John and I are living in his Mom's basement apartment while he spends the summer in an internship with the church. It's actually a pretty good deal. They have a nice house and they hardly ever use the downstairs anyway. During the summer they use their motor scooters more than their cars, so I have Carol's car to use when I need it. Living with the in-laws hasn't been so bad. It's still not something I would recommend or do for a long period of time, but as far as that cliche situation goes, we have it easy. :)
He loves his internship. He gets to learn and he's finally getting to the point where he can say he knows what he's doing. He also likes the fact that his job has a spiritual side to it and all of his coworkers are guaranteed strong members of his church. We are blessed that it is very likely he'll be able to go back once he graduates this December. We don't know for sure, but his advisor is doing everything in his power to make sure John will get a job offer come January.
The church would be a great place for him to start out. He likes it there and it has a lot of job security. It's one of the few jobs out there that actually cares about family life and is reasonably flexible for important events. We'd get good benefits and a decent salary. They'll pay for him to go to Graduate School, which will be very nice. He still aspires to something more, especially in pay, but he doesn't necessarily need to (or would get to) jump right into his dream job. But for now, this is pretty fantastic.
I am spending my time reading (the way-too-big stack of books I got from the Library that now I have to read before we leave), cleaning (sometimes. I do the dishes and the laundry, but much more than that tends to get neglected a tad bit more than it should), cooking (John complained that I haven't cooked anything since Logan. In my defense we don't have our own stove and oven...but I've been stepping it up, or trying to), baking (that one's easy for me to do. We got a bosch from the wedding, thanks to family, and I grew up baking more than cooking so it's what I know how to do. I'll bake for any excuse...John's getting a tummy from it, he says, but I say it's because he's always at the computer and isn't in a swimming or Frisbee class anymore), watching movies (mostly with John, though. I have watched a little TV here and there, since they paid for Direct TV and all on the big screen TV, but there's hardly anything on and I feel like a waste of space when that's all I do so I don't do it much), running errands, cross-stitching (currently put on hold for reading), surfing facebook (which I've cut down quite a lot, thank you very much), intending to write letters (to my missionaries and to Waanda at camp. I have envelopes all packed with pictures from the wedding, but I have yet to finish making them ready to send), keeping company with a Maltese (who got hit by a car 3 weeks ago, but it doing miraculously well, only having 7 broken ribs to deal with), entertaining nieces and nephews (but John gets sick of having them overnight. who knows how he'll be able to stand our children :P ), and spending time with friends when I can. Soon I will be packing.
This fall is John's last semester of college to get his Bachelor's Degree, and we will be spending it at the ITESM Monterry campus in Mexico for a Study Abroad through Utah State. John speaks Spanish extremely well (many Mexicans don't believe he's not Hispanic), but I don't speak it a drop. He was able to convince USU that he would be able to take upper level classes instead of the usual Study Abroad courses. Only a few more things need to be finalized and he will be golden for his last semester.
We leave on the 5th of August. They actually wanted him there on the 2nd of August, so we were going to leave on the 28th of July, but then he found out that classes don't start until the 9th of August and they wanted him there for a whole week of Orientation. He didn't find that useful because he's not like most Study Abroad students, plus he hates Orientations. We'll be there so he can make the last day of Orientation to make them happy. So we got another whole week to play here in Utah, which we were both happy about :) John will be able to spend his birthday with family, etc.
Airplane tickets are ridiculously expensive. John was expecting to pay around $800 for both of us roundtrip. Instead, it was looking to be about $1300. We tried our best, and in the end we have flights to San Antonito, TX, and then from there we will be taking a bus to Monterry. It's a little scary to be thinking about crossing the border like that when the airplane makes it so easy, but John's confident we'll be fine. Let's pray he's right, eh?
My parents are there on a church mission at the temple. My Mom is super excited to have us come. I guess we'll be spending time with them there, even though finding time when we're all free might be hard. We'll see :)
I don't know what I'll be doing with myself, but I'm trying to pack prepared. It'll be hard to find books, which is a killer, and I can't bring that many with me, so we'll see. I am planning on bringing things for cross-stitching. Right now I'm making a Calendar. My sister-in-law has one that I've always loved, but it's made out of yarn and plastic canvas. I'm kind of figuring out as I go along how I'll put it all together, but I expect to have fun. I've put it on hold until Mexico while I read a bunch of books I got from the Library.
John's going to download some of his step-dad's movies on the computer so we'll have a few English ones when we go. We're hoping our internet connection will be good enough to support streaming netflix. We figure $8 a month is worth it to have English entertainment even if we never get the hard-copy one mailed to us. Maybe someone else can utilize that, eh?
