Random Updates and Things.

As you've probably noticed from my lack of updates, things have been a bit all over the place lately here.

We're really busy, but there's really not much going on. So today I just thought I'd fill you in on some of the randomness that's going on right now. It's really not all that interesting, but I'm sure my parents are dying for an update of some sort.

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So, as you know, our heating has been on the blink. Last weekend it got so bad we decided that maybe there was something wrong with it and we should call someone out.

And with our luck lately -- we seem to be hemorrhaging money at the moment -- we fully expected to need a new furnace. When we bought the house, the inspector told us it really wasn't sufficient to heat our whole house. Which is why we weren't really clued in that it may actually be broken.

So, I called out to a neighbor that has a HVAC company. He came over and said ignitor switch was broken. $55 part, $65 labor. Needless to say, we were thrilled at the $120 price tag as opposed to the $5000 one we thought we may need.

And he said the heater WAS good enough for the house and showed us how to actually set the flow to regulate upstairs-downstairs. We've all been very happy and warm this week!

Our garage door is still hosed but that will have to wait. We're just parking outside at the moment.

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I've been doing a lot of substitute teaching for Sam's school this week. Even though it's only 4 hours a day, it's so tiring! We get home and it's almost time to get Josh from the bus. I never realized how much I missed my mornings and how much I got done until I didn't have them.

One of the teachers at the school is quite ill -- she's in the hospital with some sort of virus and they don't really know what's wrong at the moment. The school did some teacher shuffling since it looks like she'll be out for a bit longer, so I'm only there 2 days this week, and they're short days.

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And finally, as most of you know, we're a bit uncertain what will happen with Rich's job this year. He works for an IT company that has a contract with a large mobile phone/telecomm company. Rich works on the billing application there. The "client" has decided to not use that outsourced application any longer and instead migrate everyone over to their own in-house system.

Which really makes sense. Why run 2 billing applications when you can run one and why pay for outsourcing when you have a team already running it.

So we've known for over a year that Rich's job would be going away eventually. Well it looks like "eventually" is sometime this year.

He's been looking for jobs internally and found a prospect with the same client in the same building doing something he's quite excited about. He's been persuing this opportunity for about 9 months but it looks like things will finally fall into place in February.

He found out yesterday there are some internal politics at play that may have been the reason for the long, drawn out process. But the manager of the group wants Rich and has a good case for him. Hopefully the decision will be made this week or early next week.

Rich is really excited about working with this team, the manager and on the team. He'll be learning something new, and we all know how he loves to learn!

So, please keep us in your thoughts, prayers, whatever... and that this finally comes to a conclusion (one way or the other) this week. It's starting to stress Rich out a bit!

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I've been knitting like crazy. Once I finished Rich's sweater I got the bug! I made a pair of "topless" mittens that I love (I'll post a picture soon). And I am working on a baby sweater for a friend who is having a baby soon.

I still have a queue a mile long of things I want to make. The boys still want me to make some hats for them and I really want to make something for me. I can't work on more than one thing at a time -- I'll get confused!

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That's about it for us for now. I'll try to come back again this week and post more. I'm solo parenting Sam this week. Josh and Rich are on an adventure together and have my camera. More about that later.