As I write this post I am sitting in the airport in Albuquerque, NM. I'm on my way to Tucson to start my job with the US Border Patrol. I have two days in Tucson before I go to Artesia, NM for 11 weeks for the Border Patrol Academy. Many of you that are reading this didn't even know that I had your email addresses. Some of them I stole from mass emails and others I have just added to my contacts from an email announcing a mission reunion in Utah that I am going to miss by less than a week. (I'm really sad that I will miss that.) I just wanted to let everyone know what we are up to and how drastically things have changed for us in the last week. Many of you who are even quite close family and friends are learning this news at the same time as people who I have not spoken with for a very long time. For this, I apologize. If you are not bored out of your minds yet and you keep reading you will maybe understand why I did not contact you before I left Utah. Sorry, especially to Jonesy and Lewis--I know we had tentative plans to get together in the next few weeks, but it looks like you'll have to take a rain check until December. Anyways, I'll get to the story telling now.
If you really don't have much to do with your free time you may have already read our all-too-infrequently-updated blog and you already knew that we had been living in Utah since January. While there I had been working a lot of hours at several jobs. We quickly realized that we would not be able to afford going back to school to get my Master's degree on the wages that we were earning in Utah (and the ridiculous cost of health insurance.) So, in February we restarted the application process for the Border Patrol. Many of you know that my brother is an agent in Casa Grande, AZ and had talked me into applying before I graduated back in May 2005. They offered me the job then but we turned it down thinking we had better options. Long story short-it turns out a BA in Political Science doesn't really provide many options. So, poverty and the threat of living in my mother's basement forever persuaded me to apply again. Luckily, I only had to do part of the hiring process again since my file was still current in the system and, since I had originally scored a 98 on the entrance exam, I was at the top of the pile of candidates. A few hiccups along the way made things take a little longer than we had hoped, but finally we were in a waiting phase at the beginning of this month. We were really thinking we would probably get a job offer by the end of the year, but last week is when somebody was really looking out for us. Allow me to bore you with the details.
Two weeks ago I received more paperwork back from the Dept. of Homeland Security that needed to be filled out and signed again. I figured this would hold things up for another month or two. However, because I am a bit impatient and I don't like waiting-especially for the inevitable-on Wednesday of last week I started calling all of the phone numbers that I had in my phone for contacts at Homeland Security. I got really lucky and actually got someone to answer the phone-usually you have to leave a message. I asked the first lady about the paperwork that I had resubmitted to make sure that they had received it. She was the wrong person, but she transferred me to another office. The second lady was also the wrong person, or so she thought. She asked me for my Social Security number so that she could see which office did have my file. To her surprise and mine, her office had just received my file that morning. I asked her what that meant. She said that I should be getting a call by the end of that week with a job offer. Great!, I thought. Things were going faster than we had hoped. I decided to pick the woman's brain and ask what the likelihood would be of getting to have a say in the city we got stationed in. She told me that they really can't accommodate requests, but, since she had a little extra time, she would put a note in my file of where I would like to be stationed if the person who called me had that option available to them. I thanked her excessively and hung up feeling pretty good about life.
To my surprise, the same woman called me back about two hours later. She remembered our conversation from earlier and said that since we had spoken somebody had canceled and there was a job available in Tucson starting this week. She said that normally they would just go back to the top of the stack and start calling people. Usually they don't have much success doing this so she thought she would give me a try. I was ecstatic. The only catch was that she needed me to report in a week. I told her that I had to talk to my wife first, but that I would probably be taking it. And we did. And here I am in Albuquerque.
Now, remember Karen is due to have our second girl at the end of October. We were prepared for this possibility, though. It is going to be hard to not be there when the baby is born-very hard-but she is going back up to Wyoming next week to stay with her mom and be by all of her family that can help with Grace and help her after the baby is born.
We are so excited to get stationed in Tucson, though. It's considerably close to family in Phoenix, my brother Conan is actually in Tucson, and I can finally go back to school. Oh, and the money will be 2 times what we were making in Utah. I'll be done with the academy on Dec. 20 and back in Utah then to pick up our things from my mom's basement. before we actually all move to Tucson. I hope to see some of you in Utah then.
Well, I have managed to waste a significant amount of your time. I just wanted to let you all know what was going on with our little family. We hope to hear from you all soon.
PS: I've included some pictures of our cute little girl, Grace.
Dad and Libby.... 
All together!!
Pretty Libby at 7 weeks
Grace in the snow in Utah
