And so it begins...

Well, Alan started orientation for law school yesterday. All day Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday...ugh! He already has homework and classes don't even start until Monday! I'm really proud of him though. He's worked so hard to get into law school and to get to where he's at.

Work is going well. I rearranged my office a little today. It still needs some work, but I'm excited about it. My supervisor wants me to go to a conference later this year. I hate that I'll have to be away from Alan, but the good news is that my flight will have a 4-hour layover in Atlanta, so maybe my mom or brothers can come see me. That would be really nice.

I worked a full day today because I had a conference call in the afternoon, so I'm off tomorrow. Lots of housework is in order. We're having two couples from church over for dinner Saturday night so I've got to get to cleaning! I'm also wanting to get my sewing machine out :)

Missing Home

We left Alabama almost 7 weeks ago. To be clear, I don't really miss Alabama. I do miss the people though. Before we left, I had it in my head that I would get to go back home at some point between summer and Christmas. Right now, that really just isn't seeming feasible. If we don't get to go back until Christmas, it will be 4 months from now before we go back. This has already been the longest I've gone without being in Alabama. It's really weird.

Something else weird: growing up, you can't wait to get away from your siblings (at least I couldn't). Now that we're grown up, I realize just how much I love them. Don't get me wrong, they can still get on my nerves like nobody's business, but I love them and I miss them. I hate that I don't get to see them very much.

About 2 weeks ago, one of my brother's, Patrick, had an accident at work (carpentry shop) and lost two fingers. Dealing with this has been hard on me because I'm so far away. I cried when Ray called to tell me what happened. To be honest, that was the first time I've cried since before the move. I guess I've kind of "turned off" the part of me that cries because it's so hard thinking about home. I love it here, but I miss my family a lot. I'm really hoping that I can get them to come out and visit soon, but I know it's just as hard on them to come here as it is for us to go there.

Anyways, just been thinking about that lately...

July and August 2010

So July was pretty crazy. Since we had already paid for the storage unit for a month, we kept our stuff in there and slowly moved a few boxes a week until we got everything in. Like I mentioned in the last post, we ended up with a three bedroom, even though we were looking for a two. This one cost the same as the two bedrooms we had seen and it came with a washer and dryer, which we needed since we sold ours in AL to make room on the moving trailer. I had an interview with the university the first week we were here and it took about 2 weeks to hear back, but I got the job!! I found out last week that part of the reason it took so long was that HR changed their hiring procedures and they had to do a lot of paperwork because they weren't supposed to have interviewed yet and they had already decided they wanted to hire me. Anyways, I have my own office which I love! In Birmingham, everyone in my department had to walk past my office to get to the front door, to the kitchen, or to the administrative assistants' area. Needless to say, one person in particular spent a large amount of time in my office, which made it difficult to get any work done. Where my current office is located is great because it's sort of private (I can close my door) but I'm not closed off and completely away from people either.

Back to the month of July: We didn't do a lot because money prevented us from being able to do much. We went camping one night and almost froze to death! Not really, but it was extremely cold! We definitely weren't prepared with our Alabama camping gear. We've met a lot of interesting people here and the church here is great!

So far, August has been great! We got a new mattress which was delivered on our anniversary. That was pretty awesome since we didn't have a bed, so we had been sleeping on the hide-a-bed, an air mattress, the couches, or the floor when everything else got too uncomfortable. The first night, we slept about 11 1/2 hours! We went to dinner here in town for our anniversary because we didn't want to drive all the way to Cheyenne just to eat. Alan got me an 8x10 of one of our wedding photos and an 11x14. I've got to find frames for them now!!!

I started work on Monday and I love it! My boss is pretty flexible about what hours I work, as long as I get all my hours in. I'm really excited about work because one of the things I'm working on right now is updating the website. It needs a lot of work, but it's not as bad as a lot of the other state projects' sites. I also got another job babysitting for a couple that are both in school at UW. They are foreign and I'm not sure what country they are from, but they seem really nice. I'm excited about that because it's a baby that I'll be taking care of so I'll have time to study for my grad classes which I will hopefully be starting next week, but that will depend on if I can get in. I've got a lot of paperwork to do before I can get registered. Oh, and not that it's that important (sarcasm?) but I need to pick a major...hmmmmmm. I'll have to do some more thinking on that one.

Other than all of that, we've been pretty laidback the last few weeks, just trying to get settled in.

Life in WY

Okay, Alan is on the phone with his family so hopefully, I can actually get a blog posted! A lot has happened over the last month, so here goes:

I'm gonna start with our road trip here. We left on Wednesday afternoon after being up until almost 4 Tuesday night and getting only a few hours sleep. Packing...ugh! We stayed in a hotel in Arkansas the first night. Arkansas was flat and bland. The next day we stopped in St. Louis and went to the Gateway Arch...incredible!!! We had a rough time there because Alan's pathfinder starting going schizo and wouldn't shift out of park. Considering all of our belongings were in a trailer attached to the pathfinder, you can imagine my panic! Thankfully, we found the instruction manual to the car and got it to shift out of park. We stayed in a hotel in Missouri Thursday night. Friday, we drove through part of Kansas, Iowa, and into Nebraska. We stayed at a KOA in Nebraska that night. We got there after dark, 25-30 mph winds, and we had never put our tent together before. Needless to say, it took us a good while to get the tent together and we didn't sleep very well that night. We got up Saturday morning and figured we would stop in the next town for breakfast. Too bad it was 10 when we left the KOA and the next town was 45 minutes away (i.e. breakfast was no longer being served). We had an early lunch instead and hit the road for Wyoming. I drove ahead of Alan and arrived about 2 hours earlier so that I could try and get a storage unit for our stuff, but everyone was closed since it was July 3rd (holiday). Anyways, I ended up not getting a storage unit so we had to keep our stuff in trailer an extra day. We drove around town and found a decent hotel with a good weekly rate and got checked in.

Sunday, we went to church services at Laramie church of Christ and loved it! Everyone was so friendly and we made some friends who took us out to lunch and for a drive through the Snowy Range mountains. On Monday, our first objective was to find a place to store our stuff. We found a storage unit and got our stuff unloaded and took back the Uhaul. We got a copy of the local paper and just started calling places about apartments. We looked at two that were okay, one that could only be described as a dungeon (I seriously almost didn't even go in, and I wish I hadn't!). The fourth apartment we looked at was incredible! When we arrived, we found out it was actually a three bedroom instead of two! It came with a fairly new washer and dryer and the kitchen was remodeled! We talked it over and decided that we couldn't do any better than this so we decided on this apartment! We started moving stuff in on Tuesday and we love it here!

Well, I'm getting tired of typing and it's getting close to dinner time so I'll write more later!

Updates

Only had time to update the layouts and stuff tonight...maybe I'll actually post a blog tomorrow :) We'll see!