Incommunicado

After a weekend of cleaning, we're now almost fully prepared for the packers, who arrive tomorrow morning. We'll find out Tuesday how long it will take for the movers to get to Illinois. If it's just a few days, we'll head straight to McHenry with a stop in Wichita. If it's much longer than that, we'll take the long way: Denver to Wichita to Tulsa to St. Louis to Chicago. So, this may be our last post for some time.

The only thing we have left to do tonight is pack what we're carrying with us. Just the essentials: Mac Mini, GameCube, GameBoy, iPod, etc.

Finally, here are our thoughts on tomorrow night's championship game:

Wendy correctly predicted Illinois and UNC would be the last two teams standing. She's going with Illinois. I'll be rooting for Illinois, but I picked the Tar Heels to win it all, so I'm sticking with them in a close one: UNC, 85-80.

Follow your bliss

Today was my last day at Naropa. I knew that it would be sad to say goodbye, but I think it was actually harder than I was expecting. I managed to avoid thinking about it too much for most of the day, even though I (like Randy) didn't actually have that much to do today. It felt a little bit like the last day of school before summer - everyone was terribly unfocused and unproductive today.

After work, my co-workers and I all went for a bowling-pizza party extravaganza, which was lots of fun until it was time to leave, when most of us ended up in tears. Even though the job itself wasn't always the greatest, I don't know that I could have ever imagined having better co-workers or friends than them. I learned a lot of wonderful things while working at Naropa, and very few of them actually had anything to do with university admissions.

One of the phrases you hear on a semi-regular basis at Naropa is "follow your bliss." I think that writing will give me the opportunity to do that, but maybe I hadn't realized just how much this job was allowing me to follow my bliss until it was time to give it up. On the other hand, I can't pretend I'm not glad that I'll never have to look at another visitation request form again.

It's bittersweet. And I'm melancholy.

A tribe of superior men

Hello everyone!

So, Randy and I will be moving to Illinois in about a week. We decided that now would be a good time to start a blog where we can keep everyone up to date about what we're up to in the Land of Lincoln. (Side note: You may or may not be interested to learn that Illinois translates from Native American as "tribe of superior men." I was interested, but then I'm a dork.)

Randy has a new job with Follett Library Resources as a web application programmer. (Follett provides services, software, and books to K-12 school libraries.) I'm not quite sure what I'll be doing, but I think I may give professional writing a try.

We spent this past Thursday, Friday and Saturday up in McHenry looking for a new place to live. We found a townhouse that seems really great - it's comparable to our apartment now, but it has a two-car garage as well. Goodbye, ice scraping on winter mornings! I met Randy's new boss, who gave us a tour of Follett and went out to dinner with us, along with his wife and their daughter, and another of Randy's new co-workers and his wife. Everyone was very friendly, and I have a good feeling about Follett and Illinois in general.

Feel free to leave us comments or questions - we aim to please!