Friendship

I guess I can blame moving across the country as a legitimate reason for neglecting this blog. But my last post was 2 months before moving...

I do have two drafts in the works. Does that count for something? Honestly, lots of times it's uploading pictures that slows me down. I want them in there for when I print this blog out someday, but having to organize them on my computer before uploading them to the blog is usually a huge impediment. If only blogger were iPad compatible!

And now we are in Richmond, Virginia, a place I never thought I would live. I have actually visited a handful of times over the years for various reasons and always liked it just fine, but never imagined myself as an east-coaster. But we go where the job takes us.

The Job. It's good. Pays well. Decent hours for a doctor. But it hasn't been as awesomely wonderful as he hoped. It's fine. Maybe it'll start to turn awesome as he gets more time under his belt. But we also fear that, if after a year here, we start to look somewhere else, only to find that everywhere is only just 'fine.' He is dreaming of working at a hospital like he did in Milwaukee. They do the whole gambit of what an interventional radiologist can do. And the hospital is big enough that they are busy all day, with 3 or 4 interventionalists working non-stop. Here, he is the only interventionalist at the hospital every day. He rotates between 4 hospitals (supposedly he'll be rotated to 7 eventually) but still, he is always the only IR doctor there. He misses working with other doctors. He misses the camaraderie and teamwork. But not very many hospitals (at least private hospitals) are set up like the one in Milwaukee, so maybe even if we uproot ourselves and move again in a year he will still find himself working alone every day.

This is a little funny if you know my husband. He is not exactly ultra-social. I never would have guessed when I married him that the biggest point of dissatisfaction with his job would be the lack of interaction with peers. He doesn't crave social activity. He's an introvert.

But he does have a hidden social side. In Wisconsin, he finally had friends. I mean, real friends. I have never met any of his high school or mission friends, and the only college friend I met was his brother. He just didn't do friends. But Wisconsin changed that. We had friends that felt like family. We had friends that make us ache to go back there. We had friends that made it so that whenever we move to a new place, we immediately start searching for new friends, only to remember how long they take to find and how sometimes you just don't find them. Lots of people don't really want friends. They are happy having only their family. Or, at least in our church, sometimes friendship comes in the form of a responsibility. But I think true friends make us a little selfish. We spend time with them because we crave their companionship, not because we were asked to reach out to them. We come up with any way possible to hang out with them, while still trying to fulfill work, family, and church responsibilities. As we have moved around, our friends have become more and more dear to us.

We are going to Wisconsin next week to visit. We are all ridiculously excited. It'll be somewhat bittersweet knowing we will go home to the work of creating new friends. Don't totally misunderstand me. I don't hate making new friends. I made some amazing friends during our year in Albuquerque. But finding a couple with kids sort of close to our own kids' ages that we actually get along with and want to hang out with can be hard to find. We count ourselves lucky that we found numerous such couples in Milwaukee. We still call Wisconsin home, mostly because of those people we left behind.

Fruitless

This is a hard topic to write about. Mostly because after 10 years, we still don't have a job.

About a year ago, I started hounding my husband, asking him over and over when we were supposed to start looking for a job. He talked to a few people in Milwaukee, who all said we should start looking after we start fellowship. So, in August, I started checking radiology job boards 2 or 3 times a day, looking for interventional radiology jobs in areas we would like to live. Pretty much, we want to live in the West...Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Wyoming. We would even consider Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. And if desperate, Nevada and California. We haven't been too interested in being farther east, since we love the mountains and would like to be closer to family.

I even spent about 2 weeks cold-calling radiology groups in those states, asking if they knew about their upcoming radiology needs. Pretty much everyone said they didn't plan to hire.

So I searched the job boards harder. We applied in Hawaii, Arizona, Oregon, and Colorado, and got a few phone interviews. But with no result. They either haven't gotten back with us, or we realized they wouldn't be a good fit.

Paul wants to spend 60-70% of his time doing interventional radiology (IR), which is a completely different beast from general diagnostic radiology. And some of the places he talked with could only promise about 30% IR. Maybe some day he will want to tone his work-load down and do more diagnostic work, but not his first year out of fellowship. These first few years are really the time in which he will hone his IR skills, so he wants to do as much as possible.

Then over Christmas, the perfect job came on the market. Kalispell, Montana. I know that may not sound like heaven to everyone out there, but image living at the base of Glacier National Park. (I was going to insert some pictures of Kalispell, but there were too many good ones to choose from, so google it.)  The town is small, yet because of its remoteness and proximity to Glacier, it surprisingly has lots of amenities. Paul had a great phone interview, 90 minutes long. The job was perfect. Just what he was looking for, twice the vacation time everyone else offers, and more pay than we had expected. We hoped and prayed that no one else wanted to live in paradise.

Two weeks passed, and nothing. Finally we emailed, just to see if they were even still considering him. Gratefully, he is 1 of 5 that they are considering, but they are giving preference to doctors with a little more experience and who have ties to the area. So...we are probably 5th on that list.

To say the least, we have been deflated. To have had the perfect job in our grasp and to lose it. Technically, they might still contact us, but who would ever pass up such a perfect spot?

So now, I continue to trudge through the job boards daily, now applying pretty much anywhere in the country because we are at the point that we just need a stinking job! Even after spending an evening with friends who were telling us all about their great radiology experience with a group in Tulsa that they loved, it was hard to be excited about it, knowing it can never quite match Kalispell in sheer awesomeness.

We have realized that we will likely have to settle for something not-so-awesome. I'm sure we will learn to love any place, like Lubbock and Milwaukee. But now that we finally have a say in where we get to live, I wanted to actually WANT to live there.

At least he has in-person interviews set-up in Tulsa, OK and Richmond, VA...both okay places, but not ideal.

I'm still trying to figure out what I've learned, if anything, from all of this.

I wish we would have started looking 6 months earlier.

I wish we would have contacted groups in cities we were interested in sooner, and 'courted' them a little.

I wish more people needed to hire interventionalists this year.

I wish we had a job.

Lessons learned...renewal

A week before Christmas, my external hard drive started acting funny. I was immediately angry at myself, because, in the back of a drawer in the office, was a brand new external hard drive, one that I had bought at least two years earlier when our computer had crashed. Then, we had been able to recover everything, and I had immediately bought the extra external hard drive, in case we had troubles again.

But I didn't even open it. It sat in the back of the drawer for more than 2 years. I would see it and think, "Ya know, I should back up everything on to that today," and then move on and forget.

So the right before Christmas, when the hard drive started having problems, I immediately transferred everything onto it...but it didn't all transfer. In fact, most of the pictures didn't.

I felt sick. That terrible pit in the stomach we all hate feeling. I didn't want to deal with it. I didn't want it to ruin Christmas. So I unplugged both hard drives, and tried to push it to the back of my mind.

Christmas was wonderful, New Years was great, vacation in Utah relaxing. But in the back of my mind, in the pit of my stomach, the fear that those pictures were lost gnawed at me. Dreading having to deal with the reality of having lost all photos from 2006-2014 (2015-2017 were backed up on iCloud), I finally dropped off the hard drives at a repair store, and was told they'd do their best.

I didn't sleep much the next two nights. The pit in my stomach grew, being almost certain that all photos from Hattie, Anna, and Niels' births were gone. All of our time in Texas. Half our time in Wisconsin. So many memories. I prayed for a miracle, even just to be able to recover even some of the pictures, and asked the girls forgiveness for having made such a huge mistake. They were two pretty crappy days.

Then Thursday, the store called with the news that they had pulled a TON of data off the hard drive. For privacy reasons, they didn't open to check to see if everything worked, but they assured me that there was a lot there.

I started to hope. I still dreaded picking it up, and having to actually face it.

When I plugged it in, I nearly cried. It was all there! I skimmed through quickly...well, almost all there. They hadn't been able to recover pictures from November 2013 through 2017. But, remember, 2015-2017 were on iCloud. Which meant that I really only lost 2 months of 2013 and all of 2014.

All things considered, much better than expected.

And somehow (I think miraculously) 2014 was the year I was most active on Instagram and Facebook, before taking a 3 year hiatus. I also printed a photo book that year, AND it was the last time I blogged regularly on here.

Over the last two days, I've spent hours pouring over snapfish, shutterfly, facebook, instagram, and blogspot...and anywhere else...and I've pulled up about 330 pictures. And because those were the pictures printed and shared, they are among the best of the year. I've asked family and friends if they can search through their pictures and send me anything they've got with us in it.

I also have been uploading the pictures from 2006-2013 to Amazon Photos since 8 am. They are still uploading now...not even halfway done.

So, that was not a short story, but here's the lessons learned.

1. Don't wait 2+ years to back up your pictures. In other words, don't be dumb.

2. Have copies on your hard drive AND on the cloud somewhere. You won't regret the $ per year they may charge. I've had hard drives fail me twice now and just don't trust it anymore.

3. I really should instagram/facebook/blog more. I think in the past I've always viewed social media as a way to communicate with others. It certainly IS that, but it can be more. I need to view it as a way of documenting life...my kids' lives more than anything.

4. Listening to promptings. I had seen that unopened hard drive SO many times...I even moved it across the country and packed it up. I felt so many times that I should do it. But I always had an excuse, a lame one.

After talking with a friend while swimming today, she talked about how she sets apart a specific time every week to blog, so that at the end of the year she can print it all out. I've always struggled with making the time to blog, between kids, house, homeschool...endless list. But after talking with her, I'm pretty sure I can budget an hour a week to sit down and write...there is always less tv for me to watch. I love writing. I used to be good at it. So here I am, with a new year and a new purpose, focusing on recording history for my family instead of only sharing it with others.

P.S. There will be pictures in the next post. I'm having to download all the iCloud stuff, and it'll take a while to get it all organized again.

Surprising productivity

How does it happen that some days are remarkably productive? This morning I did the usual routine: breakfast for kids, unload dishwasher, load breakfast dishes, dress kids. Some days that seems to be the end of my productivity. The rest of the day slowly passes between diaper changes, attempts to start a project, constant tidying, mealtimes, clean up, and bed time. Every day Paul calls me on his commute home from work and invariably asks how the day was and what we did. Sometimes I know that I did something, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was. The house is a disaster, I didn't cook dinner, and I am still in sweats.

Happily, today was different - after the usual morning start, I got some laundry started, crossing my fingers that with a bit of luck I might actually wash it all today, and, with a miracle, have it folded *and* put away by bedtime. Hattie stayed home from school, having vomited on Sunday evening. So while she would have been at preschool, we instead did school together. She loves doing math. We've purchased a few math workbooks from Wal-Mart & Target. She eats them up. She will often finish a work book in a day or two. While she rarely volunteers to do a reading lesson, she'll jump at the chance to work in her math workbook. Suddenly the 20 minutes I had planned for math time had turned into an hour.

We were interrupted by my phone chiming, tell us it was little cousin Rachel's birthday. Which led to a 40 minute FaceTime party, playing hide-and-seek, Swiper no swiping, and singing happy birthday with Luke and Rachel.

Then lunch for kids, planning an FHE activity, making cookies with Anna, folding a few loads of laundry, fixing my hair, reading with Hattie, reading my scriptures in Spanish, folding more laundry, making dinner, washing dishes, and folding yet again. Kids to bed at 7:15, more folding. Now I am even blogging. What happened that made today different from other days? I didn't necessarily wake up this morning, randomly determined to be productive. I feel like I always have intend to be productive - even if my productivity is focused on spending time with my kids and forgetting about the house for the day. (Did I mention that the kids didn't even ask for TV today? That really made me feel like super-mom. How did I get stuff done and not entertain them all day?)

So if you know the secret to how you pull off your productive days, please let me know.

And the laundry is completely put away. Check.

Inspired by creativity

As I've tried recently to keep this blog up-to-date, I've endeavored also to be more diligent in reading my friends' blogs...heck, if I want more comments, I'd better give 'em out myself. In so doing, I rediscovered that some of my friends have awesome blogs.

There is Elise, who, as a mother of four in Carlsbad, NM, has the funniest stories about motherhood, Kristina in Lubbock, TX, who finds humor in everything, Miranda in Austin, TX, whose writing brings me back to days with her on the mission and in Provo, and Wendy in Washington DC, whose stellar wit and vocabulary always leave me searching for a dictionary. These women are all amazing writers. I feel like I'm right there with them through it all, and it makes me miss these dear friends very much (sigh). 

Now I'm not one who constantly compares myself to others. Trust me, it is damaging to everyone. But reading their blogs did make me wonder - does anyone read my blog for the fun of it? Do they keep reading old posts from a year or two ago just because they are so awesomely written? Or is my blog purely informative on our rather mundane life? 

I'm not an incredibly gifted writer. During my first semester at BYU the only thing I knew about my undecided major was that it would NOT be writing-intensive. Oh the irony. After four years of whipping out critical analyses week after week, I think I started to develop the talent - a five page paper got to be a breeze. But that was 7 years ago. Whatever writing skills I developed seem to have dwindled. Gosh, even writing by hand for too long makes my hand cramp up. 

So what does this all sum up to? My attempt to add some spice to the blog...more stories, less travel-log. More musings, less information. Hopefully I won't look back on this post in 6 months and roll my eyes at my failed commitment. But at least it's a start.