i haven't mentioned the job lately

It's going well. That's not to say that I don't have issues, and I don't have a lot to learn, and I don't get stressed out. But overall, I really like it. 99% of the clients are at least halfway pleasant and polite, but I would say probably 60-80% are sweet and just thankful for whatever they can get. The other nice thing is that since i's a small agency, if I have an issue, I can bring it up in staffing and we actually hash out options and discuss what those options would do and come up with a solution that works for everyone. This is a good thing.

upcoming move?

We've gotten quite tired of being cramped up and having half our stuff in boxes in storage and decided that we wanted to rent a house. The thing is that when you crunch some numbers, you end up paying as much (or more) to rent the house as you would on a mortgage. Despite the market being kind of risky down here (you buy stuff for really cheap, but if you have to sell anytime soon, you might end up selling for less than you paid), we decided to at least explore buying a house as an option. We talked to someone in the real-estate business that my mother-in-law's realtor friend knows and got hooked up with a finance person who said we were pre-approved for $220,000 based on our credit, job history, etc. We wouldn't buy that much house, but it's nice to know we can get something. We hooked up with a realtor and we're going to start looking probably this weekend.
So we will be moving once again, but hopefully this time it will be to a place where we're going to stay, and on where it's not so cramped we have stuff laying on every flat surface, even with half our stuff in storage.

geocaching fun!

Chris and I have started geoaching again. For those of you who don't know, geocaching is like a scavenger hunt that you do with a handheld GPS unit (a TOM TOM is an example of a gps for your car. A handheld gps is kind of the same, only smaller and better designed for use on foot). We've done several caches over the last couple of weekends. There's pictures and stories to all of them here, as well as all the ones we did when went geocaching years ago.
I won't Bore you with the details of all of them, but there was one that I thought was noteworthy. Someone put a cache near this alabama war veterans memorial in a nice park in leeds, alabama (about 20-30 minutes from where we live). It has a memorial with names of all the veterans from alabama that died in just about every war that's ever happened, even the alamo. I felt honored to be there, and it's in a beautiful park. I suggested to Chris that maybe we should go have a picnic breakfast with the veterans on memorial day. Maybe we could do that and then do more geocaching!

you asked for pictures

here's a link to a BIG gallery of pictures that my husband uploaded. (sorry, the link wasn't working originally, but now if you click "big gallery" all the pretty pictures will show up)

update on the car

The car is reparable, so i just have to give the insurance company the $500 deductible and they shall fix it up so I can drive it again. Even though insurance doesn't cover a rental car, I decided to get one because sharing a car means that one of us is stranded if the other one has the car and this is not a good arrangement when you have two people with migraines, one of whom has odd work hours and a dog thrown into the mix as well. It will run me less than like $200, so it's not very expensive, and I got lucky and got a sonata at the economy car rate because they didn't have a little car.

oh yeah i forgot to mention the uhh... car thing.

Friday (mar 28), I had a car wreck. "What happened?" you ask. "I'm an idiot and I was on the phone and I stopped at a stop sign to pull across a street with no stop sign and I swear I looked, but I ran right into someone in the farthest lane and smacked my car into hers good enough that the front bumper was a good 8 inches separated from the car and there was some manner of fluid leaking from the right front area of the car." I'm not as much an idiot for talking on the phone because it impairs me (I personally have never noticed a problem although data suggests that talking on the phone is as bad as driving drunk), but because if I am on the phone and I am in an accident, there is no way for me to prove that it wasn't me being on the phone that caused the problem.

So anyways, my neck was sore Friday and Saturday, but it's fine now, and the car is reportedly reparable, so everything will be okay. Although, I don't know if my diet is ever going to be fixable. I've had too much fun with all my old bad eating habits such as multiple large desserts per day, snacking on junk just because the food is there, etc. I probably gained 3-5 pounds since Friday. Oh well... it will all be okay somehow. :)

the new job (the first non-archive post)

So far the new job has been very interesting. We have a lot of very sweet clients and then some who are not so sweet. I haven't come across any that are truly hostile, but I have come across a few who have tried to get extra gas vouchers ("I always get 8 for my Dr's appt.", and if I look it up, they always get 2) because they know I'm the new girl. Luckily it's easy to look up what they usually get, and what they've been told in the past.

The big ugly thing about the job right now is paperwork. I tend to get way behind on it and there's not much I can do other than stay late like every night and that's no fun. Today it had to be finished because it's the last day of the fiscal year, so my supervisor helped me. We started doing nothing but paperwork at 3 and we still both left around 5:45.
My ability to stay at this job is going to depend on my ability to either a. get a reasonable system going whereby i don't get behind (or too far behind) on my paperwork (that doesn't involve too much in the way of nights and weekends) or b. come to peace with the fact that I will be behind.

So far I actually really like the job because I deal with all adults, so I don't have to worry about a lot of the nit picky nonsense that I do when dealing with children, and because it's a very diverse, beautiful and accepting crowd--- including clients, volunteers and staff. I think it's definitely worth the effort to figure out how to be comfortable with the paperwork and the general insanity ("oh, btw, that thing we told you you're working at 7 in the morning? it's on a saturday... this saturday.") to be able to work in that environment.