Hey Family--
Long time no hear! We have been a little blog-resistant, but are willing to give this a shot in order to stay in touch with everybody.
We are going through some changes at our house.
First, and foremost, I have left my employer of 10 years. It is a long, ugly drawn-out story. But the uptake is that I worked for a publicly held company and we went through a hostile takeover by our largest shareholder...an older gentleman who has more money than sense. And he is trying to prove to his old enemies that he still "has it." So he swept in, turned the direction of the company, and installed all his old buddies into upper management. So in the past 6 months, the former management team has all basically run for the exits.
This means I get to do what I have always talked about doing, but never did....namely, start my own business. It isn't the best economy in the world to do this in, but I think we will be fine anyway. There just may not be any new Mercedes or BMWs in our immediate future (not that they would have been there anyway!). I have started an Internet publishing company and run it out of our basement. I release my first product this week. It will be sold by a couple of companies initially but we hope to grow. I have two other products in development that I hope to finish by the end of the summer. We'll see how this all goes.
As a result, Mary Lou has gone back to work....not something we planned, exactly, for right now either. But we always DID plan that she would go back to work when I was ready quit working for someone else and start working for myself. And since my hand has been forced in that regards, Mary Lou has gamely returned to work. She is a therapist at a facility that specializes in eating disorders. She worked with several of the founders of the business years and years ago and they have been encouraging her to join them for a long time. So she jumped in. She is getting a new perspective on this strange and life-threatening behavioral disorder. And she is quickly gaining the reputation of being the resident butt-kicker. If you get Mary Lou for your therapist, you better want to get better.
This also means that I am the stay-at-home Dad around here. The kids are squirming under my new "iron-fisted" rule. But we are all adjusting. And I get to pick out and prepare the meals, chauffer the kids, etc. It has been a pretty wild ride. And now that school is out, it should only get more interesting.
The kids are doing great. Today is the last day of school and the two older girls are skipping the day. It is so wierd the way they do this in Utah. The last couple weeks are just watching videos and playing games. They don't even take roll. The girls' teachers told their classes if they show up today they have to help clean the classrooms. So with that kind of encouragement, my girls are sleeping in for the day. The younger two had to go and pick up their grades.
More change....Lincoln is officially done with grade school and is heading off to Junior High next year. I hope they are ready for this. Holly is going to be a senior next year. She's driving (both exciting and terrifying to her parents), dating (ditto) and starts her first "real" job on Monday. She drives a dainty 3/4 ton pickup, the dream vehicle for any high school girl. Sierra starts teaching her art classes, again, to the neighborhood kids this summer. She is saving her money to buy a pottery kickwheel. We are planning on having a wheel and a kiln by the end of the summer, probably. She also has a regular babysitting gig of watching a family with the three most-difficult kids in the ward. But the parents pay well. And Sierra can handle them....well, as much as anybody can handle them. Mackenzie is going to find herself, for the first time ever, the only Wise kid at her school starting this fall. That should be interesting. It will be fun to watch her transition from the youngest kid in carpool to being the oldest one.
Of course, we have plenty of projects around here. I am ordering some lumber today from Home Depot to start some shelves in my garage. I just can't take the clutter anymore. There are a couple of rooms that are the last to recover from our great remodel project. The garage is one of those hold-outs. We are hoping to make some progress in that area this summer. We are also just finishing getting our vegetable garden in. We should finish up tonight. And we are re-landscaping a little part of our back yard. Oh...and lots of sprinkler work as is the trend in the spring. It's not like we are building a museum in our backyard...but we are busy anyway.
We hope you are all enjoying the end of spring! The hot summer is coming.
David, Mary Lou, and the kids
Long time no hear! We have been a little blog-resistant, but are willing to give this a shot in order to stay in touch with everybody.
We are going through some changes at our house.
First, and foremost, I have left my employer of 10 years. It is a long, ugly drawn-out story. But the uptake is that I worked for a publicly held company and we went through a hostile takeover by our largest shareholder...an older gentleman who has more money than sense. And he is trying to prove to his old enemies that he still "has it." So he swept in, turned the direction of the company, and installed all his old buddies into upper management. So in the past 6 months, the former management team has all basically run for the exits.
This means I get to do what I have always talked about doing, but never did....namely, start my own business. It isn't the best economy in the world to do this in, but I think we will be fine anyway. There just may not be any new Mercedes or BMWs in our immediate future (not that they would have been there anyway!). I have started an Internet publishing company and run it out of our basement. I release my first product this week. It will be sold by a couple of companies initially but we hope to grow. I have two other products in development that I hope to finish by the end of the summer. We'll see how this all goes.
As a result, Mary Lou has gone back to work....not something we planned, exactly, for right now either. But we always DID plan that she would go back to work when I was ready quit working for someone else and start working for myself. And since my hand has been forced in that regards, Mary Lou has gamely returned to work. She is a therapist at a facility that specializes in eating disorders. She worked with several of the founders of the business years and years ago and they have been encouraging her to join them for a long time. So she jumped in. She is getting a new perspective on this strange and life-threatening behavioral disorder. And she is quickly gaining the reputation of being the resident butt-kicker. If you get Mary Lou for your therapist, you better want to get better.
This also means that I am the stay-at-home Dad around here. The kids are squirming under my new "iron-fisted" rule. But we are all adjusting. And I get to pick out and prepare the meals, chauffer the kids, etc. It has been a pretty wild ride. And now that school is out, it should only get more interesting.
The kids are doing great. Today is the last day of school and the two older girls are skipping the day. It is so wierd the way they do this in Utah. The last couple weeks are just watching videos and playing games. They don't even take roll. The girls' teachers told their classes if they show up today they have to help clean the classrooms. So with that kind of encouragement, my girls are sleeping in for the day. The younger two had to go and pick up their grades.
More change....Lincoln is officially done with grade school and is heading off to Junior High next year. I hope they are ready for this. Holly is going to be a senior next year. She's driving (both exciting and terrifying to her parents), dating (ditto) and starts her first "real" job on Monday. She drives a dainty 3/4 ton pickup, the dream vehicle for any high school girl. Sierra starts teaching her art classes, again, to the neighborhood kids this summer. She is saving her money to buy a pottery kickwheel. We are planning on having a wheel and a kiln by the end of the summer, probably. She also has a regular babysitting gig of watching a family with the three most-difficult kids in the ward. But the parents pay well. And Sierra can handle them....well, as much as anybody can handle them. Mackenzie is going to find herself, for the first time ever, the only Wise kid at her school starting this fall. That should be interesting. It will be fun to watch her transition from the youngest kid in carpool to being the oldest one.
Of course, we have plenty of projects around here. I am ordering some lumber today from Home Depot to start some shelves in my garage. I just can't take the clutter anymore. There are a couple of rooms that are the last to recover from our great remodel project. The garage is one of those hold-outs. We are hoping to make some progress in that area this summer. We are also just finishing getting our vegetable garden in. We should finish up tonight. And we are re-landscaping a little part of our back yard. Oh...and lots of sprinkler work as is the trend in the spring. It's not like we are building a museum in our backyard...but we are busy anyway.
We hope you are all enjoying the end of spring! The hot summer is coming.
David, Mary Lou, and the kids
No comments:
Post a Comment