So you may have been wondering where I've gotten to. I haven't posted anything since before we left and I stopped posting on our blog somewhere between Wyoming and California. Oops. I promise that I will start blogging again there soon.
Anyway. We are here! in Portland, Oregon! Come visit!!
Portland's pretty awesome so far. The people are extremely nice and we haven't had one day of rain yet. I know the rain part is going to change once summer ends, but for now we're enjoying the sunshine. Up until about 3 days ago it's been sunny and around 65 to 70 degrees every day. We've just hit a heat wave though and now it's about 90 degrees.
Our apartment is all right for now. It's pretty big and we live on the third floor. Maybe I'll post pictures at some point but it's pretty unexciting as we aren't really settling in at all. We don't want to spend money on making it homey when we plan to move at the end of January. It's low-income housing, which doesn't mean it's bad, but it does mean that I often wonder if the management is trying to get us to move out by ignoring us. The place was in a little bit of disarray when we arrived, not everything was clean and the doors into the laundry were sitting in the middle of the living room. However the carpet was all new and after a little bit of bathroom/kitchen cleaning everything was fine. It did take them 3 days to get to our apartment to put the doors back on and fix the garbage disposal, but whatever it got done. Today we discovered that the dryer makes weird noises and smells smokey when turned on, so now all our clean clothes are lying on towels in the dining room drying. We are however only a block from the light rail station, which makes going into town easy, though it takes us 40 minutes to get to the farmers market and about an hour if we want to go to the west side of town.
We've explored some since coming to Portland. We've found a bar called The Hungry Tiger Too where they serve vegan corndogs and hot wings and other vegany foods and it's not too terribly far by MAX. The farmers market is huge but pretty cool. This week we bought an eggplant and blueberries, but last week it was fabulous peaches and a vegan chocolate cupcake. We've also been to Voodoo Donuts about a half dozen times since we've gotten here. Even I, who hates donuts, loves a good vegan voodoo donut. The place is open 24 hours a day and sometimes the staff give you discounts on donuts. Yum.
The job front is iffy. It looks like Kyle is going to get a part-time position in this small town outside of Portland as a Library Clerk. It's such a small library that he'll be doing practically everything that a librarian normally does. It's only part time though so we'll see if he can get something else to fill in the rest.
I had an interview for an Aid position at a daycare center on the West side of Portland working with Toddlers (18 months to 2 years). The first interview seemed to go really well, then I had to go in for a 2 hour work try where I actually worked in the room that the open position is in. I thought I did really well, but after the work try the director of the daycare center told me that I needed to register with this Oregon state criminal history database thing if I want to work with children and that they would let me know, you know, soon or eventually, about whether I would get the position. Ugh. There's a nanny agency that has a couple of families they are willing to refer me to where I'd be nannying for older children. Mainly I'd be shuttling to and from school and helping with homework and whatnot after school. It wouldn't be terrible but I'm not sure she can give me 40 hours a week and I wouldn't get benefits like the full-time position at the daycare center would offer.
Anyway, things will get better here in Portland once we both have jobs and things start to settle down a bit. For the moment tensions are a little high with all the stress of looking for jobs.
I hope everything is great with you girls. I miss you all bunches. Call me anytime, I'm mostly around all the time, but just don't call early in the morning your time, I'll be sleeping. Late night is great, 'cause that's early evening for me and we're usually in the apartment cooking dinner or watching a movie or something. Anyway, call me.
Much love,
Court
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