One week down

The first week of school was great. Just wanted to leave a quick update. I'm excited for my classes. Right now they are just getting going so there is a lot of review material, which has been good for me. There are some things I just didn't grasp as well as I should have and this is giving me the opportunity to make sure I really understand it. The classes move fast though and new material is coming up so I hope I can keep on top of everything. I love interacting with the people in my program and I like the direction and vision the teachers have. The program is great. I love going to school...hopefully it stays that way :)

Besides school starting we have been trying to finish taking care of all the small things with moving, like registering our car. Unfortunately this hasn't gone so smoothly. I don't know if it is just Pennsylvania or any state, but registering our car has been a nightmare. We had to get Pennsylvania Insurance, then go and get our Pennsylvania drivers license, get inspections etc... Getting our drivers licenes was a nightmare also because Sharon at one point had a PA license, so they wanted to see it and since it had her maiden name on it we had to come back with our marriage license to show why/how her name had changed. It was crazy.
After getting our PA insurance lined up, they said they couldn't register us because it didn't start until the 1st of September(a whole 3 days away). On top of that because the car was 'gifted' to us less than 6 months ago they want us to make sure we've paid some sort of taxes on the car so we have to pay a sales tax of 7% of 80% of the blue book value of the car. What a joke. Any way we hope to have it all taken care of, inspections, insucrance, licesnes and all by the end of this week. This has been the most frustrating thing for us. We've been back and forth from our house and offices all week, valuable time when you could be getting other things done.

We made a visit this weekend to Del and Mary Lou, Sharon's parents in Marietta, PA about 3 1/2 hours from us this week. It was fun seeing them. We carpooled with them down to the DC Temple for a session Saturday. That evening we had dinner with Sharon's old High School friend and her husband, then headed back to Pittsburgh.

We are starting to make friends at church. We discovered a family that lives on our same street, just a few houses down. He is going to dental school at PITT. They have three little girls. They invited us to dinner tonight. We also have a church picnic tomorrow for Labor Day that we are looking forward to.

Sharon starts work this week. She will be helping in the classroom for a non-for-profit pre-school/daycare called interplay. They work on integrating children with diablilities with other children. It should be fun. She is working on all the paperwork and screenings for that, like finger printing, FBI background check, etc.

We hope you all have a great week.

Pittsburgh

We've now been in Pittsburgh for a week and our little apartment is coming together. We’ve been learning a lot with our first big move and have been experiencing a lot of growth. We got the internet up and running and I have time to sit down before classes start tomorrow to update our blog. Here are some pictures from the summer. Some of Sharon's sisters family, who we stayed with in Washington and some of the fun activities they took us along on, as well as some pictures of the famous Pike's place market.


Sharon got here last week with my family and we piled the boxes in our living room and slept on the floor. It was fun to have my mom, dad, and littlest (but by no means smallest) brother McKay here for a couple of days. We appreciate the help and support we got from them. Monday I gave them the grand tour of campus, which was fun, but probably not the most exciting. We then went down the road and saw some of the University of Pittsburgh and showed them the Cathedral of learning and checked out some of the museums and other buildings. While I was at a meeting they went and checked out the botanical gardens just behind campus, which they reported was pretty cool. You can see pictures that my mom posted here.

Tuesday my family took off for Amish country and Indianapolis and we started to unpack. Things are definitely coming together. We made a couple trips to IKEA and found some nice, relatively, cheap solutions for furniture that should get us through the next couple of years. I have some pictures of how the apartment is starting to look, but pictures never do much justice.
Before:

After:



We only have a few minor things to take care of now. A mattress, a possible couch cover, some curtains, and I'm going to try and build some shelves for food storage in a little closet by the kitchen.

School starts tomorrow. I’m excited. Orientation was fun. They did a good job at giving us time and information to get settled in before the load of classes falls on us, which I think will help. Orientation involved everything from a scavenger hunt all around Pittsburgh to some tests to see if we qualified to exempt any of the core classes. I partially exempted the database class, so I have some open credits for an extra class. I was hoping to exempt a few other classes, but I guess I wasn’t up to the Carnegie Mellon standard. It’s bitter sweet. It will be sweet to solidify my knowledge of the subjects I was hoping to exempt in classes that will be really good, but it’s bitter because I could have opened up some credit hours to take some classes in other areas.

Sharon has been busy since we’ve been here as well. Besides doing most of the house organizing she has been interviewing at a couple of places for a job. She recently had two second interviews with good results. One place, only a mile from our house, said they would love her help. It’s a non-for-profit daycare/pre-school called interplay. She would be helping in the classroom. The other interview was out in Columbus, Ohio. It is a political action and research group, non-partisan. Unfortunately they don’t have anything fulltime in Pittsburgh, only a couple part-time things with the elections coming up. She doesn’t know for sure what she’s going to do yet, but has to decide soon because they are waiting to hear back from her.

Career paths have been a subject we’ve been discussing a lot between ourselves lately. It’s hard to know where choices of employment will lead and how to choose employment that will take you where you want to go. We would love to hear people’s thoughts on this. Feel free to post something, or email us.

I’m hoping to keep up the blog; it might be back to once a month with classes starting. If you need our new mailing address you can email us. For security and privacy reasons I'm not going to post it.

We love you all and hope all well for you.

Coast to Coast...again.

Well, I finish my internship for the summer. It was a wonderful experience, and I feel that I have some good experience under my belt. Many have asked if I could see myself with the company I interned with or working for some other Big Accounting firm. After reflecting I have decided that I could do this kind of work, but not for a long time. I found it interesting to be in different companies and to talk with management in those companies to understand the way their systems worked. It was exciting. That said, I don’t see myself with an accounting firm for more than 5 or 6 years. Why not? I don’t have much of a desire to be a Partner. Accounting firms main business is Auditing, although there is some ‘advisory’ or consulting work too, I’m not interested in the core of what an accounting firm does. 5 years would give me two years of being at the bottom of the chain doing grunt work, understanding all the ins and outs of IT auditing and understanding business processes. Then three years in a position where I could actually start getting experience managing a team, being part of planning, resource allotment, and building relationships with the firm and within the team. The firms are good about keeping their employees qualified with certifications and other education that would also be advantageous for continued career development. It seems to me that at the five year mark people stay because they want to be a partner or keep moving up the chain, something that doesn’t really interest me.

I don’t think audit is my true passion. I have come up with this analogy and it seems to work well for the current time. Auditing to me, perhaps not to others, is like rappelling. It is interesting and fairly engaging. The focus isn’t so much on moving forward as much as it is on sitting back and looking at what is going on around. There is vision and insight of what one would have to climb or has climbed. My passion and what I eventually want to be involved with as a career will be more like climbing. As much fun and as useful as rappelling can be, I personally feel more fulfilled and challenged climbing. I want to be involved in the dirty work and challenge of building something. Having to trouble shoot and come up with solutions. I want a job where at the end I can look up and see I’ve gotten somewhere and feel like I have overcome, accomplished something significant, and fixed a problem or made the world better. Talking with my brother-in-law and visiting Microsoft, I realized that being involved in software development is defiantly one way I feel that; auditing, not as much.

I had strong reviews, and the firm was prepared to offer me job for next September, however, changes in plans and switching schools means I will not be back in Seattle anytime soon, so they could not formally offer me the job. There is still a chance I could work for them wherever we end up, possibly the UK. I do hope to one day end up in Seattle though.

The day after finishing we were in the car on our way back to Park City; we have had such good luck with our car that we should have foreseen trouble on this trip. It started out a couple hours after we started and I got pulled over in Yakima. I was going 73 in a 60 zone, the lame thing is that it was about to turn to 70 L. I learned my lesson. A couple hours later we were about to gain some good elevation up a big hill so we stopped for our first fill up of the day and to switch drivers. As Sharon started the car up and put it into gear the car barely moved, it was like the gear just wouldn’t engage. Pushing on the gas just made the RPMs go way up. Even switching gears didn’t seem to help. With some patients the car eventually got going. We stopped and looked up the closest mechanic which took us back a couple of miles down the highway. By the time we got there it seemed to be working again. He said the clutch might just be slipping or the clutch needed replacing. He also said that if we made it over the big 7 mile hill we would probably be fine the rest of the way. We proceeded much slower and took the hill easily and cruising the rest of the way without any clutch problems. However, as we were rolling past Twin Falls and looking for a place to fill up, we suddenly heard a crazy sound like starching, banging and rattling all at the same time. It came from the back and under the car. We pulled over immediately. Sharon jumped out of the car and started looking around frantically. It sounded like the side of the car had fallen off or something, but she didn’t see anything wrong. We slowly started up again and after a couple of seconds it started again, only worse. We pulled over and again inspected the outside of the car, and below the car, starting to get worried. Again nothing seemed wrong. We started up again and the sound started again almost immediately. Sharon once again hopped out and as I slowly started driving she observed to see if anything fishy was going on with the car. We found it. The treed on our tire was starting to come off. A big flap with wires and all was flopping around and banging the inside of the wheel well. Lucky for us we were about ¾ of mile from the off ramp to the gas station. We pulled in slowly and a nice man with a garage for trucks helped us throw the spare on. He sent us up the road another 30 miles to the Mal-Mart in Burley. They were still open and not too busy so they got us in and out quickly. After that we didn’t have any problems. The next day at the shop it was determined that the clutch was slipping and all it needed was adjusting. We also had the Air Conditioner looked at, but they couldn’t fix it because it is the old rayon kind of coolant, so we are content to keep using the natural ‘windows down’ kind of air conditioner. With everything that happened we feel the lord was really looking after us and are happy most everything is working well now.

The next morning after arriving in Park City I jumped on a plane with as many bags as we could justify paying for (2) and headed to Pittsburgh. It really is amazing how things just seem to happen and work out. As I was on my way to the airport I got a call from Sharon’s sister. She and her husband, who are on their way to Africa for a few weeks to do research, were in Pittsburgh. They picked me up at the airport, took me to dinner with their extended family, dropped me off at our apartment, and took me to the grocery store. I’m so thankful for good family and charitable people. It was so nice to have some familiar faces the first day in a new town and some help. The alternatives I had planned on would have been much messier and hectic.

I have been doing all the fun orientation stuff the last few days. I made a quick calculation and I think that about 50% of my program is from India, about 20% from China, Taiwan, and Japan, maybe 20% from Europe, Africa, and South America, and I think there are only 10% of us from the US. I’ve only officially meet three, but I’ve seen some others that I feel confident are from the US as well. Today was my first day at church; the ward seems like a good one. There are a lot of couples with small children. Sharon, my parents, and McKay should be getting here tonight! Exciting. Good news is there have been no major car problems on this leg of the trip. I think the stereo might have stopped working because of a fuse, and apparently we might have a bad spark plug, but it hasn’t affected anything too much.

Pittsburgh has been great so far. It was stormy the night I got in, but the rest of the time has been sunny and very nice. I thought it was going to be really hot and humid, but so far it’s been fairly cool and I haven’t noticed the humidity. The sun has been out and everything has been beautiful. As I’ve had time to finally sit down and relax and think as well as reflect on the past couple of weeks and especially last three days at school, I am really excited and I feel deep down that this is the right move for Sharon and me. We appreciate everyone’s love and support.
Thanks for everything everyone has done for us the past few months. We love you all. Keep us updated on life.