We are both still looking for jobs where we can do good work and be proud. Teresa is looking all over the country, and nothing, bupkis. I have also been looking all over and also got bupkis. Well, that’s not true. I did get a job with some folks in Florida who give me several hours of work to do every month. I can’t survive on that, so I found a job at a local movie theater for minimum wage. That’s just pathetic for the amount of work I give them. I feel like I have gone over all of this so I will move on.

We are both still looking for work.

Teresa may have a lead on a job north of Austin, TX. She has had one interview with them, and has another one tomorrow. I am not sure if she has actually applied for the job though… It kind of came out of nowhere, the first interview did.

I have started looking all over the country for work. It has come to the point where we will move to wherever it is that one of us finds a job. I might have a lead on a job in Greenville, SC. We will see. I have a friend asking around for me and one of the companies he mentioned is looking for a Junior Developer. I can do that, very well indeed. I will need to bone up on my skills a little in case something comes of it.

That’s pretty much the new news. It ain’t much, but it’s what our lives have been filled with lately. A whole lot of searching for work and a whole lot of rejections. This is life I suppose.

We are getting tired of these No’s. they are weighing on us. Heavily. The stress is building, and even Olive can feel it. Can we get just one Yes? Preferably in a place that will work for both of us? Please?

My job at Biltmore ended and I started the search for a job. Sadly none really showed themselves for a while. I have been hemorrhaging money like crazy, and applying to jobs like mad. I eventually found one job, but the hours are not proving to be very helpful, so I started looking for another job and found it at Target. That job only lasted two days though because the job caused my forearms to hurt like crazy, putting me out of commission for just under a week. I have since found another job at a local movie theater, Cinemark. This job is fine, it just has low pay, and I am one of the oldest people working as an usher. It’s kind of sad really.

Now we are starting to think about where we will be off to next. Teresa has been applying to jobs all over the country, and has had several interviews. So far we have three prospects: Georgia, Rhode Island, and Washington state. Once we know where we are heading I will start bombarding the locals with resumes, and we will make plans for the move. All of that is exciting.  I know that I will be happy to get out of Texas. It isn’t a bad place, just not my place.

I hope to be updating here more, I just need to give myself more time to do it, and that is one of my plans, better time management. So, check back here a little more often for more updates on us.

So no more softball after this evening, at least until the Spring, or Summer. The league starts up again, and I think we are going to join up again. I know I need to. I have been a homebody, never leaving the house, eating too many Bon-Bon’s, watching too many Soaps, wearing the same clothes day after day until Teresa makes me change them. Okay, things aren’t that bad, but I go out of the house very little it feels like. 2010 will help to change that. My job at Biltmore ends the end of this year, and I need to look for work. I am thinking of getting some sort of part time gig where I need to deal with people. This way I can get out of the house, and have actual interactions with real people…. Whoah, I am way off topic. Softball is the topic of this post. I need to find some warm clothes for the game tonight. If, by chance, we do end up doing good, we could be playing for several hours in a row and being in left field can be a lonely and cold position some times.

Somebody has some nice bed head after laying on the couch.

On a side note, I have been a little late with some of these daily pictures. I apologize. I will get back to being good at it. I have had a couple other things on my mind lately, like finding a job. Yipes!

Doing a lot of work today, gearing up for the oncoming job search. PHP is the new language to learn.

Teresa has posted her dissertation research survey over on zoomerang and needs people to fill it out.

Here is a link to the survey: zoomerang.com
Here is a link to the Facebook group: facebook.com

Here is a little info Teresa wrote about the survey:

This study is being conducted by Teresa Blevins, B.A. I am a doctoral candidate under the supervision of Randolph Pipes, Ph.D. at Auburn University. The purpose of this study is to understand attitudes about psychotherapy and how they relate to personality traits. Your participation in this study will help provide more information about how psychotherapy can be more effective.

The survey is confidential and will take about 15-20 minutes to complete. For each completed survey, $1 will be donated to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. You may withdraw participation at any time. The current study has been approved by the Auburn University Institutional Review Board (IRB). For more information regarding IRB approval and contact information, please click on the survey link below.

Now that you’ve read that, go take the survey and help Teresa finish school!

I am happy to report that school has started for the students and I STILL love my internship! We had a full 4 weeks of training before the students came back to school, so I was definitely ready to start seeing some clients and getting busy. My schedule is filling up and I am excited to be doing an assortment of Counseling-Center type things this semester–group, outreach, supervision, learning about the afterhours HelpLine…WOOOOHOOOO!!!

As far as fun stuff goes, I will work backwards since Wylie beat me to it for our weekend in Aggie Land…though I will have a few comments to add there!

TODAY–Sat. Sept. 12: It was very rainy and we were feeling lazy at first, so we caught up on some of our TV watching…that was nice. We thought that the rain would stop us from heading out to Caldwell, TX (about 20 miles) for the Kolache Festival…but we were wrong! We made the trek in the rain and found that at 3pm most of the kolache vendors were ready to get the heck outta that rain, and so we got 1/2 price kolaches! We sampled about 8 different kinds. My favorite was the poppyseed, then the raspberry, and the cinnamon roll (although I don’t think this counts as a kolache). Other than that, they all kind of just tasted like a danish. Some of them were gross and we didn’t even try them. I had a major attack of the sugars by then anyway…I understood why they were also selling giant sausages on a stick…something to cut the sugar! There was a polka band playing fine tunes and some people even dancing in the rain! I wished that the day had been nicer for their sake, but there were still quite a few folks enjoying the festivities.

We then went to Target because Wylie had some gift cards that were burning a hole in his pocket and I needed socks for when I wear dress shoes to work. Now I am writing this and we are relaxing. I still feel a little sugary, and am looking forward to some black bean and corn tacos when I get done here…

YESTERDAY: Fri. Sept. 11: HOORAY! Wylie was born today…well, today, but a couple years back!!! We had a very fun day…I get done with work on Fridays at 12:30 (because I work late other days, not because I am a slacker) so he also took the afternoon off and we went to a fancy-pants place in town with a vegetarian menu for lunch, and then to see Inglourious Basterds. (The movie, I will note, was actually pretty funny. I laughed out loud a few times and didn’t think that the trailer was accurate for the amount of violence–I had been wary of seeing it because it looked like it was going to be non-stop…it wasn’t that bad. I did cringe and hide my eyes a few times, though.) Then we came home for a little birthday celebrating at home–we had 2 kinds of pie (pizza and Dutch Apple, which I found at a local place that makes them from scratch and sells them to you unbaked so that you can feel like you are part of the process. I appreciated that. Except, some of the guts of the pie spilled out during baking and were on the bottom of the oven and made it very smelly and smoky in the house. I did not appreciate that. I think our oven needs to relax. It is an oven. Things will fall to the bottom….)

THURSDAY Sept. 10, 2009–Our first softball game was rained out! BOOOO!! We did, however, have 2 lovely practices before this. There were rainbows at one of them. There are actually a lot of rainbows here because there are tons of tiny little rainstorms that come and go in 10 minutes or less and the sky surrounding them is blue…kind of wonderful, in ym opinion!!! Good for leprechaun hunting, too!

LAST WEEKEND! See Wylie’s post for the details. Parts of it were pretty incredible. The dinner at the General’s house was kind of odd. I managed to insult his wife a little bit on accident…but I didn’t get fired on Monday, so that was good. Apparently the hiring of the general as the VP of student affairs is frought with a bit of political drama that is interesting to hear about, if you like that sort of thing…I usually do. He mainly roamed the lawn with a cigar, and that was awesome. Then we headed to the Dixie Chicken, where we also made friends with two gentlemen from San Francisco who were here on business with the university. It was nice to have some fellow outsiders to share in the awe of midnight yell. I think Midnight Yell was one of my favorite things. There were probably 30,000 people there. At midnight. To Yell. You get to kiss at the end though, which is fun. And whenever the Aggies make a touchdown. The game was cool to go to as well. I am thankful that my training director is generous with her spare tickets and her tailgating spot! Tailgating is one of the best inventions to go along with sports, if you ask me! I liked seeing the differences in the football culture between College Station and Auburn. I will say this: The students at A & M are WAAAAAYYYY more mellow than the students at Auburn, and the scene was more relaxed here. Although, the whole student section yelling in unison is pretty intimidating!!!

Well…that’s about it. I told you I would have a lot to say. I will try not to wait so long next time!

As Wylie mentioned, we had dinner with most of my cohort and their families on Thursday and we discovered that pizza rolls are better than pizza at Double Dave’s…we will have to sample some others. The other awesome thing about that night was watching 4 year-old’s make friends. It seems like they have it right—the eyeballed each other, saw they were the same height, said, “My name is ____” and they were off and running. That was it. Seems so easy that way. Why does it seem to get so much more complicated later in life? After dinner we walked around campus a little bit and ended up at the Dixie Chicken for an adult beverage. We saw many people playing dominoes and many animal heads on the wall. It seems like a nice place to hang out. Although, the college kids come back next week, so we are not sure how much we will go there then…

Yesterday I got to go to “Fish Camp” with the other interns and the director of the counseling center. Freshmen here are called “Fish,” so it was not something nautical, but rather a whole lot of freshmen doing a whole lot of cheering. We left here at about 6:30am and drove 2-ish hours. The “Fish” spend about 3 days up there learning the traditions of A & M and how to do all the cheering that will be required of them during the football games, etc. It seems like it is probably fun. It reminded me of student council conventions or something–where everyone is trying to show that they have the most spirit for their team and some very zealous folks dress up or dye their hair to match. We talked to them a little bit about the counseling center and showed a video about the services we offer. We did this for 3 groups and then came home. It was a very interesting day. I was tuckered out at the end of it, and happy for a nap and a nice dinner at Cafe Capri.

Today we tried the bagels at Blue Baker at about 11:45, and we learned that “breakfast food” is only to be eaten at Blue Baker before 10:30am–they had turned the toaster off, so we ate our bagels untoasted, which was fine. However, since Wylie and I are rarely up and moving before 10:30 on a weekend, Blue Baker is probably off our breakfast list…Then we ran some errands–got a softball glove for me, and braved the “best” grocery store that is near campus. That was kind of bad thinking on my part because it was a little crazy with folks moving in to town. They do have lots of good stuff though, so I will remember that at a later time, when it will not be so crazy.

We just finished the third Indiana Jones movie, and it was good. I liked them all! (The second one was a little cheezy, but Data was in it (from the Goonies), so the cheeze was overlooked, for the most part!)

Getting ready now for another week of working and maybe planning an adventure for next weekend…any thoughts on where we should go?

Yesterday Teresa and I went to the Division of Student Affairs Annual Summer Social after our work days were over. We weren’t really sure what to expect except what the flyer had on it. It sounded okay, and it would be a good chance for me to meet the rest of her cohort, and actually get out of the house.

So, after I finished up my work day I got in the car and drove to meet Teresa at her office. It’s a nice office with a bunch of room, and way too many chairs in it. After cooling off for a bit we headed on over to the Student Recreation Center where the hoedown was going on. It was a quick event, about 1.5 hours, that included dinner (BBQ for non veggies, potatoes for me), a sing-along (three songs that not many people sang along to), a lesson on how to do the Aggie Chicken dance (it’s just the normal chicken dance everybody knows), trivia (we didn’t know this was happeneing), a dessert competition (Teresa made cookies but we were too late to be in the competition, or they were scared that she would win), and a dollar sale (we kept our dollars in our pockets). Whooh! It was a fun evening, I was glad to get out of the house and meet some people, though it felt like an awkward first-meeting kind of place. We will all meet again I am sure.

Afterwards we went home and just lounged around, the whirlwind evening had us wiped out.