You probably have given up on me/us....

It has been a considerable long time since I last posted on here.  So long in fact that I struggled with signing into Blogger and had to navigate through the new look!  I was afraid our blog was lost and gone forever but the lost is now found.  I am not going to make promises to how frequent I am going to post but I/we are going to try harder this go around!

Now for some of the reasons excuses why we haven't been keeping up.  A lot has happened the last year for us.  I received notice last April that I would be laid off from my job in October.  So the summer was spend stressing out looking for a job.  Also, since most knew I would reapply for a position in the new Extension system I was asked/cornered, etc to do extra projects/work/assignments that would look good if I wanted a job in the new system.  As the summer went on quite a few of my co-workers left for other positions with private Industry or took jobs out of state.  I knew I wanted to apply for the SDSU position but must admit I was also looking out of state and at other entities.  I applied for a very similiar position out of state, made it through the phone interviews, was selected for the 3 face to face seminar interview, and then much to my surprise was offered the position.  It took Dave and I some serious discussion before I ultimately chose to turn down the out of state position.  There were a lot of things that I really liked about that position but it came down to what was best for our family and choosing to stay in SD was what we decided was best for us.

I started my new position with SDSU Extension in late October.  The new positions are a continued work in progress.  We are constantly creating our positions as our job descriptions are changing and developing every day.  It has been both fun and frustrating at the same time.  There is one other person in the state that does what I do.  Our state specialist position is still vacant so that brings some extra challenges for us.  Hopefully we will have this position hired before the start of the New Year.

Right before Christmas we learned that we were expecting our fourth child.  A bit of a surprise and Christmas miracle for us.  Now we are counting down the days until our little bundle of joy arrives.  Like our other children we chose not to find out what we are having so we are waiting for our surprise to come on or around July 30!

More changes have occurred for us.  We decided to try and sell our house.  We listed our house late June 11 and within 48 hours we sold our house!  Talk about a huge stress relief for us but that posed a problem we were not expecting to have.  We were dealing on a house that we were hoping to purchase but that deal did not turn out in our favor.  Now, we have sold our house but have not found a house that we would like to move into yet.  So we are weighing the options of building versus buying.  In the mean time we are moving into an apartment for 6 months.  Dave was completely stressed out about where we would be living.  He kept saying he had never been homeless before.  Now, we were never homeless as our house closing is scheduled for July 27.  We just didn't have that definite plan of where we were moving too.  I can't say that we are excited about living in an apartment but it is short term and I know we can make it through it.

I probably have given some of you information overload so we will stop there for now.  Stay tuned till next time for another crazy life installment update!

If you would like our temporary apartment address please email us at dcstrunk@gmail.com.