Alie has been telling me that I should make a post, so here goes. It goes without saying (2 weeks without a blog post on here means there is a whole lot of not saying) that we’ve been really busy. So here’s my rundown on the last couple of weeks:

June 30 – We pack everything up and put it in a moving truck. Alie will tell you that I was very nervous to just have all of our belongings chillin’ in one place. I would wake up every couple hours and look outside to make sure our truck hadn’t been stolen.

July 1 – We leave Provo at 5:30am. Alie drove with Jack attack in the car, and I drove in the moving truck. Believe it or not, she only got to Oceanside about 90 minutes before I did because she had to stop every few hours and feed Jack. I drove 55-60 mph the whole way, and got there at 6:30pm. That makes for a 14 hour drive! Our victories are that I got 14 mpg in our moving truck, and Alie got 35 mpg in our car. We effectively spent a little more than half of our moving truck gas budget, which makes for good saved money. Granted, I didn’t run the A/C much in the moving truck, and it got so hot in there that I opened the window in Barstow and I thought it was cold outside.

July 2 – We had some friends from our ward come and help us move all of our stuff into a storage unit. Props to Extra Space Storage, since we may only be in the storage unit for 2 months, and the first month is free. When I told them that, they just said that I was sure getting a killer deal!

July 3-7 – We were at Carlsbad State Beach with Alie’s parents. It was really nice to just sit on the beach. I really haven’t had a vacation for quite some time.

July 8 – I will tell you that I had the most lazy birthday ever, and it was great.

July 9 – We had a crazy day catering with Alie’s parents. They booked four jobs between Friday and Saturday. We were responsible for driving one job up to Lake Elsinore (50 minute drive), and Alie and I actually served the dinner at another party close to Oceanside beach. I got to be the legit guy that cut the tri tip right in front of people’s eyes and put it on their plates. It was quite fun.

And that pretty much brings us through Sunday and today, in which we are back to normal. So here are some questions that you may have:

1. Why the heck has Alie not posted? Well I’m sure there’s a good reason, but the only one I can think of is that Alie’s camera broke right before we came down. Her trusty Sony digital camera had its screen die out, so we’re waiting on her new DSLR to come in the mail. She is very stoked.
2. Do you guys miss Provo? I’ll defer to Alie on this one, but I really do miss a lot of things. Provo is definitely greener, and its nice to wake up to the mountains, even if they block the sun from shining on your house in the morning. I miss playing soccer and tennis every week, and running on a street that isn’t a hill. I miss going to church on Sunday with such awesome people. I miss working with James, Spencer and Jonathan. However, I think that the choices we have made so far here in San Diego will let us find our groove and lifestyle down here. Alie’s home ward is really fun, if not really quirky, and I feel like we belong here to some extent.
3. How is Jack adjusting to the change? Very well. In fact, he has done much better than expected. Within a day he changed his sleep schedule to California time. He took his normal naps, and he was happy. He is still adjusting to the noise at some times of day, and since I’m not working yet, every day is like the weekend, so we get out a bit which screws around with his nap schedule.
4. Didn’t your new job start today? Well, yes and no. When I worked at BYU, I became very, very knowledgeable about a certain piece of software. Little did I know that the projects I worked on were becoming well known by the company that made the software. In the end, we were just taking the tools they gave us, and making them into something useful for BYU. However, they really liked our work, and among other people working at BYU, they came to know my name. Needless to say, when I left BYU they persued me to work for them, and the details worked out. I cannot state how hard of a decision it was to turn down an employer at the last minute. A part of me still feels hurt because I feel like I wronged them, like I was dishonest or withholding, but in all reality, I wasn’t. After a lot of prayer and thought (really, I think that Alie and I were sick of thinking/praying/talking about it) we realized that there were some distinct opportunities with each potential career option, and that I would be happier and more benefited with one. I feel that doing anything different would have been dishonest to myself, and that I would have been dishonest to just pick one and play games while thinking about the other. I feel that in no way was either option a bad thing, and we would have been well off with either option. We have nothing bad to say about the company I had to turn down. We really do wish them the best.
5. So who are you going to work for, and when are you going to start? The company I’m going to work for is called Service-Now.com. What do they do? For nerds, ServiceNow is a SaaS solution for IT Service Management. An ERP package for IT resources. For non-nerds, just know that at your work, when you call IT, they file all kinds of stuff to track their computer systems, your problems, and their other different projects and tasks. I will be a programmer for them. I will start on July 18th.