I just became employed! (and guess, by who)

.....by the HR department at Missouri State University. Haha!

Kinda crazy after my interview didn't give me much feeling of hope, and not necessarily my dream job, but still a job. All I know right now is it's part-time in the mornings, $9/hr, and doing paperwork / ordering time cards / spreadsheets /etc, since I am waiting for the employment and training specialist to call me back to tell me more. However, Patrick and I just need some extra money, it's a job that'll look ok on my resume, and at least working at the university means I can walk to work and don't have to go in on weekends or holidays. So hopefully all shall work out well.

(Big sigh.) That's for relief and nervousness. :)

Atalie's first interview

Atalie had an interview this week at school with a woman in the HR Department and was treated like crap. The interviewer was condescending and rude. The job was doing clerical work and Atalie didn't think it took a rocket scientist to qualify for the job. This woman obviously felt otherwise. The only thing we can figure is that the woman felt threatened by her own inadequacies and Atalie's superior brain power. The job hunt continues...

First week is done and this semester isn't looking too bad. My class schedule is pretty light but work is another story. Apparently I'm good at getting things done because my supervisors keep giving me more assignments. :)

a new semester commences

Patrick and I are back in Springfield now, after an even longer drive through the Midwest than usual this past Wednesday. We started out in Grand Rapids, but we backtracked to Okemos to pick up and drop off a few things first, adding a couple of hours to an already long trek. Needless to say, we were pretty tired and spent a good portion of the last couple of days sleeping extra and just taking it easy before Patrick had to return to school/work this week. We hung out with our friends a couple of times and did a bit of shopping since we had a gift card to spend (we now have food in the house and a coffee table- yay!)

It's going to be difficult adjusting to our normal schedule again, but I think it will be nice too. For one thing, I feel like a total slug for not exercising the last month while we were in Michigan, and Patrick mentioned once that he was a little excited to return to work at the university. Of course, I think I might keel over and die when I revisit the aerobic kickboxing tape this next week or two, and Patrick went into work a couple hours later than he originally aimed for this morning, but I'm sure we can get the hang of it again soon! (hopefully) :)

Happy New Year!

As most of you know (or were there), Patrick and I spent New Year's Eve night with a bunch of friends from GVSU. The venue was at Jill's, where there was a Wii (that's a video game system for the technologically challenged adults in our family- you know who you are) and some snacks and a little champagne for the strike of 2008. The two of us were super-tired the next couple days because the time went by before we knew it and we didn't get back to my parents' house until 4 a.m.! It was wonderful to see everybody though, since we're all spread out a lot more and/or have sporadic schedules after graduating, and because it might be a long time since Patrick and I get to visit with them again. We hope everyone else had a great New Year's Eve too!

Merry (Belated) Christmas

We had a great Christmas with both our families this year. Our families were far too generous to us and we feel very spoiled! Atalie joined Patrick on the 26th to celebrate Christmas and both went back to GR the 27th to celebrate with her family. The little nephews are great fun to have around and were overwhelmed by the amount of presents for them.

Accessibility Notice

This blog is not listed with Blogger or any of the search engines, however, there has recently been some visitors from the Internet that (as far as we know) are not family or friends. Therefore, we'd like to start keeping the blog a little more private and, starting January 13, our blog can only be accessed by those invited by us. We will be sending out an invitation email to those that we think read the blog. Unfortunately, those that want to keep up with us will need to sign in with a Blogger or Google account (Gmail email IDs included). We're sorry for the inconvenience this will cause some of you.

If you are reading this and HAVEN'T received an email invite by December 27, email one of us (if you don't have one of our emails call us). We don't have everyone's email address and have surely missed someone.

Note: you don't have to sign up for Gmail when you sign up for a Blogger account.

Visitation

The results are in and it turns out Patrick did better than expected- all A's! His first 4.0 ever! He's now officially 1/4 of the way through school and very psyched about his grades.

The two nephews are very cute (possibly too cute for their own good) and Patrick has enjoyed playing with them and having Mark and Daisy around. The whole family (minus Sally and Atalie) decorated the Christmas tree Wednesday evening. Following the tree decorating, Patrick drove up to Brad's house in GR and had a fun time visiting with him and some friends. Brad got a Xbox 360 a while back and the two of them stayed up way too late playing it. But it was fun! We went ice skating yesterday evening with Mike, Jim, and Jill which was great fun and then picked Sally up late and drove to Okemos.