Coming together

I whined, ranted, and rambled for a while on a past blog post about my job situation. Yes, that was frustrating. Unfortunately, my problems weren't immediately resolved. I had to practice my patience. Apparently, I have a lot more of this than anyone in my family, who kept asking me a few times a day how things were going.

So let me tell you how things are going. ;)

Student teaching: I've applied to do my student teaching in New Mexico. I submitted my application on time, and I called to follow up a few times. One of those times, they told me that even though I'd already taken the Praxis exams to qualify to student teach in an English classroom, New Mexico had its own exams and I'd have to take those. There was one point where they didn't know if I'd be able to even apply for student teaching without taking the NM exams. "Don't worry," they told me, "You can just take the tests and then apply for student teaching in the spring." Um, too bad we may be living overseas by then and it's not an option! I told them this, and a few days later they got back to me that everything is fine. I don't have to take the NM tests unless I want a NM teaching license. Which I don't. I'll just get an AZ one (University of Phoenix, you know) and then move overseas.

Summer job: I called a couple times to follow up on my application here (I learned that patience doesn't mean failing to follow up), and frustratingly, the lady in charge of my application was gone for a week. But eventually she called me back, and sounding very pleased with my application, set up a phone interview on Monday. Yay! Wish me luck!

Moving to NM: So it appears that we will actually be moving to NM. This leaves us the question of how to make our way down there. Should we make a beeline directly to NM and spend as little time on the road as possible, or should we meander through the entire Western United States, hitting up all the National Parks and visiting all the relatives? We're still debating this issue, and chances are, we will do something in between. We're finding that when we discuss this in the morning, I'm psyched to do as much as possible. I make maps, plans, lists, and routes, finding a way to include every possible site along the way. Then in the evening, I lean towards doing absolutely nothing but driving directly to NM. Every proposed stop just adds hours to an already unavoidably long road trip. We will have a fussy baby, my body is going to hurt from sitting so long, and what are we going to do for those hours and hours and hours on the open road?

For some people, this would constitute "up in the air." However, for us, this is feeling quite certain, at least in comparison to how we've been lately. ;)