From then to now
So this will be news to some and old news to others, but here's my first Life Update post.
Jenny and I recently celebrated our 4th anniversary together. It's been a great ride with a magnificent woman. I am looking forward to many many more years with her.
We are once again in Dallas after a brief 2 year sojourn in Ootah (Orem and Salt Lake City both). I finished my undergraduate degree at BYU in Marriage, Family, and Human Relations then worked for a year in the techie business, becoming increasingly disillusioned with corporate America before we felt we should go back south to the city where we met and got married.
I really wanted to get my Master's Degree in Professional Counseling, but could not see a way financially to do it, so I begrudgingly got another techie job at a local law firm in downtown Dallas, all the while feeling in my gut that I should just wait on finding a school, that it wasn't the right time yet. Every time I looked at UT Dallas or any of the local Community Colleges, it just didn't sit right with me.
But one day, through a series of random events, the right school dropped in my lap. A good friend of my wife's was helping a couple in our church become more active. My wife's friend began going to where the lady worked, a place called Paint Yer Pottery, one of these places where you pick your unfired pottery piece and painted it any way you liked. She took Jenny there and Jenny loved it. One Friday evening, Jenny suggested we go there on a date. Feeling strangely unresistant to the idea, I readily agreed to give it a shot.
We walked in and there lying on one of the tables was the DSM IV-TR (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed, Text Revision), a book I had been introduced to during my undergrad. It's an important part of the field, though I personally don't care for it much. I inquired as to whom it belonged to and began a conversation with the lady who responded. We chatted for a little while about it and then I asked her what school she went to. She told me the name of it, and something interesting happened.
Call it what you want - I call it God, others might call it Fate, Karma, or Pure Freaking Massively Incredibly Improbable Luck That Is So Ridiculously Improbable It Might As Well Be Impossible - but when she said the name of the college, it was like a bell went off in my head. I had never heard of it, I had never seen a single advertisement or heard one on the radio anywhere (and still haven't 1 year later), I knew absolutely nothing about this place, but I *knew* in that instant that this was the right school for me. I wrote down the name and looked into it.
Here's what I found:
1) NO THESIS! (I hate research papers with a passion. I am absolutely terrible at them, and the main reason I had decided not to get my Master's was because I knew I could not write a Master's Thesis in a million years. Creative writing and analytical writing are very different beasts - I'm great at the first, sucky beyond sucky at the second...)
2) All night/Saturday classes so I could work and go to school at the same time.
3) NO THESIS!
4) Fully accredited program with a reputation of being really tough.
5) Did I mention NO THESIS!?
6) An actual campus instead of all online classes like so many scams/crappy adult education schools are.
7) NO TH-... OK, you get the idea...
8) A curriculum designed around the working adult that once I lost my job and went full-time, I was able to punch through the course work and enable me to graduate 6 months earlier than a normal 2 year program.
It's like this school was tailor made for me. What are the odds someone would just mention the name and I would know that it was the right school for me AND IT ACTUALLY WAS? Maybe I'm just psychic. :) Anyhoo, once I decided this was where I wanted to go (at first planning on just taking 1 class/semester in order to keep working and avoid school debt), I signed up for the first class and simply loved it. I was on my way to graduating in 4-5 years.
Then, I lost my job. Suffice to say that I wasn't getting along with my boss's boss (she took an especial disliking to me), and I was looking around for other employment. I got a verbal offer from another firm, I tendered my 2 week's notice, and then the offer was rescinded, leaving me high and dry. MORAL: Get it in writing before you quit, kids.
After 6 months of job hunting and eventually deciding that I could get my Master's much quicker than 5 or 6 years, I began attending school full-time in January. It's been some seriously brutal semesters, but I'm maintaining a 4.0 thus far, a real record for me! I'm very very excited about being a counselor.
I'm also working on a webcomic project with mrl24 and a friend from college, Glikker. I'll keep generally tight-lipped for now, but we're hoping this collaborative project will do well enough that we can make a little extra cash doing it.
Jenny is working as an admin in the HQ of a large world-wide corporation, supporting me as I do school full-time. We don't get to see each other as often as we would like, due to my night classes (just enough time for her to come home, share a quick dinner, a kiss, and then I take the car for the evening), but we're managing, still very in love, and still hoping for kids!
Whew!
Jenny and I recently celebrated our 4th anniversary together. It's been a great ride with a magnificent woman. I am looking forward to many many more years with her.
We are once again in Dallas after a brief 2 year sojourn in Ootah (Orem and Salt Lake City both). I finished my undergraduate degree at BYU in Marriage, Family, and Human Relations then worked for a year in the techie business, becoming increasingly disillusioned with corporate America before we felt we should go back south to the city where we met and got married.
I really wanted to get my Master's Degree in Professional Counseling, but could not see a way financially to do it, so I begrudgingly got another techie job at a local law firm in downtown Dallas, all the while feeling in my gut that I should just wait on finding a school, that it wasn't the right time yet. Every time I looked at UT Dallas or any of the local Community Colleges, it just didn't sit right with me.
But one day, through a series of random events, the right school dropped in my lap. A good friend of my wife's was helping a couple in our church become more active. My wife's friend began going to where the lady worked, a place called Paint Yer Pottery, one of these places where you pick your unfired pottery piece and painted it any way you liked. She took Jenny there and Jenny loved it. One Friday evening, Jenny suggested we go there on a date. Feeling strangely unresistant to the idea, I readily agreed to give it a shot.
We walked in and there lying on one of the tables was the DSM IV-TR (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed, Text Revision), a book I had been introduced to during my undergrad. It's an important part of the field, though I personally don't care for it much. I inquired as to whom it belonged to and began a conversation with the lady who responded. We chatted for a little while about it and then I asked her what school she went to. She told me the name of it, and something interesting happened.
Call it what you want - I call it God, others might call it Fate, Karma, or Pure Freaking Massively Incredibly Improbable Luck That Is So Ridiculously Improbable It Might As Well Be Impossible - but when she said the name of the college, it was like a bell went off in my head. I had never heard of it, I had never seen a single advertisement or heard one on the radio anywhere (and still haven't 1 year later), I knew absolutely nothing about this place, but I *knew* in that instant that this was the right school for me. I wrote down the name and looked into it.
Here's what I found:
1) NO THESIS! (I hate research papers with a passion. I am absolutely terrible at them, and the main reason I had decided not to get my Master's was because I knew I could not write a Master's Thesis in a million years. Creative writing and analytical writing are very different beasts - I'm great at the first, sucky beyond sucky at the second...)
2) All night/Saturday classes so I could work and go to school at the same time.
3) NO THESIS!
4) Fully accredited program with a reputation of being really tough.
5) Did I mention NO THESIS!?
6) An actual campus instead of all online classes like so many scams/crappy adult education schools are.
7) NO TH-... OK, you get the idea...
8) A curriculum designed around the working adult that once I lost my job and went full-time, I was able to punch through the course work and enable me to graduate 6 months earlier than a normal 2 year program.
It's like this school was tailor made for me. What are the odds someone would just mention the name and I would know that it was the right school for me AND IT ACTUALLY WAS? Maybe I'm just psychic. :) Anyhoo, once I decided this was where I wanted to go (at first planning on just taking 1 class/semester in order to keep working and avoid school debt), I signed up for the first class and simply loved it. I was on my way to graduating in 4-5 years.
Then, I lost my job. Suffice to say that I wasn't getting along with my boss's boss (she took an especial disliking to me), and I was looking around for other employment. I got a verbal offer from another firm, I tendered my 2 week's notice, and then the offer was rescinded, leaving me high and dry. MORAL: Get it in writing before you quit, kids.
After 6 months of job hunting and eventually deciding that I could get my Master's much quicker than 5 or 6 years, I began attending school full-time in January. It's been some seriously brutal semesters, but I'm maintaining a 4.0 thus far, a real record for me! I'm very very excited about being a counselor.
I'm also working on a webcomic project with mrl24 and a friend from college, Glikker. I'll keep generally tight-lipped for now, but we're hoping this collaborative project will do well enough that we can make a little extra cash doing it.
Jenny is working as an admin in the HQ of a large world-wide corporation, supporting me as I do school full-time. We don't get to see each other as often as we would like, due to my night classes (just enough time for her to come home, share a quick dinner, a kiss, and then I take the car for the evening), but we're managing, still very in love, and still hoping for kids!
Whew!