Reintegration

I've neglected the blog.  It's been almost three months since I wrote anything.  Life on shore doesn't seem too exciting, and I hate to bore people.  But things have happened, so it's time for an update.

The boat is mostly fixed.  We repaired the blisters as wells as we knew how.  Hopefully, it'll be good for a few more years.  We might haul the boat out in another five years, and only then will we know if our repairs were good.  So we have a while before we have to worry about it.  After the blisters were filled, we painted the bottom.  It's now a lovely green!  So cute!  And we raised the water line so we don't get barnacles again.  Oh wait, no barnacles in fresh water.  Well, at least we won't get river slime up on the side.  Right?  Since we painted right over the boot stripe, we had to put new ones on.  We bought striping tape to do it.  Getting the lines straight was a little tricky, especially on a curvy hull.  But we managed.  It looks good from 10 feet away, at least.  And it's definitely pretty good for an amateur job.  Go us!  Now the boat is ready to go back in the water.  We'll have to get the prop shaft reattached to the motor so we can actually move the boat.  And some adjustment on the stuffing box will probably be necessary since the stuffing is new.  But then it'll be river-trip ready!  We're hoping to bring the boat back down the river.  Right now it's at Sale Creek, which is a 45-minute drive away, and we'll never use the boat that far away.  I want to bring it back to the marina where I lived before: Gold Point.  Unfortunately, the dock with the bigger slips is full, and the other dock is for 25-foot boats.  We're waiting to hear if they'll take us anyway.  I know there are other 27-footers there, so I'm hopeful we can put the boat there again.  *fingers crossed*

Wedding plans are coming along.  Most of the big stuff has been ordered: food, flowers, cake.  Sending out save-the-dates needs to happen soon.  Very soon.  But we're making progress.

And I have a job!  I was offered a job in Nashville, but I turned it down.  The hours were weird, they didn't do holidays, and I just wasn't prepared to move to Nashville for a job that wasn't awesome.  Rejecting a job was hard.  The search had been slow and discouraging.  But the job wasn't right.  A week later, I was offered a job here.  I got a long really well with the people in the interview, and the job seemed interesting.  And it was a 5-minute drive from home!  Unfortunately, the pay was terrible.  So I had to turn it down.  Apparently, they really liked me.  The offered me more money.  It's still not a great salary, but it's livable for now.  And once Trevor finds a salary-type job, our joint income will be fine.  So what's the job?  I do stability testing for fragrance and cosmetic samplers for a marketing company.  You know those smelly pages with perfume ads in magazines?  Yep, we make those.  And those little samples of shampoo you might get in the mail?  We make those, too.  And my job is to test them.  We do accelerated stability.  Basically, we stick some in an oven for a week (or month, or a few months)  and then compare it to the room temperature sample.  I smell things.  That's my job.  I have a professional nose.

I always managed to land the quirky jobs.  It's a knack.

We're still living with Thaddeus.  Our plan is to buy a house in the next few months.  We hope to be in a house around the time we get married.  We'll see how it goes!  We haven't even started looking at homes yet.  There's so much going on with holidays, wedding planning, job searching, it's hard to even conceive of shopping for a house.  But we'll get around to it.  Meanwhile, our living situation is great.  I live 7 minutes from work.  Because our expenses are low, we're saving up for a down payment when we find a house.  And we get to hang out with Thaddeus!

Life is good.  We're moving forward.  Acting like adults, with actual long-term plans.  And the weather no longer dictates our every move.  I'll admit, that part is kind of nice.