Last Day

I am in the middle of my last day of work at SMC. I have a few things left to pack up, and a meeting to go over loose ends and I am done. It feels weird to pack up and leave. I am leaving my files and desk in a little better shape than I did when I left Stevenson, but I have had a lot less time to acquire junk, and I don’t have nearly the volume of files I did as a CRE. Tomorrow begins the earnest search for Portland employment and housing. The housing part I am not worried about at all. There are plenty of apartments all over the city, and a ton more in the ‘burbs. I am planning on casting a pretty wide employment net to see what comes back. I am going to look at getting my Oregon food/liquor servers card so I can apply for bartending gigs again. I am not gunning for a booze slinging job, but I will apply for the ones I see. I liked the simplicity of bartending. The only stresses were about keeping up with orders on busy nights, and checking IDs. I would need to brush up on my mixology, and learn all the crappy popular fru-fru drinks that are all the rage these days. I applied for a couple of Higher Ed jobs, and I have a set of bookmarked tabs of all the area colleges. Now that we are free to head down there anytime we need to, we’ll start looking through the paper and responding to craigslist posts. I think the fact that we are pretty flexible is going to help a lot with this job search.

On the job interviewing tip, there is a Wall Street Journal article on strange interview requests I read about this morning on lifehacker.com. The article basically says that you should just do whatever crazy thing they ask because if you say no, you will probably not get the job. My natural paranoia makes me hate the idea of handwriting analysis and three hour psych profiles as part of a job interview. I imagine that while I was “interview mode” I would probably go along with it, but if I did not get the job I would probably raise a huge stink to get a hold of whatever analysis they did of me.

I have never been asked to do anything too strange in an interview. I have been asked questions I knew were illegal to ask (Married? Have kids? Are you Mexican?) all things that are probably to my benefit to answer in a Higher Ed interview. I guess the strangest interview I ever had was for the high school newspaper where they made you do your interview standing on top of a table, and they just asked stupid questions about monkeys and tv shows.

Anyway, back to cleaning up my office and files…

First mission

Hey there
Originally uploaded by gregandchristine.

We made our first trek to Portland with a serious eye towards figuring out where we are going to live. The trip was mostly sucessful. We discovered that we won't have any trouble finding an apartment in an area we want to live. The problem is that there are a whole bunch of areas we would be happy living in.

There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle, and it is going to take some time for them all to fall into place. Where we live should be a practical distance from where we work-- since we don't know where that is going to be it makes the choice a little more difficult. The plan is to look for an affordable place near public transportation that we can rent month to month... then find a better place once we settle into jobs. That still doesn't really narrow down the places we can live. Not that I am complaining about having to many rad places we can live.

stumptown trip

We are heading down to Portland tomorrow and camping about 40 minutes SE of town. This saves us some money, allows us to use some of our great camping gear, and gives us easy access to the SW 'burbs where we are likely to be living. The other place we will probably check out will be the NE side of town, but there are plenty of good neighborhoods spread out all over the place. I am looking for a good guide to the different neighborhoods, but I haven't found one that is very complete. If I find a good online one I'll post the link, and if not I'll put up info about the neighborhood we end up in. Wish us good weather for our camping trip. It is supposed to be raining a little, but you never can tell with the Northwest weather. So we'll be back Sunday afternoon with some pics and stories. Have a great weekend.

the big news

As I implied below... I am leaving my job, and we are moving to Portland in the next month. The job turned out to be kind of a dud, and I never quite fit in the college here. There are things I could have done differently at different points, and there are things that I think could stand to change where I was working, but all in all it isn't the place for me, and Lacey isn't really the place for us. So back to plan A. My plan it to meet with an admissions counselor at Portland State and map out a plan to get a Master's in Counseling, starting the program there in Fall 2006. We will be going down there a couple of times over the next few weeks and scoping out a place to live and running down some job leads. Please wish us luck on our new adventure, and we'll do our best to keep you updated.

The eightball made me do it

Oh wise magic eightball

Should I quit my job and move to Portland?: Yes

Will quitting my job and trying to leave here be a total pain in the ass?: Yes, definitely

Will my family and I be okay if we move to Portland?: Signs point to yes

Will be be able to find jobs in our first month there?: Most likely

Would you lie to me magic eightball?: very doubtful

Will moving to Portland be a good move for Colin? : You can count on it

Portland here we come.

site work

I added a flickr bar to this page, a large one to Colin's page and redid the floresfamily.org main page. Everything has now been reduced to something simple and straightforward. I still have a lot to fix on the emptybox page, but that will have to wait for a while. We took some more pictures of Colin with our aged digital camera while out and about this weekend as part of our resolution to do just that. I am finishing up another bout of research on digital cameras with plans for purchasing a new one in the coming week. The current leader of the pack is the Casio EXZ50 based on John's personal endorsement, and many positive online reviews.

new blog plans

There has been a fair amount of stuff going on, but it is just so hard to find/ make the time to post. I never really have the time to write out well developed posts at work, and at home I don’t spend too much time on the computer because of Colin. We have settled into a new off campus apartment, which is much larger than our last place and has a fireplace. I have decided today to install picassa and hello and use that to put up pictures of Colin with more regularity since the last post we made to his page was months ago. I was using iphoto to generate the picture web pages, but the G4 is currently living in the closet since we don’t have room on the computer table for two monitors, and I haven’t convinced myself it is worth it to shell out for a kvm.

My plan for getting back into blogging is to switch the template on this site so it isn’t so horrible to look at (in IE in particular) I don’t know what happened to the template, but I swear the color choices weren’t supposed to be so bad. So new template… maybe a flickr account to solve the photo posting woes, and more posting. Watch this space for some potentially really big news in the near future.