Catching Up

Well it's been far to long since the last post, but to my credit things have been crazy busy. Josh and I are back in Utah now, and settling into a routine again. Every time we come back from our summer work we realize how much we missed Utah. It's good to be around friends and family again. We are both going to school at UVU right now and both taking a full class load of 18 credits each, which keeps us busy all on its own. But of course there's always so much more to do than homework. Josh has been especially busy lately. He's taken on a couple major projects the biggest one being rebuilding the transmission of his Maxima; he's also doing tons of other work on it. I can't tell you exactly what he's doing because it's too technical for me and I know I would just make a fool of myself trying to talk smart about cars. I do know that when he's done with everything the car will be like new. Because of the car work we have been sharing one car for the past couple months. At first I wasn't looking forward to this, but it actually hasn't been that bad. Our school schedules line up pretty well so that helps a lot. Josh's other big time consuming project is building a set of high end speakers. This has been an ongoing project for years, and they are finally getting it done. Again this is something I can't say much about, but I know they are going to be great to have. I'll see if I can get some pictures up of the work in progress. We have also done some fun things since we got back to Utah, including an amazing concert and the Ringling Brothers Circus. Unfortunately we don't have a working camera other than our cell phones so the pictures aren't that great. We did however just order a brand new camera and can't wait to start using it.

Here are some pictures to catch everyone up on what we've been up to since July:

The sun seems to be stronger in Louisiana. We went tubing down a river with some work friends and didn't use as much sunscreen as we'd thought we needed. It was the worst sunburn I've ever had, we could hardly move for an entire week. Both of us were extremely red/purple and very swollen.

 

Josh and I recently babysat my sister's three kids while she was in the hospital having her fourth. We had a lot of fun playing at the nearby park. Carter even did the monkey bars by himself for the first time.

 

 

Our new nephew, Gavin. Born October 8, 2010

Independence Day New Orleans Style

After looking around online trying to find some good fireworks for the Fourth, I came across an article that talked about the show in New Orleans. It said that it was one of the top five firework shows in the US. We got lucky that this year the Fourth of July was on a Sunday because that is the only day Josh has off, we decided to spend the day and do a little sightseeing too.

After spending a ridiculous $30.00 for parking we wandered around the French Market and Canal Street doing some shopping.

Then we went to Café Du Monte for their famous beignets, they were very good and reminded us a little of scones.

The fireworks were going to be right on the Mississippi River, “The Dueling Barges” was the name for the show. Although we got great seats, right on the water, the show was a little disappointing. We both agreed that we’d seen better fireworks shows in Utah. We had expected the show to live up to its name, but there was no dueling, just two barges about 100 yards apart launching identical fireworks. 

Overall it was a fun day, except for the horrible traffic on the way back to Baton Rouge.

How many times can you move in one summer?

     Life has been quite crazy for us the past couple of months, sorry if it gets confusing. As I said at the beginning of the summer we went to Jackson, Mississippi to work. After two and a half very slow weeks the company decided to merge the Jackson office with their most successful office in the company, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The current sales managers didn’t like how this idea felt to their egos so they spoke to a regional sales manager from APX Alarm and he offered to hire everyone on and put them in their Gulf Coast office which was currently working in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. This APX office did things a little different than other security offices; they were what APX called a mobile office. They worked and moved around an area of the country, staying in hotels as they changed locations.
     All of this put Josh and I in an interesting situation. When Silverline said they wanted to merge the offices they were only really thinking about the salesmen, as it is with anyone in this industry. Because of this the Silverline Baton Rouge office only wanted the technicians from Jackson if they were getting the salesmen to as well. This left us with no other option but to go to Hattiesburg with APX.
     Hattiesburg, Mississippi is a sad little city about two hours south of Jackson. Home to the University of Southern Mississippi, it reminded me a lot of Cedar City, Utah, except that it was a big enough town to have TWO Wal-Marts (a big deal to one chatty local). So Josh and I settled in with all of our stuff into a small hotel room. Despite the many negative aspects of living in a hotel room for weeks Josh had some perks in his work; he was working with new and easier to install equipment and he was also getting along well with the other techs. APX also offered me some part time work; it wasn’t much but better than nothing. I didn’t see the point in trying to find a job locally when the office was planning on moving on to Gulf Port, MS in just a few weeks. By the time I had found a job I wouldn’t even be able to put in my two weeks notice.
     Things seemed to be going alright for us, Josh was finally getting as much work as we expected from the beginning of the summer. Just when we were starting to feel as settled as we could be in a hotel room the lead tech, Shane, from the Silverline Baton Rouge office called. He was in desperate need of techs to work in his office. The problem for him was that Louisiana is very strict with licensing for security companies; lucky for him that Josh was licensed to install in Louisiana already, a process that takes weeks. In short, he made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. We packed up our cars, again, to head for Baton Rouge. We left on good terms with APX, we even began talking to them about next summer.
     So we are now living in an apartment (Hallelujah!) in Baton Rouge, but Josh has been working all over the area. This office rather than move around all summer just choose a central spot to live and travel to different areas to get the most out of the summer. Lately Josh has been working in New Orleans, about an hour and a half south of Baton Rouge. Things are good with us although very busy. Silverline did not have a job for me when we went to Baton Rouge so I have been going with Josh everyday to help make his work go faster. (With this job the faster you can complete an install the more work you get.) It’s been working out very well, we have a system down and my help gets us at least a few extra installs a week.

I apologize for how long it’s been since I posted, I will try my best to post again soon. We hope all our friends and family are well and enjoying their summers, we miss you.

One more semester down...too many to go.

Well, grades for last semester came out. Josh and I both did really well. My lowest grade was a B+, which with 19 credit hours I am happy about. Josh also got good grades, and even a better grade than he expected in one class because of his well written final paper.

"We're Goin' to Jackson"

Sorry it took me so long to post again; things have been pretty busy at work for me. Here’s how our drive out to Jackson went:

After three days, 32 hours of driving, a blizzard, a broken windshield wiper, a car break in, and a tornado we finally made it to Jackson, Mississippi.

            We finally got on the road from Utah at about 5:00. Our goal was to make it to Denver that night, which was eight or nine hours. The trip was going fine; we hit some rain after about six hours. The rain wasn’t so bad, but it quickly turned into slush and then very heavy snow and wind. We had a stressful hour or so of driving before we stopped to take a break. When we pulled over for some food Josh looked up the weather on his phone and found out that it was only going to get worse the farther east we went. Our GPS found an alternate route to Denver that took us immediately south on a two lane highway. That road ended up adding more miles on our drive, but it got us out of the bad weather quickly which was well worth the extra miles. We ended up making it to Denver around 2:30am; we found an inexpensive hotel near the airport and crashed for the night.

            The next day after a quick not so breakfast, breakfast at KFC we got back on the road. Our goal was to make it to Tulsa Oklahoma, about 12 hours. The drive was fairly uneventful for the first few hours, but once we got into Kansas we hit some patches of really heavy rain. It would be raining for five or ten miles and then sunny for a bit, then rain again. At the start of another rain storm Josh’s windshield wiper broke off. We were in the middle of nowhere (that’s all Kansas is anyway, right?) but we pulled off on the next exit to ask at the gas station where we could but a windshield wiper. We got lucky here because the gas station had a car shop attached. We were also lucky enough that they had the right size for Josh’s car; they only had few in stock. We got back on the road and the rest of the day was filled with the very repetitive landscape of Kansas and Northern Oklahoma.

            Before we left Denver we had used the free wireless internet at the hotel to help us find an inexpensive hotel in Tulsa. We ended up at Tulsa In and Suites; it was right off the freeway so we thought it would be convenient. It turns out that this hotel was the dirtiest hotels I have ever been in. Josh even had to fix the lock on the room door when we got into the room. By avoiding the bathroom as much as possible and covering the bed with our own bedding we managed to get a few hours of sleep.

            The next morning I headed out to the cars to start packing up our stuff and Josh went to check out. Unfortunately once I got to our cars I saw broken glass near Josh’s. I just stood there frozen thinking about everything that was packed in that car. Since his car was bigger we could fit all of our expensive stuff in it better, like both our computers with monitors, our flat screen TV, DVD player, and more. I just stood there until Josh came back from checking out and asked what was wrong. I tried to tell him, but I think I mostly just pointed in the direction of his car. After closer inspection we discovered that the passenger window of his car had been broken, but all that was taken was what was in Josh’s glove box: his brand new GPS and his MP3 player. We actually got extremely lucky considering that there was thousands of dollars worth of stuff in that car. We think the thief had half a brain because if he would have unlocked the door from the inside it would have set off the alarm. While it was a relief that more wasn’t taken it didn’t really help our stress level at the time.

We went back into the hotel to see if they had a security camera and a phone book to report it to the police. Of course the person working at the counter could care less about what happened; she didn’t even really seem surprised. Almost like this was a regular thing. She did give us a phone book and after a long hold with the police they told me car robberies were reported online only…

Our next step was to get Josh’s window replaced, we still needed to make it to Jackson that day. Rather than deal with the hotel staff we pulled out my laptop and leeched off a nearby hotel’s wireless internet. I called a few places and finally found a Safelite that could do the repair right away, as long as we came to them. Once we got there they said it could be anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours. We decided to kill some time, and find a local Starbucks or McDonalds with wireless internet and file a police report. After we finished we had nothing else to do except go back and wait for the window to be finished.  As it turns out, whatever the person used to break the window hit the window frame as well and bent it. The repair guy was able to bend it back enough to get the window in, but whenever we roll it up and down there’s a horrible grinding noise. Most likely we’ll have to get that fixed sometime. Which means more money lost because it’s not looking like insurance will cover any of this; we don’t think we’ll reach our deductible. Item taken from the vehicle are not covered by our policy, so we’ll most likely be just below or barely over it.

Well that was our drive, I probably missed some parts, but I think I got most of it. It was an adventure to say the least, let’s hope that our drive back to Utah at the end of the summer is less eventful.

PS. Please disregard my grammar errors, I typed this up pretty quickly and I am too lazy to read through it again.

Grateful to Have a Job

     So I suppose I should start from the beginning to bring everyone up to speed. A few months ago, Josh and I were looking at our summer plans, trying to figure out the best option for us. We knew we both need to find jobs, and we also knew that it is very hard to find a job these days. We finally decided to work for a security company again. Josh first tried calling a friend at the last company we worked at to see if he was looking for any technicians. He said that he may be and would get back to us. Just to have other options we spent some time looking at craigslist as well. After about a week we had two solid choices: Pinnacle security with Josh’s old friend, or a new company Silverline. Pinnacle was going to Queens New York and Silverline to the Alabama coast. We carefully weighed all the differences between the companies. We considered everything, from pay scale, to how many salesmen were going to be in that office, to who we were going to work with. Neither company had said that they had a job for me, so we just planned on me finding a job in the city we decided to go to. Silverline Security ended up being out final choice.
     After Josh signed all the paperwork and took a difficult certification test we found out that about half of the sales team was going out a few weeks earlier than usual to get a job on the summer. Typically the summer goes from the beginning of May to the end of August (the weekend before the Utah universities begin classes). We decided to try to take all of our finals a week early and see if we could make it out a week or two before all but one of the other technicians. This would be great for Josh because his pay is based on how many installs he gets, the more installs the more he gets paid for each one. An extra week or so where he is one of two techs would be a good way to get a jump start on getting to our goal number.
About two or three weeks before we were planning on leaving we found out that we would not be going to Alabama until a month or two into the summer. The licensing restrictions for Alabama were taking a lot longer than expected, but luckily everyone was already licensed to sell in Mississippi. So we were headed to Jackson, Mississippi for the first part of the summer.
     Another piece of news was that the manager of the office offered me a job. This was great news and made us really feel like we had made the right choice. The company worked really well with me, and they were even willing to rework their pay system.
     All of our teachers at UVU were willing to work with us on our finals so we jammed the last two weeks of a semester into four days. This was madness for me since I had 19 credit hours, and most of my teachers had big final projects and difficult finals. We also managed to do the packing during this time too, actually Josh managed to do the packing. I gave him a list and he did all the packing on Thursday while I finished up my last school project and final. Josh’s dad and step-mom, who we’ve been living with since last October, were kind enough to let us keep most of our stuff in their basement so the packing wasn’t as bad as it could have been if we were moving everything. The company we work for sets up apartments for us, they pay the rent and utilities and furnish the apartments with the basics. All we needed to bring was kitchen and bathroom stuff, bedding, and clothes.

Here goes...

Looking back on the last summer Josh and I spent working for a security company I can remember that many of our family and friends complained that they never heard from. My goal with this blog is to prevent some of that. I have not been a blogger, and I still don’t think I’ll be much of one. The main point is to keep people up to date with our lives and save a little bit of time in the process. Updates on our eventful trip to Jackson, and what is going on with our lives to come soon, hopefully tomorrow. Much love to our family and friends.