Some say the First Year is the hardest...

To those who say that I say nah. Come with me, this is Matt posting (sidenote: it is often difficult for me to figure out until half way through the post who is the poster), on an exciting journey to recap our first year of marriage.

PART I: The Hardship


May 5, aka Cinco de Mayo - We chose the biggest party day of the year because that is what we intended to throw. So for all in attendance they know that the party started at like 9:00 am and by about 9:00 pm everyone was all crashed out and so it was early to bed.

Honeymoon: Cruise to Mexico (please see post)

May 19- Scott and Alicia's wedding in Oklahoma, a state located near Texas, the big state that wishes it was its own country and so do I (just playin Mason).

June - Trip to Boston - very fun trip see previous post.

Then sometime in June we found out that I was going to get laid off again previously laid off in Feb). The first time it had an emotional toll on me. I loved the company, had many friends there and intended on being there a long time. This time I had taken the necessary steps to avoid such heart break.

Aug - It was a week before the big day came and I didn't have anything lined up for work. My boss received an email that he forwarded to me and it was a job opportunity. I responded, had an interview on Monday and was offered the job on Wednesday, to start the following Monday.

October - The new job was with a company that manufactures and installs wrought iron doors. I was to be the manager of the iron installs and customer service. Then about 6 weeks later rumors started to float that the company was going to declare bankruptcy. Then within two weeks they did and I'm out a job again.

At this point I could only laugh and think things are starting to get ridiculous. I’m calling shenanigans on life.

So due to some phone calls and quick thinking I set up a little business partnership and am and finishing out some iron door installs for one of our biggest clients, which happened to be the same company I got laid off from in August. Pretty coincidental huh!?

So that is working fairly well for a couple months while I am trying to decide a better route to go. I had a conversation with one of my friends and he asked me if he thought the Lord was trying to tell me something. I decided that, you know what I think he just might be. So I decided that I needed to make an appropriate career course correction. I started to feel that if I had begun to head down a path and that if I continued I was going to be thousands of miles away from where I want to be when I set out on my journey.

The course correction stage was a very important one, and one id did not want to go wrong on. However, when you have bills that need to be paid and a wife to support, time is definitely of the essence.

January - So now we are past the wonderful Christmas holiday time and things are not looking promising yet, you could say we were flying through some turbulent clouds. A bumpy ride and we couldn’t see in front of us. My jobs are pretty much coming to a close, I have a few thousand dollars of work to do still but after that I am not sure what to do to get me back on track. To our dismay, we found out that both the company I was in a partnership with, and the company we were working for were declaring bankruptcy. Talk about a double wammy. Now we have no more work coming in, lost out on a few thousand dollars and now all of a sudden everything feels pretty urgent. I was already feeling like I was slightly off course in my career and now it’s like the plane was struck by lightning.

Luckily, thanks to a wonderful blessing, Christi was promoted at work. It was a financial raise as well as an increased work load so she was probably making about four times as much as she was before.

I decide that it is definitely time to return to my roots. I start talking with an old college buddy and he is telling me about his company that does consulting work and it is 100% doing what our degree was in. To me it sounds good, almost too good to be true. The job is basically the exact course correction we need to make. It would get us back to our bearing, even down to one second of a degree (1/3600th of a degree) that I feel we need to be heading.

Feb - Fly out for an interview. The offered me the job and we had to compare that to several other options in AZ and we felt that moving to California was the right thing to do.

March - Leave my wife in AZ and head out to California in search of gold, or at least to start my job.

May - Happy one year and moving out to Cali. We are very fortunate to be making this trip via Uhaul and not Handcart.


So that is a recap of some of the events of our one year. Some might say that was hard, some might say it was eventful, I say at least now I have something to bear my testimony about next month to my new ward.


Afterthought: This message goes out to anyone who reads the Thompson's Blog. In a post Stacy made the comment - Sometime in February, he finally found a new job. -

I found, and or was offered nearly 10 jobs in that time period. None of them were quite what I wanted for they would not have made the course correction that I felt we so dearly needed. So I feel that if anyone was entitled to say that I finally found a new job it was my sweet wife who had to endure through so much.

So now I’m gonna try and steal that comment back. To do so I will continue to piggy back off of Pres. Uchtdorf's talk A Matter of a Few Degrees, at the Priesthood session - I would like to say that I FINALLY have a new job and we’ve made the course corrections necessary to get us back on track and I am no longer drifting a few degrees of my career destination.