to add to the front door. I want it to snow more. we only have about an inch. We want more!

Post Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving went well. I was a bit nervous, but everything turned out great.

We started the day off wonderfully by getting to spend some time with my sister-in-law Em and her hubby. It's been forever (a whole month) since we last saw them. It was nice to talk with them. Great news for them, they've made an offer on a house!! We're excited for them.
(I also found out my twin brother is also buying a house and they actually close on Dec 6th! Woot!) 
Then we headed over to Thanksgiving dinner at Ian's grandparent's house. We got put at the kid's table in the small dining room, but we didn't mind. We had excellent company and had fun talking to the younger cousin. (No one was under 16yrs old, so it was great.) The food was yummy, but I think I enjoyed the company the most. My hubby and his siblings then played round robin - a ping-pong game where the players form a circle around the table take a hit the move for the next player. They rotate around the table as they go. You get 3 mistakes til you have to sit out. Once the game is down to 2 players they must spin in place once before hitting the ball. I did not participate, but enjoyed watching. After going back upstairs and chatting for a bit, we left to go visit Ian's other grandparents for a bit. 
We didn't stay long, but enjoyed visiting with grandfather Allred. (grandma was sleeping.) We then said goodbye and headed down to my parent's Thanksgiving to see everyone there. 
They were done eating dinner but still had pie out. (This being 3 hrs after we had eaten we decided another slice wouldn't kill us.) So we had pie and talked for a while then headed home.

Like I said, not a bad Thanksgiving really.

Today, I need to work on my sketchbook for history of interior design and Ian has a job interview in an hour and a half. Still looking for work. *sigh* The holidays are going to be rough without an income.

Searching

So it hit me this week that maybe my husband and I are asking the wrong questions. Instead of asking why are we not finding jobs, maybe we should be asking ourselves if we ought to be moving somewhere else. Somewhere where we can get jobs. 
A few months ago I felt inspired that we should look into study abroad, get away for a while, show Ian my mission...etc. But Ian has to have his GPA up to a 2.75 in order to do that and truthfully he's struggling. So i don't think it's going to happen. So I asked myself, why? Why did I have this overwhelming feeling of needing to travel somewhere else to go to school? What if it wasn't an urge to go abroad, but just to change where we are attending school?
We started looking at a few options close to here. At first we were looking at the University of Utah. But they really don't have a degree program that works for Ian. (I'm assuming I just wont continue if we do move.) We also were looking at apartments in the Salt Lake area and we weren't impressed with anything we saw. 
So we started looking at Weber State. They have an interesting pre-physical therapy program, you basically make up your own program. It's kind of strange to me to do it that way. We talked to my brother-in-law who actually is an advisor there and he explained it a little bit. We also were looking at apartments in the Ogden area and found some that looked promising that aren't too far from the campus. I just don't know if that is the right move for us yet or not. 
One thing that has to change is this no job situation. We can't keep living off of the charity of others. I love my family for the help they give us, but it makes me feel so guilty. Ian has now had sixteen interviews and turned in about fifty applications. It's kind of depressing that nothing has happened yet. It's been seven months since he lost his job and two since I left mine. I still don't regret that decision. I've still got my sanity, even if I am very stressed about our finances.
We'll keep praying about it. And, of course, we'll keep looking for a job here until we make the decision to move.

On to November!

So for those interested, I didn't get the job. :( I got an email a week later saying they only had 20 positions and they interviewed 50 people. But they'll keep my resume on file in case they need me. Bummer. I'm so annoyed with this economy. It's never been this difficult for me to find a job before. (I started looking long before I quit Convergys.)
Ian still hasn't had any luck. He had an interview last week that really had him excited, but once again, 1 position and over 20 applicants. He didn't get it. It's hard to see him struggle with this. And I must admit, it's hard having no cash flow at all. I feel guilty buying milk or fresh produce at the store. (We're eating into our line of credit doing so. literally)
Christmas is coming up fast. I don't know what we're going to do. Maybe we'll be able to sell some textbooks back and get a little Christmas money. We'll see.

I'm going to get slightly political here, what with only 3 days til the elections and all. I really hope that Romney is elected president. Our unemployment rates have only gotten worse since Obama took office. He can't blame that one on Bush. I'm tired of all the empty promises. (from all candidates really.) Why can't someone actually make changes like they said they would?
I was talking to my father-in-law about the unemployment rate. He said that while the number looks relatively low (compared to other countries) it's actually quite skewed. It's a small number for people my parent's age but in my age group the number is closer to 30% unemployed or underemployed. (For those who don't know, underemployed is when someone has work, but still isn't earning enough to pay for basic needs.) Logan is a college town and there are a lot of people my age here. So the odds aren't too great for finding a job. Unless you're desperate and want to work at a call center. But then, they don't care about their employees at all so most people quit within the first two months. (if that.)

5 more weeks for this semester. I'm stressed about one of my classes, but it's not too bad. I am worried about Ian's grades though. He's struggling in French. He also has a hard time with his tests in Biology and Chemistry. We figured out that he'll need a B+ average in order to raise his GPA high enough for us to do study abroad next fall. I don't know if it's going to happen though. But I'll keep trying to help him in any way I can. I think that some guys brains just aren't hardwired for taking tests. He's really good at memorizing useless information about games, movies, and other stuff, but when it comes to school he has a hard time remembering things. How can I help him change that? There must be a way to use the memory he has for random stuff to his advantage. I just haven't been able to figure out how.
With french, we've put sticky notes all over the place in our apartment with french vocab on them. We've also made flash cards and put different verbs up by his computer. It's an uphill battle some days though. *Just as a side note, I don't understand how he was able to go through jr. high and high school without ever taking a language class. Davis high, you failed! We were required to take a full year of language at my high school in order to graduate.