Speaking of Graduation...

I came across this picture a couple months ago and it made me smile. This was a happy day in June of 2005. I had just completed nursing school in Los Angeles and Jacob had just completed his MPH in Loma Linda. Our respective programs had their graduation ceremonies on the exact same day (thankfully at different times)! We took my parents along with us on this busy day. We had a nice brunch and the nursing pinning ceremony at some fancy place in Los Angeles, and then we rushed to make the hour long drive to Jacob's graduation ceremony. Master's graduation robes are so cool with all the colors going down the back. I was totally blessed to find a great job shortly after this that launched me nicely into the nursing world, and Jacob was already working on his next degree before he graduated from this one. Life never stops.

A Blast from the Past

This picture was taken in June of 2005 at the end of my Senior BSN preceptorship at the Labor and Delivery Unit of Kaiser Bellflower in Southern California. The lady at my left is Irene. She was originally from China, educated as a nurse in England, later marrying a guy from Memphis, eventually settling in Southern California. She is such an interesting person and we enjoyed the time we spent together. We still keep in touch. I was recently reminded of this time in my life when the news came out that octuplets were delivered in this very unit where I had done my preceptorship. Irene said she wasn't involved because she hadn't volunteered to be on the delivery team for fear that she would be called to work in the middle of the night. I wish the best for the babies and their mother.

A Job for Jacob?

This is even more exciting than the car and as you can tell from all the exclamation marks in the previous post, that's pretty exciting. We're trying not to get our hopes up, however, because it is not yet a done deal and so I will try to limit the exclamation marks.

Jacob has applied for tons of jobs online, sending his resume all sorts of places. Well a few days ago, a company contacted him and said that if he was still interested, they want him for the position of "Evaluation IQC--Nutrition Analyst; Heath and HIV/AIDS Analyst; Evaluation Training Specialist--Junior Level" (say that in one breath) and would he please reformat his CV so they could include him in their proposal to the US Agency for International Development. So, finally, after years of training and internships and independently funded travel and study, a company has finally offered Jacob a paid position for his expertise, doing what he loves, pending the acceptance of the 3-year, multimillion dollar contract proposed to USAID which they say they have a pretty good shot at getting.

It's been really hard for me to forbear putting in a bunch of exclamation marks. If this job works out, Jacob will be given assignments overseas to help monitor and evaluate USAID projects. He could be sent anywhere! (Oops, couldn't contain that one.) And he could be sent for days, weeks, months, or years at a time. Depending on the duration and location of the assignment(s), I can choose to go with him or stay in the States and continue working. If we are so blessed as to be able to adopt a child by then, that will, of course, factor into our travel decisions as well. He also has the good fortune to be able to refuse assignments and wait for other ones if he feels the assignment is too risky or comes at a bad time, etc.

Hey, even if USAID doesn't accept the proposal, it's still a huge confidence booster for Jacob to know that he was wanted by such a company for such a position, and that he will likely be included on more of their proposals in the future. Yay!!! (okay, I'm a total failure when it comes to containing excitement) But seriously! Yay!!!

Laura's new car!

Well, we realized right away that if we were to be moving away from the MAX line and further away from Portland, we simply had to have a second car.

We looked at many cars in our search. Jacob's dad who is an auto mechanic helped us. At first we talked about it in terms of "we will drive" and "our new car", but then we ended up buying a cute little 1998 Honda Civic DX like the one pictured here (courtesy of kelly blue book) and I fell in love with it. The "we" and "our" business ended right there. From the first time I drove it, it became "my car". Of course I let Jacob put his name on the title... but it's still my car. :) Even if Jacob ends up driving it more than I do, it will always be my car. Jacob gets a big kick out of how much I love this car because he was the one who found it and picked it out. Great job Jacob! It has a manual transmission which I really enjoy because I get to go vroom vroom, and the car gets super great gas mileage, somewhere between 34-40 mpg depending how it is driven. This has been a new experience for me to get so attached to a non-human thing. Mostly I think I'm just excited by having found such a reliable, affordable, earth-friendly car, and I relish the new feeling of freedom that comes from having a car at my disposal at all times. I feel like I've graduated!

So much has happened...Where to begin?

As you can tell from the large space in time between the last post and this one, we've been... I'm wondering if I should use "busy" or "extremely industrious in other matters besides blogging". Hmm... Since Jacob tends to poke fun at me when I use seven words when one will do just fine, I guess we'll just use "busy" and bold it a little for emphasis. :)

The summary:

Laura worked a lot and Jacob applied for a lot of jobs.

We were nearly snowed in at Christmas.

We traveled to Utah, Montana, and Idaho.

We visited family often.

Laura discovered facebook.com and caught up with many loved friends and family - another culprit behind the large time gap seen here :). It's been great catching up with everyone!

Two more nieces were born and yet another is on the way. Yay!

We were officially approved as an adoptive couple. Quadruple Yay!

We moved to a lovely new place.

We got our tax refund and sold some furniture we didn't need on craigslist and used that to help with the following event.

We bought a "new" car!

Jacob got a great job lead (finally!)

And there's more, but if I keep going I'll get overwhelmed and won't do another post. So you'll have to read the details in the following posts. :)