Earlier this week I accepted a job with Aladtec, Inc. in Hudson, WI. We are now frantically getting ready to move again so that I can begin that job on August 1st. The new employer is being extremely helpful and I am anxious to get back to work. My official start day is August 1st which is less than two weeks from today.

For the record, and for those that missed the announcement, I will no longer be working on a teaching degree. After finishing my Associates Degree last month, and doing a lot of research, I have found that I will be better off in the long run staying in the IT field, and this job is in that field. I will be working with other developers on a scheduling system used primarily in the EMS field. I have met one of the developers already and though he is not as much of a geek as I am, it looks like we will work well together.

We will travel to Hudson on Monday, July 25th to tour the office (both old and new, they are moving soon which will be fun) and look at a place to stay. I have found an apartment in River Falls, 25 minutes away, that we can sublease for three months. During that time we will look for something suitable in Hudson and finally have our own place again in November.

With this new job I am just going to stop all the other stuff i have done to make money. No more blogs, web sites, hub posts, or anything else of the sort. I will work during the day and spend time with family and on hobbies during the evenings and weekends. It will be great to get back to a normal life again. Heck, I might even start posting here on a regular basis again!

Last month I officially became a college graduate with an Associates of Arts degree from the University of Phoenix. You may recall that I was working on a degree in Elementary Education, but that path has changed as well. Though this degree has a concentration in that field, I have decided to go back into Information Technology and use the 20 years of experience I already have.

In September, I will be going back to school to work on a Bachelors of Science in Information Technology. I am fortunate that 57 of my 62 earned credits will transfer, but I do have to take one extra math class for this new degree.

I have chosen a concentration in Multimedia and the Visual Arts. This will teach me skills I need to build the consumer facing side of web sites and other online communication. With a firm understanding and 20 years experience working on the server-side of things, the classes I will be taking should give me a well-rounded set of skills for the entire aspect of web sites and online communications.

I am both excited and just a bit nervous. Previously, I would be assigned two classes that each lasted nine weeks. This spread the work load out a little more. When I go back, it will be one class at a time in 5 weeks. Though I will only have to focus on one subject a time, the shorter time period and more advanced classes will likely mean more work for me. Oh well, it will be worth it.

I know in the past I said that I really wanted to teach, and that nothing will stand in my way, but I have to look at the facts. I know the IT world – I have lived in it for many years. I am comfortable here, and quite honestly, I am much more valuable to employers with the experience I already have.

I can tell I haven’t checked our website in a while, when I look at page and find the last update was in May, and now it’s already New Year’s Eve.

Apparently we’ve been too busy with the day-to-day living of life to take the time to update this blog.  Or too busy with the changes to write about them, and then when things settle down it would slip our minds.  Who knows, all I know is that lots have changed in the last 7 months.

One of the first changes from the last blogs, was that Shane is not working for his former employer.  There was a parting of the ways due mainly to a misunderstanding.  Apparently the boss thought that as Shane’s employer he should be in control of when and IF Shane should have free time.  Our family plans didn’t apparently mean much to his idea of deadlines and launch dates, even when notified well in advance, or when it was the weekend.

With that change it became more difficult to complete the trailer in a timely fashion like we hoped.  One of the things that really needed completing before we could work on the interior was the roof.  Well, CraigsList helped us out there with finding the right sized trusses and a wonderful price  for them to redo the roof.  Unfortunately there was several rather heavy rain storms before we had a chance to start on the roof, and with other hold-ups as well we weren’t able to complete the roof soon enough.  What do I mean about not being able to complete it soon enough, well simply that things took too long and the interior became very heavily mold infested.  Too much so, for us to feel safe to complete the trailer or move in.  Therefore the project was abandoned.

In September we moved out of Karen’s.  Instead we moved in with Shane’s brother, Scott, and his wife, Charity.  So now we are living in Arcadia, WI.  We had thought/hoped that with Ashley Furniture and Golden Plump here in town, there might be job opportunities locally.  Unfortunately we are the wrong ages and have the wrong skill-sets for those employers apparently.

December 13, my cousin, Brandi Lynn Allen, was fatally injured in a car accident.  It’s hard to believe that such a bright young woman of only 19 is no longer with us.  She will be missed by many.

Allyssa made out well with Santa this year.  She received some Thomas the Tank things, TinkerBell items, a couple of dolls, and a few other things as well.  It took her about 30 minutes, I believe to open all her gifts and she enjoyed every minute of it, and then became busy playing with her new gifts.

Unfortunately the 26th we seemed to have a bit of a flu bug around the house.  Allyssa seemed to have it first, during the late night of the 23rd, but Shane and I seemed to have a bit of it on the 26th.

Well, Shane has finally received his first paycheck.  (He is only paid twice a month, not every 2 weeks.)  This of course naturally started us thinking of when would we be able to move out of his mother’s.  Part of what we want to be able to do is buy a house in the future when Shane has his teaching position.  To be able to do that, naturally we have to put money aside now, while he is making a good wage from his programming.

So how do you pay rent and put money aside?  Well, you either find the cheapest possible place to rent… or you try to buy a cheap trailer house.  To this end, we believe we have found something that could suit our purposes.  It’s an older trailer house, 1976 or 1977, a 14×70 with 3 bedrooms and 1 3/4 bath.  It’s very rough right now, but at the price we would be able to go in and make improvements before moving in.  Naturally we wouldn’t be able to make all the improvements we want right away, but enough to satisfy our immediate needs.  Then we would be able to move in and plan to make other changes over time.

If this works out not only would we have the space we need (including an office for Shane), we would also be able to put money aside for a down payment for a home in three years when Shane graduates.  Please wish us luck, we can use all the help we can find.

Yeah, I know, heart attack time right? Since moving back to Holmen I have been so busy trying to find a job that I just have not been able to do much of anything else. Then last month I got involved in writing some plugins for the WordPress software which has taken up quite a bit of time. One of those plugins I wrote was for sharing recipes, called Recipe Share, on WordPress blogs. For fun, I added that plugin to this site so I can share some of my recipes – there is one up already.

Allyssa is getting bigger and is really smart too! She knows the entire alphabet and can count to ten, though some days she needs a little coaxing to get through them all. She is also at that stage where she wants to be “naked”, well, except for a diaper, and refuses to wear clothes. She also refuses to sit on the potty so potty training is progressing very slowly, or not at all right now.

Her favorite movie right now is Cars. Well actually, it is Mater and the Ghostlight which is a bonus on the Cars DVD. I think I have seen that over 100 times already. It is kind of annoying too, because every time Mater breaks his headlight she has to scream out “he broke his light!” Oh well, she’s still the most wonderful part of my life right now.

The job market in the area is crap, and although there have been a couple of options, none of them have panned out. So, Laura and I have decided to use my knowledge to build a business. We are working now on a Business Plan and actually have about a half dozen customers already, so it just might work out. The trick will be to actually keep working towards that, and not playing games on Facebook (hint hint Laura).

Shoot, gotta get back to work now. In case you don’t hear from us in the next couple of months, just remember that it is NORMAL to for us to not update the blog, so things must be normal.

Those of you close to us already know about this, but next week I will be moving the family back to Holmen, Wisconsin where we can be with family and the activities we enjoy. It has been an interesting journey to Minneapolis, Chicago and Kansas City, but I guess the old saying is true, “Home is where the heart is”. It took a while for me to realize it, but I just need to get back to a place where I can do the things I enjoy doing and be with my family.

I’d like to say there won’t be a lot of posts for a couple of weeks with packing and moving and settling in, but a lack of posts seems to be the norm for this site. So get ready for this blog to be normal! Maybe once we are back and we have things to share we will post more. Then again, we will be sharing those things with the very same people who read this blog, so we may not feel a need to update. Geez, what is a person to do?

Currently I am not working, nor is Laura, except to build up our new business venture. Hey, we already have nearly a dozen clients so things are looking up. We will be focusing on the area around La Crosse, WI in the coming months, so if you know someone who wants a cheap web site, send them on over to $150 Sites, OK?

Well today we went and did a bit of shopping here.  Our tax return finally made it’s appearance and naturally we went to spend some of it.  We ended up at Micro Center.  There we purchased a 26″ Sharp flat panel T.V..  Shane wanted to use it for both a T.V. in the bedroom and something he could use as a second monitor.  While it works as a monitor, it’s not perfect.  Basically the resolution is smaller than he hoped and it’s a bit too big to fit comfortably on the desk.  He’s using it for now, but is likely to pick up a different monitor once the funds from his Pell grant arrive.

While we were out, we also purchased a Play Station 3.  We had talked about purchasing a Blue Ray player, but of the difference in price it made more sense to pick up the PS3.  While we purchased a second controller for it, we haven’t purchased any games for it yet.  We decided it made more sense to get a GameFly subscription and rent the games first.  We also have several PS2 games which we haven’t played since our PS2 died with a drive problem.

Besides all this, Shane recently introduced me to Mafia Wars on FaceBook.  And from there I’ve also seen Vampire Wars and Pirates: Rule the Caribbean!  I’ve found them to be rather addictive.  As you can see we now have plenty to play around here.