Yeah... so it's been, um, quite a while

OK, well yeah, we all know that Sherri and I are terrible and keeping our blog up to date... or even keeping a blog for that matter.  So the last post was over a year ago and a LOT has happened since then.  Let's see if I can hit mostly everything:

So last post being April 2011, we'll start in May 2011.  I started work with Bureau of Reclamation again, this time in Billings, Montana.  I went up in May while Sherri and Nathan stayed in Provo until our daughter would be born in June.  I would travel home on the weekends to see them and help as much as I could.  So that is really all that happened in May.

June, 1, 2011

Well, our biggest change since last update was the birth of our beautiful daughter, Cambrie Grace.  She was born on Wednesday, June 1, 2011 at 3:58 P.M. and weight 6 lbs 7 oz and was 19.5 inches long.  

Both Sherri and Cambrie were healthy throughout the whole thing and I arrived only about 15 minutes before it was time for Sherri to start pushing - I had been at home taking care of Nathan so as to keep the day as normal as possible for him.  She weight 6.5 lbs and 19.5 inches long.  Nice and little baby, but she sure started chunking up pretty quickly.  A few days later I had to go back up to Montana, but luckily my mom was able to come down and help Sherri, Nathan and Cambrie move up to Montana when Cambrie was 2 weeks old.

We were very fortunate to be renting a house from a coworker who was out of town for the whole summer, so it was a very good living situation.  We loved the ward and Billings is actually quite a nice place.  The people I worked with in that office and my supervisor said he would have loved to have me on his crew.

Fall, 2011
Well this was my last semester for my Bachelor's degree.  It was a pretty easy class load and I was so ready to be done.  The semester started pretty quietly.  I was a teaching assistant for the AutoCAD class which was pretty fun to do.  We knew that around November that we would be receiving a call from Bureau of Reclamation as to where we would be placed after graduation.  We were really hoping Billings since we liked it so much there.  Then in November, just over a month before graduation we received a call from my HR manager in Billings (the regional office).  We were excited and on the phone I heard "Sorry to tell you this, but we don't have any job offers for you."  My first response to her was, "Seriously?"  Yeah, so that really sucked to find out a month before graduation that we no longer had a job, nor a place to live.  She even had the gall to say that they wanted to let me know "now, so that [I] had time to look elsewhere for employment."  "Now"?  Seriously?? A month before graduation.  Yeah, thanks a lot.  The silver lining on this rain cloud was that I was eligible for non-competitive hiring for my job position, of which there were several on the government's job website.  So I called my HR and asked them if they could put me in for any of those positions and I was told that it was my responsibility and I just had to apply online like everyone else... well if I have to apply online like everyone else, how can I let the people know that I am eligible for non-competitive hiring?  The website application is the same for everyone... hmmm... so what do I do?

I applied for probably 10 different positions all throughout the intermountain west and West Coast and was just playing the waiting game.  In the meantime, I had contacted an acquaintance in Kennewick, who was a partner at an engineering firm and asked him if they were hiring.  He said to send him my resume and he would forward it on; the next day I saw a posting on Craigslist from the company for an entry-level civil engineer position in Kennewick.  Well, I received an email saying that the company would like to have an interview with me via webcam.  So the day of the interview arrived and it went pretty well.  I asked them near the end when I should expect to hear back.  This was just before Thanksgiving that I had the interview and I was told to expect to hear back by the end of November.... the end of November came and went and I had still not heard anything.  So Sherri and I felt that we should just move back to Kennewick until I heard back from either the job in Kennewick or one of the government jobs to which I had applied.  My parents had said we could move in with them temporarily.  By the time the end of the semester came in mid-December, I had been rejected for a couple of government jobs, which was quite disheartening since a couple of them were in Vegas - not a bad place to start off, we thought.  Well the end of the semester arrives, we had our whole apartment packed because we had to move out since a new couple would be moving in and the day we were packing the truck to move up to Kennewick, I received a phone call from the company in Kennewick, offering me the job that I had applied for.  They asked me, "When will you be coming up to Kennewick?"  and I told them, "Well, we are actually packing the truck as we speak."

So to receive that call was a huge answer to our prayers about what to do.  So we arrived up at my parents house and unpacked a few things and put the rest in storage, expecting to stay just a couple of months until we could find an apartment.  I wasn't scheduled to start my job until January 16th, so we were just kind of in limbo until that point.  We spent Christmas with Sherri's family in Vancouver which was a pretty relaxing Christmas.  (Unfortunately, pictures of that are in Vancouver still.)

January - May 2012
Well, I start my new job and the people I work with are great and our new office is in a great location.  Projects are interesting and things are going well.  The job is progressing and Sherri and I met with a mortgage lender to talk about buying a house.  After all the job verification and appropriate time has passed of being at my new job, we are finally able to look at houses with a Realtor.  We looked at houses in Kennewick and Pasco.  The houses in Kennewick that were in our price range were all older and many of them were split levels and a couple of tri-levels.  The next day we went to Pasco and most of the houses there were newer, but had smaller lots and were all the same layout.

After a couple of weeks of looking at houses we found a tri-level that needed some cosmetic fixing and was on a good-sized lot.  The day that we were going to put an offer on it, our Realtor told us that it had just gone under contract.  We were bummed because it was a house that we really liked.  Then there were a couple of houses in Pasco that we wanted to go look at that were 2500+ square feet, but each of those had just gone under contract.  So things were thinning out in the housing market for us until we saw a tri-level in Kennewick that had been very well taken care of, had been updated and was in our price range.  It had only been on the market 7 days when we put an offer on it.  The owners responded the next day and reject the offer, so we raised our offer and they accepted.  We were so excited!... the downside was that we couldn't move in for 2 months (our offer was accepted mid-March).  So our plan of only living with my parents for 2 months turned into 5.  I love my parents, but it sure was nice to move out into our own place - and the feeling was mutual.  So on May 14th we closed on the house and began moving stuff in.  Below are some pictures of the house:

Front view of the house

Entry of the house (to the right is the living room)

Living room looking out to the front

Living room looking from the entry

Dining room from kitchen (living room is to the right)

Looking at kitchen from dining room

Looking upstairs (entry is to left, kitchen behind)

Main bathroom (at top of stairs to the right)

Main bathroom

Looking downstairs

Family room downstairs - we're going to remove the wood paneling

The rest of the family room

4th bedroom from the family room

Looking out the kitchen window

Our back patio/deck

Most of our backyard

Looking back at the house

Looking out of the downstairs back door

Looking up at the back deck

So those are pictures of the house that Sherri took.  There are little things here and there that we want to update on the house, but for the most part, we love the house.

June 2, 2012

Well Cambrie turned 1 yesterday and today was her party.  Can't believe that she is already 1.  We had a good turnout of friends and family.  Here are some shots from her party:

Nice bruise she got just a couple hours before her party

Nathan enjoying the bounce house

Gma and Gpa Asay

Gma and Gpa Welch and Gpa Clarno

Nathan got to blow out the candle for Cambrie

July 8, 2012

This bring me to today.  I've tried to remember any important things that have happened to us in the last 15 months.  I know, we always say we're going to do better at keeping our blog up to date, but this time I make no such promise.  Keep expectations low that way when they're not met, you're not disappointed, right?  Or is that not a good perspective? :-)  Anyway, that's it for now.  Hope to update you all soon.