School is Out!

You know this kid?

He is done, done, done, moved on.

Graduated Thursday, May 31st.  Moved to Sheboygan Monday June 4th.  Got an apartment with some friends.  Got a job delivering sandwiches for Jimmy Johns.  Got accepted at UW-Sheboygan.

Yay Jack!

We Bought a House!

Ashwaubenon. Southwest suburb of Green Bay. Out towards the airport. Great access to the highway. About 10 mins from work (compared to 20 mins from the northeast side of Green Bay). 4 BR, 2 bath place on a quiet street. We close on June 29th and plan to move in the 2nd weekend in July.

Becky, Tabby and I are very excited. It's going to be our own home! Tabby absolutely loved house hunting. The realtor hardly had to sell the houses at all . . . she just let Tabby go to town telling us who would have which room and why it was the perfect place for us. Every house we looked at. So, of course, Tabby is thrilled that we are buying "her favorite".

Sam and Ben have mixed feelings. They're both happy to exchange their current crowded bedroom that all 3 boys share for each of them getting their own room. They're both unhappy about moving away from friends they've made the past two years.

Becky feels guilty about that and is very, very concerned about how they'll adjust in their new schools. I'm afraid they have a somewhat unsympathetic father. I moved going into 9th grade and again going into 12th. I was disappointed with both moves at the time we made them. But I got through them just fine. That second one, my family left Wisconsin for Arizona my senior year of high school. Even at the time, even not liking it, I recognized that with only one more year at home my own interest in the move took a back seat to everyone else's. Looking back with the experience of being a parent, I don't think badly about it at all. That first move? The one when I was closer to Sam & Ben's ages? In 9th grade from Utah to Wisconsin? One of the best things that ever happened to me, I think.

On top of that, when my family moved, it was a 1500 mile distance. No internet. Mail took a week to deliver. Long distance phone calls were prohibitively expensive. I really was losing friends. Sam and Ben are moving 10 mins across town in the age of instant messaging. I think they'll manage just fine.

Jack really doesn't care at about this move. He's leaving, hopefully, in June to live with some friends in Sheboygan.

Phone Service

I have always been pretty happy with our AT&T service. But man, this has a been a bad week for it. They were supposed to hook up our phones the Friday we moved in. It didn't happen. When I called they said it got put off until the next Monday. No reason. It was really like they just ran out of time on Friday and were taking the weekend off. We have cell phones so it wasn't that big a deal.

Monday they hooked up our service. Tuesday it was dead. A technician came and looked at things Wednesday evening and told us we had a bad jack. When we plugged our phone in, it shorted out the line. Again, not a big deal. We have enough jacks in the house that we plugged the phone into a good one and we'll tell the landlord about the bad jack when we get a chance.

Over the next few days our kids notice that the phone line upstairs (not the bad jack) has no dial tone, but if they unplug the phone and plug it back in again, the dial tone comes back on.

This morning our phone rings, but only the downstairs line. The upstairs line is dead again. When we answer the phone, there's no one there. So I play around with my cell phone and find that I can make outgoing calls from our home phone, but incoming calls are getting a "number has been disconnected" message. I called AT&T, they did their thing where they ping the house to check the signal. No problem. Called our house, they got through fine.

Frustrating. I mean, are prospective employers going to get through? Or get told I no longer have a phone? Fortunately, Pizza Hut got through last night. With an inconsistent problem though . . . who knows if anyone else has tried to call?

Moved In

Whew.

Friday through Tuesday with no internet. Played Civ IV for the first time in ages. The boys and I played a game together all Sunday afternoon. Jack and Sam have been playing Age of Empires III.

Phone service was supposed to be hooked up Friday, was delayed to Monday, died Monday night, couldn't be fixed until Wednesday. Turns out we have a bad jack that shorts out service if we use it. Yay cell phones.

HOT!

Storage pod was mostly emptied into the house Friday evening. Becky's dad stayed long enough to help set up the beds.

Saturday morning while Becky went to the store, the boys and I finished emptying it. Stocor took it out of our driveway Monday night.

Who would have thought restocking the kitchen from nearly empty would be so hard? Becky has gone to the store pretty much every day. She even let me go once.

There are a dozen or so boxes we plan to just not unpack given that six months from now, when my class is done, who knows what we're going to do. They are finally put away in their closets and everything else unpacked. I mean, well, we need to straighten the garage in order to get both vehicles in. But other than that.

We're close enough to church that we walked on Sunday.

Ben spent a day and a half in bed with a puke bucket.

I've applied for jobs at Ponderosa and Applebee's (currently fully staffed, but taking applications), Pizza Hut (constantly hiring drivers) and Universal Health Group.

Jack has applied at a host of fast food places; McDonald's, Subway among them.

Becky has applied for jobs at Hancock, Joann's and Wal-Mart.

Had a wonderful chat with my grandmother.

There's still stuff to do, but we finally actually feel moved in.

Moving again

One benefit of having our vacation cut short is that it accelerated our plans to move to Green Bay. Today we are going to pack a few boxes to put in our storage unit, tomorrow we will pack up the rest of bags and Friday we are actually moving.

Today we also have on the agenda to get utilities, water, phone and internet set up for the GB address. And a trip to the post office to change address.

A place

Our original plan was to spend the summer in Wisconsin Rapids. We'd get summer jobs, save money on rent, keep our stuff in the portable storage pod and in August we'd move to GB. The more we thought about it, the less sense it made. Other than that "save money on rent part." There ends up being very little time for a job and if we got one it would mean skipping out on going to Utah for sure. Plus there's the stress of sharing a home. As much as we love Becky's family . . . well there's still stress about things we used to control and now don't.

So we spent this past Wednesday and Friday in Green Bay looking for a place to live. We found a nice 3 bedroom, 2 bath duplex on Green Bay's east side. The kids will go to Edison Middle School and Preble High. The kitchen is small and all three boys will be sharing a room, but overall the place is bigger than we had dared hope. The bedroom are easily big enough for three and it has a huge family room. It's within walking distance of church and East Town Mall. Clean, quiet leafy subdivision. We met our neighbor and one of her sons. They seem nice. Our landlady seems real nice too. And, small world, her husband's brother is an IT manager at Acuity.

We're kind of excited about the place.

Monday we're leaving for a vacation out to Utah and back. We'll visit Becky's uncle, grandmother and sister on the way out and/or back. We should be back around July 7th or 8th, then plan to move into the place in Green Bay the next weekend, July 16th-17th.

Downtime

Packed up the storage unit yesterday, packing up the computer in about 15 mins, thoroughly cleaning the house.

Tomorrow when school gets out we'll be driving off to Wisconsin Rapids.

Craig's listing

As part of our moving process, we've identified a bunch of stuff we really don't want to take with us, but which would be just wasteful to toss out. On suggestion from Becky's brother, we gave Craig's List a shot. It has been pretty nice. We've already sold a BB gun, shelving unit, a bunch of 2x4s, a safety gate and a swingset. And we've heard back from people about a papasan chair, a hitch haul and a toddler backpack carrier. Only things that haven't moved have been a toddler swing and a fold out bed couch sectional.

I will never, ever list something as free again, though. I got so many responses to "free lumber!"

Course Set

I'm still looking for a mainframe developer job. Those are looking scarce, though. At least relative to the number of job seekers. Great Lakes answered my e-mail to let me know, "You weren't lacking any specific skill. It's just that we had nearly 400 applicants." So, a career change is looking more and more . . . well, not so much appealing as adviseable.

Which got us thinking about, if I'm going to take an entry level position, does it have to be as a programmer? No. And why not do something to broaden my skill set? So I am registering for school . . . but not something that would take so long as law school. I'm going to retake some math coursework at UWGB that will prepare me for the Actuarial exams. If a good mainframe developer position comes along, I'll take that. Otherwise, after this next school year I'll expand my search to include actuarial positions.

Until school starts, because we have to leave this home, we're moving in with Becky's parents in Wisconsin Rapids until we can find a place in Green Bay.