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.