About a month after my last update to this website, I broke up with my girlfriend. It was a rough time, she gave me an ultimatum, and I realized that I was just not ready to be married. It wouldn't have been fair to her to continue to put her through so much pain, so we broke things off.
A year later, I was married.
Let me explain......No, never mind. There's nothing really to explain. I met someone who helped me realize that it doesn't matter if I'm "ready" to be married. We all just make choices, and we choose to be ready, or we choose to be unprepared. So we got engaged on Valentine's Day (real original, I know) of 2007, and married that August. It feels....strange. It feels mature. It feels responsible. It does not feel frightening.
Five days before the wedding, I lost my job. Ouch. Looking back, I realize that they had been driving me to the point where they could fire me. They lied to me, they cheated me, and then they fired me for the most innocuous of reasons. I was planning a wedding, so I had my email and chat windows open on my computer. Browsing the internet was against the rules. Bastards. Anyway, we continued on our path to be married that weekend and honeymoon in Mexico the week after that, and we had faith that everything would work out. We were even considering skipping the honeymoon until I could find employment, but we decided that would be a bad idea. We wouldn't have been able to actually go until this past May because we were both so busy with school. In the end, I'm really glad we went when we did. There were a couple nervous hours, juat waiting to hear back on a couple interviews and resumes I had sent out, but all in all, most of the time was spend enjoying Mexico and falling deeper in love with my wife. Yay, tropical romance!
We came home on a Friday and started school the next Monday, and a temp agency found some work for me stuffing boxes and stuff at a warehouse. For the first couple of hours, the thought kept running through my head "Is this really what I'm going to do? Warehouse work for nine bucks an hour?" It was frightening. After a couple days, I got into a groove, though, and actually began making some friends. That's when the blessings started.
I have two twin brothers, and they have two friends who are also twins. Yeah, for real. They've been friends for, quite literally, as long as I can remember. One of them works for a software company, and he mentioned to my brother that they were looking for someone in my position who was studying engineering and looking for work. I got in touch with him on Wednesday, had an interview on Thursday, was called back Friday and began working the following Monday. It was great.
For the last year, I've been a software technician in the qa department of a software company that develops programs and drivers for large-scale printing. My team reports bugs we find in the software and makes sure that other bugs have been fixed and new features have been added. We pretty much make sure that the users and customers have an enjoyable time using our product. Well, as enjoyable as possible. I've aboslutely loved it! And now, after being here as an independant contractor for nearly a year, they've decided to make all the contractors regular part-time employees. We're part-time so we can be flexible with our hours during the semester, and that makes some things suck (not eligible for paid holidays, sick pay, vacation, 401(k), or insurance), but we do get direct deposit now, and our taxes are all taken care of. That's worth it right there, definitely. We also get overtime if (1) we actually work over 40 hours in a week, and (2) it's approved by our team leads and the director of engineering. Oh, and we get gym reimbursement of up to $40 a month, so I'm going to be taking advantage of that.
So that's where I've been the last two years. I'm in the middle of teaching myself HTML and CSS so that I can code my website myself, and I won't have to worry about any third-party applications. There's just something so fulfilling about creating everything myself using abstract words and numbers and having it translate into the image in my mind. The little bit that I've done, I've absolutely loved.
Oh, and one final note. I've begun a new writing project. Right now, I'm just in the outline stage, but it's progressing. I look forward to putting some of it up here in the near future.
Thanks for the love!
