What a difference three and a half months can make!
You’ve probably heard that I’m no longer living in
North Dakota.
We moved at the end of May – but, I’m getting ahead of myself.
In early March, just after my birthday, Matt was going around to all kinds of airline interviews. One he was particularly excited for was Express Jet, which is Continental’s regional carrier. (His excitement being partly because Continental is not one of the airlines that has recently declared bankruptcy and which has a relatively stable relationship with its regional carriers.) Express is known for telling you right away if you got the job or not – they have you wait in the hall after the final portion of your interview. Happily, Matt got good news in the hall, and came back from Houston with a binder of study materials for a training class start date that was little more than a week away. He left for his six weeks of training in mid-March.
March turned out to be the busiest month for me as well. I seemed to be working more and more at Sylvan, especially with the ACT prep class I was sharing. The end of March was spring break, which meant that about half of our Michaels employees were gone, and the other half of us working to cover the slack. I also knew I had to start figuring out the logistics of where and how we would move. Of course, that was complicated by the fact that Express has bases in Houston, Cleveland, and Newark, and we wouldn’t know for weeks which one Matt would be based at. Eventually we just decided to go with Houston (especially after I heard the weather reports of the blizzards hitting Cleveland in late April) and hope for the best with his assignment. And somewhere in the middle of all that I also started studying to take the GRE (like the SATs for grad school). Suffice it to say that I kept very busy.
April was not quite as busy as March, but not noticeably less. I managed to fit in a trip to a Fargo test center to take the computer-based GRE, and did better than I expected to, after so long off from school, though I probably should have expected it of myself. I also realized that teaching the ACT prep course helped immensely with my own test taking, especially sitting in on the English review taught by one of my coworkers. Works stayed as busy as ever, and I started in earnest to search online for Houston apartments that Matt could scope out on his rare and unpredictable days off from training. I also started researching different methods of moving our stuff and my car to Houston, and it turns out that moving across the country is pretty expensive. Plus the move was complicated by the fact that we didn’t exactly know when Matt’s training would be over, and I had to be back in California by June for Patrick’s graduation. It was definitely stressful, and frustratingly uncertain.
Luckily the loose ends got wrapped up pretty quickly in May. With UND out for the summer, Sylvan was able to hire another math teacher to replace me, and she shadowed my during my last week. The students who had been primarily mine, and whom I was most worried about leaving, seemed to take to her really well. It made me feel a lot better about leaving, since most of the other teachers there would go pale in the face when confronted by an Algebra II textbook. I of course did not have a hard time leaving Michaels, but realized how much I’d miss a lot of the people who worked there.
And it miraculously worked out that Matt had a week off in between training flights, so he unselfishly drove his truck from Houston to Grand Forks so that we could load in the few pieces of furniture we didn’t want to give away and drive together back down to Texas.
Once done with our two-day drive, we had two days to furnish the new apartment (with lots of help from IKEA) before Matt had to leave for the last of his training. Then I had about a week to get as settled in as possible before flying back to California for graduation festivities. I really like the Houston apartment, and although it is a bit far from the airport and a bit close to the hurricane-generating Gulf, it is at least in a nice area, and with the challenge of moving to a new (big) city that we know nothing about, I’m satisfied with it.
So I’ve been away since the very end of May, spending a week and a half in Folsom with Patrick, Mom, and Dexter. Then I flew up to Minneapolis for a few days to hang out with my aunts and cousins, then back to Folsom, a trip out to the Bay Area to see some of my college friends, a weekend in LA with my college roommate, and I’m currently in San Diego with Elizabeth (best friend from high school) before Grandpa Irv and Grandma Alta’s big shindig this weekend. After that I’ll be flying back to Folsom with Mom, but it’s up in the air as to when exactly I’ll be going back to Houston. Given the Armageddon-like deluge they’ve been having, I’m perfectly happy to kill some time back in CA.
When I do get back to Texas, I’m planning on finding another tutoring job or something on the UH campus right next to my apartment to wait out my residency requirement before going back to school for some education training. It’s all very see-what-happens at this point, but it’s served me well so far.
