The movers are here, packing up our stuff. We’re supposed to finalize a lease tonight or tomorrow. The first place we wanted fell through. We are hoping beyond hope and praying hard that this one will work out. We need it to.

Puppy is going to stay with Audra for a few days while we take care of things. I can’t wait to be in our warm hotel room in Bannockburn tonight. Watching LOST. And relaxing a little. There have been a few hitches with this moving process, but I’m trying not to worry about stuff too much.

Tomorrow we’re doing stuff at Trinity; Thursday we’ll be moving in (as long as things go well); Friday we’ll be driving to Champaign to pick up Cors; Saturday we’ll have Jessica’s parents visiting.

It’s been a long couple of weeks.

This week is the week. Well, I hope it’s the week. We’ve run into a few snags in this moving process. We did find a place that we’re okay with living in for the next year. It’s only a 15 minute commute to school, pretty up-to-date, has a fireplace and a garage.

The only problem is that we are still waiting to hear if the lease has gone through. We are supposed to have the movers here on Tuesday, but without a confirmation from the landlords, we don’t know if there’s a place to have our things delivered to. Hopefully we will hear tomorrow.

I’ve got a few things to take care of beyond the normal changing of address. For one, we’re in a Dish Network contract and I need to know if we’ll be able to have a dish installed at our new place. We’ll have to see what Dish will do for us if we have to terminate early. Hopefully it won’t be too bad.

Sounds like Jessica’s parents may come up on Saturday to help us unpack. I’m thinking IKEA for bookcases and Giordano’s for some pizza (they’ve never experienced Chicago-style stuffed pizza). In any case, there is a lot to do this week with finishing up work, meeting movers, moving, going to an inauguration, and getting all settled. I start my new job at Trinity a week from Monday.

Well, my friends. Something I have vaguely alluded to on several different occasions has finally come to pass. As of yesterday I have accepted a position at Trinity International University starting later this month. The official title is Web Marketing Manager, and the work is much more along the lines of what I want to do than my current job.

Jess and I have been praying hard for things to work out (as many of our friends and family members have been) and it has been pretty incredible to see how God’s timing has played out. In about two weeks we will be moving our things from the St Louis Metro-East to the North Chicago area — assuming everything goes to plan.

As you can imagine there is a lot to be done before that move, so things might be a bit quiet around here, though I am going to try and keep up with the writing so I have a record of this move.

It’s a little bit sad to be leaving so many great people here in Greenville, but Jessica and I have, for a long time actually, felt stagnant here. This move is something that is invigorating and hopeful for us. Expect great things! We both are.

Those of you that knew about this, thank you for your prayers, thoughts and support while we were going through this. It means the world to us.

This week has been absolutely nuts. I’m hoping I’m not heading toward burnout at work. I’m trying not to. It’s become super important for me to protect my time, otherwise I wouldn’t get anything done.

After a long day of talking to people and trying to explain to them what exactly it takes to provide them with the web stuff they are asking for, I come home and work on freelance stuff. The good part about that is that I should have a new project premiering later this week after a a couple months of work (sporadic, of course).

I have another WordPress template coming out in a couple of weeks. In fact, I completely redesigned said template because I wasn’t happy with the previous one.

Also found out at the beginning of the week I’ve got about $1300 worth of car repairs I need to take care of. Great. I need some more freelance jobs to pay for the fixes.

Couple other exciting things coming up including National Novel Writing Month in November. If you’re participating in NaNoWriMO, make sure you add me as a writing buddy!

Tomorrow is my first class period teaching a college-level course. I am excited and maybe a little bit nervous. But I think I’m ready. I’ve got the class pretty much planned out. And tonight I finished my Keynote presentation for the class. Check it out.

Wow. It’s already been a busy week.

We released the new Athletics site at work that I have been developing for the last few months. That was Monday. I have gotten far fewer comments than I expected. And no news is good news as far as I’m concerned. Overall I’m pretty happy with it. Everything at work just seems to overwhelm me right now, so it’s good to have a major project out of the way. Check it out if you want: http://www.gcpanthers.com

I did a project for Randall a couple week ago. I’m only going to say this: I coded the design as a WordPress template in about 2.5 hours.

I’ve got a few projects on deck now (freelance speaking). One of those is a new WP template for a friend from back home. It’s a fun project. And I feel kind of bad because it’s not going to take that long to code, I just haven’t had much time the last few weeks what with work and preparing for my class. But it’s coming in the next couple of weeks. She’s got a really great blog and I’m excited to be a part of getting this design out for her. Check out tea@elevensies »

I start my first bout with teaching college students on Monday evening. I’m really excited about it, but have a bunch of work to do. I need to put together a better keynote presentation and finish up the first assessment for them. I need to get a feel for what they already know about web design. So I’m going to “test” them the first evening. They’ll get points just for taking the assessment, no matter what they know or don’t know. So hopefully the students will forgive me for a test during the first class.

If you’re interested, I could still use help creating questions for that initial test. Check out my previous post and leave the question you think I should ask.

This day has been so tiring. I’m not sure if it was the storm last night waking me up at 3 AM, all the work I’ve had to do at work or what… but my normal (and even abnormal) efforts at coffee intake did not work.

I need to get some new electric guitar strings. I’m think I may just spring for the Thomastik-Infelds… I haven’t played them since college and I love them. And figure I might as well. To order or to drive to Guitar Center? That’s the question. I have no other reason to drive the 45 minutes out to Fairview Heights, and it’s so far when Musician’s Friend is just a few clicks away… probably cheaper to order them online.

Today I trained faculty in using dotCMS again. It went pretty well. A little bit tedious considering I had zero energy. But all in all I think it all worked out. New Student Orientation starts tomorrow and the semester starts next week.

As I continue to read design blogs, more and more I wish I could just quit work and do freelance all the time. But it’s certainly not feasible at this point. I need the steady work, even if I have to put up with things and people.

I’ve got a bunch of projects I need to finish up and barely any drive to do them after everything at the day job. Do I feel a bit overwhelmed? Yes, certainly. But I am holding out for a specific project that I think is going to be awesome…

It’s been one of those weeks. Work’s been a little bit more involved/overwhelming/frustrating since I once again became the sole web manager. It’s a little more stressful. On top of that we feel kind of antsy to get on with life, to do something else. To do something new and exciting. But we’ll have to see what happens.

Jessica hates her new job and  that’s kind of frustrating. There really isn’t anything else that she can do in Greenville because no one is hiring. At the same time, I don’t get paid enough to cover all of our bills and student loan payments. It’s not an ideal situation and beyond that, it’s one that makes us disappointed in our life here just a little bit more than it already was.

I’ve got a couple of new projects I’m working on that I’m excited about. I’ll talk more about them as things take shape.

I need some forward motion though. At least I’ve got this class to teach this semester. I’m excited about that

Man, this past week might have been the roughest I’ve ever experience. It was for sure the roughest in my young working career.

Suffice it to say that all institutes of higher education are hurting financially due to light wallets and expensive tuitions. And many of those schools are having to take drastic measures to stay afloat. And it finally hit my small school in the Midwest. And particularly the office I was working for.

No, I didn’t lose my job. But I have been moved to a different department and am working for different bosses now. And it’s certainly a welcome change. The move to IT actually relieves a lot of stress that I think has been building up for the past three weeks since we found out the VP over our department was heading to a different job at a different school. I take uncertainty hard. But this shaky ground solidified fairly quickly and I now know what I’m doing and who I am working for.

There’s a lot of change going on in my workplace, but I’m glad I am now apart of a supportive office working with some of the smartest people I’ve ever known. Even better is that I’ve known many of them for a long time. It’s good to be back in IT.