Month: October 2005

I am at Jeff and Crissy Nelson’s house in Carrollton, Texas today. Crissy is Ron and Carol Voorhees’ daughter. They have invited me to stay with them while we are waiting for the house to sell in Oregon. They have convinced me that if we can afford it, we should get a house with a pool. I talked with Lorena about it and she said she liked that idea, so that is what I am going to do.

I went to convention at Mountain Peak in Texas. I met too many people to go into much detail, but some of my old friends were there like Jimmy Bryan, Juanita Coker, Justin Wicks, Calvin Griswald, Grandpa Milo, and Grandma Sarah, and many, many others.

Yesterday was my last day of work here in Oregon. I leave for Texas on Thursday morning very early. We have switched over to our new, less onerous homeschool schedule and it looks like it is going to work out well. It is great to see them do there homeschool thing. They got up right at 7:00 am when their alarmclock went off. Christian went to the piano and Kelly started in on her bible memorization and her bible reading. Then they switched places.

The real estate people in the area are all coming to our house today for a tour. We have to be out of the house between 10:00 am and 3:00 pm because people will be here. These posts will remain short for now, probably until we go no vacation to Puerto Vallarta in December.

It is always very hard for me to leave a Sunday morning meeting. While we were attending Jim and Joann Waldo’s meeting, Christian professed and Kelly really started to get established in her faith. Those are huge milestones in our family. We had a very touching Sunday morning meeting, then a bunch of people from the Mark and Nancy Ramsdell’s meeting–the Meyers, the Ramsdells, and the Doolittles–met us at Red Robin in Albany for lunch. We all had a great time. Then, Ryan and Jeannie Harris followed us to my cousin, Tim Mecum’s apartment when we picked him up for gospel meeting. They will start taking him to gospel meeting next week. They even promised to buy him a soda after meeting. I very much appreciate them taking this on. One of the highlights of our time in Albany has been the privilege of taking Tim to meeting.

I only have two more days of work here at ATS. We are going to do something together as a family on Wednesday. I will leave for Texas in my pickup early Thursday morning with the idea of stopping in Caldwell, Idaho to see my business partner and friend Ron Voorhees before going on to Texas. I plan to meet Dad and Mom for the last two days of convention in Mountain Peak, Texas. After that, I need to find a place to stay so I can start work on Tuesday, November 1. All of this, God willing, of course.

Today is the last “regular” day of homeschool before we move to the reduced schedule so we can get ready to move. We plan to spend most of the weekend sorting stuff and getting ready to move. Dad and Mom will probably be over today to pick up the old pickup. I have three more days of work. The project I am on is actually coming together pretty good. It will be nice to leave on a positive note.

Dellis Waldo was in our gospel meeting last night. He came to Albany to replace Jay Wicks who went over to Bend to be with Harold Bennett. It was a very nice meeting. Tony and Martha were back from Texas, so we got to talk to them a little about our move. We are starting to ramp down on the homeschool a little now. After tomorrow, the kids will go to their reduced schedule as I will be leaving next Thursday. I found that I will be in Texas in time for a day or two of Mountain Peak convention. Maybe that will allow me to connect up with a real estate agent or a lead on a place where I can live until we get the house sold in Oregon.

Our digital camera is broken right when we need it the most. I was planning to take it to Texas with me, but will have to get a new one when I get there instead. The purpose of the camera is to take pictures of possible new houses so that Lorena and the kids can participate in the selection of our new house. Maybe I will be able to take pictures of some of the professing kids, so Kelly and Christian can see some of their future playmates.

I am getting short-timer’s disease at work right now. There is too much to complete before I leave, but I will give it the old college try. I very much enjoy working for ATS, so the change to August Technology will not be without sadness. I had talks with my direct boss, the plant manager, and the Vice President of our division. Each one of them said I can return anytime I would like. I very much appreciated their offer.

Note: I will be making fairly short posts until I get down to Texas. After that, hopefully, I will be able to dedicate a little more time to putting up photographs and blogging in general. I would like to get away from posts about the mechanics of our life to some of our projects that might be more interesting, but that will have to wait until we are not so overwhelmed.

The sign for our house is supposed to go up today. Candice, our sales lady is coming over after work to get the last of the papers and take pictures for the flyers and the web site. I surely hope we can sell the house quickly. I mowed the lawn for what will probably be the last time last night. We are going to have Clinton Eblen mow it for us after I leave until it sells.

Joe Layman and Jay Wicks came to our house on Friday night and stayed through until Sunday. It was absolutely great to have them! We got to have some great discussions, mostly on spiritual topics over the three days. Joe will be going over to Bend to be with Harold Bennett for the rest of the year while Dellis Waldo will be coming to Albany to be with Joe. One of the highlights of the weekend was when Joe took Christian and Kelly with him to set up for gospel meeting and had them greet people at the door until we arrived a little later. After meeting, he took them for an ice cream cone at McDonalds. They had a ball.

The house is going to go on the market on Tuesday afternoon. Lorena has been working frantically to get it ready to take pictures and to show it when the people arrive. In the mean time, I have been working frantically to get all the scheduling and materials ready for homeschool for Kelly and Christian through the end of the year. Both of the kids are very far ahead for the year in Math, Spelling, Grammar, and Writing, so we will be able drop those subjects for the next several weeks and still be way ahead, even if we do not pick them back up until January. They will mostly be concentrating on Science, History, and Literature. There is a good deal of writing they have to do in the performance of all those materials, so they will stay pretty busy. Of course they will also continue with memorization and bible reading, too.

We met with a real estate lady last night named Candice Orange. She owns a John L. Scott real estate franchise in Corvallis and sells a lot of houses in our area. We will sign the papers to put our house on the market on Saturday afternoon. We like Candice a lot. She seems to know what she is doing and has sold a lot of houses in our area including several in our exact neighborhood. We will have to do a lot of work to get ready, but she was optimistic that we could sell the house quickly for a good price.

I talked to my boss yesterday about when I will leave my current job at ATS. I am hoping that my last day will be Friday, October 21. I might stay a little longer than that if they really need me, but I think it is best for both of us that we just move on. I had a great talk with, Jim Sheldon, the Vice President of our division as well as a brief discussion with the general manager of this location. Both of them said I was welcome to come back here any time. My boss, Anthony Pettigrew said the same thing. When Jim gets his system into place here, this is going to be an amazing place. I have perdicted before that it will be the biggest business in Corvallis within the next five years if they stay on track. I would love to come back here some day.

We bought a new Toyota Tundras pickup yesterday. The agency drove it up from Grants Pass last night and will put aftermarket cruise control into it around noon today, so we will not be able to get our hands on it until about noon. We are quite excited about the whole deal. Grandpa Milo will get my old pickup as he gave his old pickup to Cayatano, his Mexican worker, whose car had blown up. That was awful nice of him. I will try to put a picture up here if I get a chance. Grandpa Milo’s new (to him) pickup is the one I got for Lorena right after we got married. We are glad it is staying in the family as we have some pretty strong emotional attachments to it.

I received an offer letter from August Technology yesterday for a position as a Senior Software Engineer at their Plano, Texas research and development facility. I accepted the offer and turned in my resignation at ATS Oregon. I have to be in Texas working in thirty days. We will be very, very busy during that time. I mowed the lawn and talked to a real estate agent last night about selling the house for us. I spoke to Mary Simmons, one of our ministers who is currently working with Spanish speakers in the Dallas area earlier today. She was great. We will probably get to go to a Spanish speaking Sunday morning meeting. Mary acted very happy to hear from us. She knows Martha and Tony, too. We certainly hope we can be a help when we get there.

I am planning to buy a new little pickup to drive to Texas as soon as I finish my time at ATS. Lorena will stay in Oregon with the kids until the house gets sold. Our hope is to be able to sell the house before our Puerto Vallarta vacation in early December so that I can fly up from Texas to fly down to Puerto Vallarta with the family. On return from the vacation, we would all drive down to Texas in the minivan together. If we sell the house fairly quickly, Lorena, Kelly, and Christian would stay with Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah until Puerto Vallarta. It is all in God’s hands, really.

I received an email last night from my future potential boss. He said that an offer for a job in Dallas should come today as soon as the corporate office decides what kind of housing change package to provide. Of course, Lorena, Kelly, Christian, and I are excited to make a decision on all of this, so we can hardly wait. We want to get on with the hard work of selling the house and moving. Or not. As yesterday, I will try to update this post today if and when the offer comes in. I hope it comes quickly because I am being scheduled for a trip to Salt Lake City on Wednesday to discuss a big job we are doing at my current job. It would not make sense for me to go if I have turned in my resignation.

I have noticed that when I changed the gallery, all the pictures in the blog disappeared because the links changed. I was going to go back and fix them all, but I think I will just leave it as it is because all the images are available in the photo gallery anyway. I will add new photos as they accumulate.

This weekend was absolutely packed. On Friday afternoon, I flew out from Eugene to Dallas, Texas, arriving at my hotel a little after midnight. My potential new boss, picked me up at 9:30 on Saturday morning for a four hour interview with himself and the principle software engineer. Then we went to lunch. They seemed like great folks. At the very least, I had a great time meeting them. I am supposed to have an offer in my email before lunch. I will post an update as soon as I make a decision about going. Hopefully that will be later today.

The Lorena and the kids stayed with Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah for the weekend and had an absolutely great time. They swam, ate, played games with their aunts and cousins, and generally had an absolutely super time. I am sure we will see them a lot when we are in Dallas. Probably more than we saw them here. They are so busy, we hardly ever see them.

On Sunday, Lorena and the kids got up early to came back to Albany to go to Sunday morning meeting with me at Jim and Joann Waldo’s house. Before meeting, Joe Layman called. He and Jay Wicks are going to go to our house to stay with us on Saturday and Sunday this week. It will be great to have some time with Jay before we all head different directions. He will not go back to preach in Africa until this time next year. After Sunday morning meeting, we went to a potluck at the Ramsdell’s house in Jefferson. Then, at gospel meeting, Tom, Stacey, and Seth Pedginski showed up so we went out for ice cream with them. They seem to be doing absolutely great. Seth has really grown up. Both Kelly and Christian rode with them to Baskin Robbins from the meeting and enjoyed their time with him. It is great to get together with the Pedginskis because they are so upbeat about life in general, love to talk about just about anything, and always have some spiritual thoughts, too!

I fly at noon to Dallas, Texas. Lorena, Kelly, and Christian will drive up to Portland to stay with Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah on both Friday and Saturday nights. They will drive back down on Sunday morning to go to meeting and the potluck at the Ramsdell’s house. It is always hard to be away from the family, even for a day or two. It is even harder now that I have not had to travel for quite awhile. I am so thankful that I have been able to spend so much one on one time with both Christian and Kelly for homeschool. That Christian has professed and that we are all now serving God is a tremendous blessing. The key now, is that we all remain faithful to the end.

I missed our gospel meeting last night. I think I am coming down with either a bad cold or the flu. Lorena and the kids went to the meeting as usual. When the returned, I was already a sleep so I did not talk to them after the meeting. When I got up to go to work a little after 4:00 this morning, I found a wonderful set of meeting notes waiting for me on the upstairs bannister. Kelly had taken them for me and they were truly amazing. I read through them. It is amazing how much she gets so much of what is said down on paper. It is even more amazing how well she writes as a sixth grader.

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An era is over. Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah have moved off of their farm in Newberg to a beautiful two bedroom apartment in Lake Oswego. It is a little bit hard to imagine, but we are all happy for them and believe it was a great move. There are still quite a few things to get moved out of the old place, but the lifestyle change has already started. Lorena is going to meet them over at Newberg on Friday to pick up a few things and that will be it.

I am in a holding pattern right now until I find out a little more about our future this weekend in Dallas. Lorena and I are making contingency plans about logistics, but that is about all the further we can take it until things are a little more solidified.

Lorena went to her accounting class last night so Christian, Kelly, and I were home alone together all evening. The kids are both doing great on their homeschool programs. The Sonlight literature and history programs are absolutely stellar as is the Singapore Math programs. The way we use the two programs continue to evolve. We have made some modifications to the way we are doing the reading part of the Sonlight programs. After reading on any given day, I always had the kids explain to me what they had read, but they are turning into quite good writers. They generally have two books going at a time. One of each of their books is a read aloud book while the other is a book they are supposed to read to themselves. Because all three of us like to read aloud together, we have chosen to read only Christian’s books out loud. That is so that Christian will not have to hear something now from Kelly’s program that he will just have to read again later. We felt like it would be good for the kids to do a little more writing, too, so the kids are writing a synopsis of what they read in their second book for me to review each day. That leaves Kelly’s read aloud book. I am having her give a detailed oral synopsis of what she read. It is all working out quite well.

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I worked all day Saturday, but we had a nice day on Sunday. We went to Conrad Tull’s house for Sunday morning meeting, then to Tangent for gospel meeting at 6:00 in the evening. We were a little bit sad because Tim was sick and could not go along with us. I have a very busy week this week and will fly to Dallas, Texas on Friday night to meet with some people on Saturday. If it all works out, there could be some dramatic changes in the lives of our little family.