The Sooner State

In honor of our recent trip to find a home in Oklahoma, here's a little background as to how it got its nickname:

In 1889, the Indian Territory was opened to settlers. Thousands of people lined up on the border and, when the signal was given, they raced into the territory to claim their land. Some people went in early to claim their land. They became known as Sooners.
Hence, Oklahoma's nickname today is “The Sooner State”.  
source: http://www.salinaok.com/oklahoma.html

    

We arrived in Oklahoma City, got our rental car and headed to the LDS Temple.  It's a good grounding place for us to start. 

 A peculiar thing about Oklahoma that I noticed right away: There are oil rigs all over the place in some of the most random locations.  There are quite a few right as you're leaving the airport and there are even some downtown.  I guess it's not much of a surprise how much of this state's economy is directly linked to oil prices.  With the oil price dropping really low, the largest energy company in Oklahoma City laid off 1,800 workers in February.  This made it so when we were looking for a house, there were tons of homes just sitting empty waiting to be purchased.  It is quite the buyer's market right now.  It made me feel bad like I was capitalizing on their poor fortune.

We saw 18 beautiful houses in one day!  It was quite the whirlwind.  It was actually a lot of fun even if my brain hurt by the end of the day trying to keep all the houses straight.  We narrowed it down to our top 5 choices and saw them another time the following day.  We're in the process now of trying to put an offer on a house.  We're really excited!  It feels a lot more real now that we possibly have a place to call home.  Fingers crossed that it all works out!

Scrappy Happy

After almost a month away from my sewing machine I was finally able to sit down for an hour and whip out a quilt top.  I had all of the March do.Good Stitches blocks just waiting to be put together.  Since it's made entirely out of everyone's scraps it's a fun quilt.  I've been calling it the Scrappy Happy Quilt.

 I'm not going to have time to finish it before my quilting stuff gets packed, but I'm glad I was able to get the quilt top together quickly, so I don't have random blocks all over the place. 

OKC Bound

After 10 long months we finally know where we're moving.  It's been an emotional roller coaster to the very end, but we're excited to have a direction and to have a job that Joel's happy about.  We are moving to Oklahoma City!  It's pretty funny, because when we started this process OKC wasn't even on our list.  I didn't even know they had a children's hospital.  I thought they either went to Dallas or Kansas City.  It wasn't until we expanded our search in January that it first came on our radar.  I'm sad about being so far away from family, but we're excited to explore an entirely different part of the country.  It's going to be quite the adventure for our family.
 
Here's the video they sent us when we were first being introduced to Oklahoma City:  Video

April Stitches

This month's blocks for do.Good Stitches are a variety of scrappy/bright/low-volume/HST options.  Steph wanted us to pick the way we put together the Half-Square Triangles, so here are my three blocks.

The Job Search Marathon

I was looking back and it occurred to me that it's been over a month since I gave a job interview update.  I meant to write a post before we left for vacation, but when you have 4 kids the preparation it takes to vacate the premise is almost as long as the vacation itself, so the post never happened.

Joel was gone all last week on interviews, so I'm going to back up a bit and take it from where we stood when we left on vacation. 

Oklahoma City said they would get back to us within a week of our initial visit, and Joel and I both felt pretty sure they were going to offer him a second interview, but a week went by and then another and we still hadn't heard anything.  Silence had, to that point, been a very negative thing for us, so we started to doubt that there was going to be a second interview.  For that reason Joel went ahead and applied to 3 more job openings.

During that waiting period he interviewed in Columbia, Missouri.  The people were wonderful and he had a good experience, but the hospital was so tiny and he would have been 1 of only 2 oncology doctors there, so we didn't feel like it was the right fit for him or for the family.  They were wonderful and offered him a second interview, but he turned it down.  It was really scary to turn down the only second interview offer he had ever received, particularly after the continued silence from Oklahoma, but we really felt like it was the right thing to do.  It was our little leap of faith in the process.

Meanwhile, Joel submitted his CV to Ann Arbor, Michigan and within an hour the BMT director was on the phone interviewing Joel.  He told him he would meet with his committee and get back to him about a possible face to face interview.  With how slow this whole process has been going we didn't expect to hear anything for a while, but the very next morning he heard back from them on possible interview dates.

Detroit, Michigan also offered Joel an interview, and Rochester, New York finally set a date for an interview.  The real relief came the following week when Oklahoma City finally got a hold of Joel and offered him a second interview.  Scheduling was a bit rough, but gratefully it worked out, so that he could travel there the Monday after we got back from vacation.

We enjoyed our week together as a family, and then Joel left for his second interview.  He felt like it went really well, but still had a few questions about mentor-ship and exact duties.  This job is a general practice Oncology job with being in charge of the Survivorship clinic (long term follow ups for children who no long have cancer).  Joel felt pretty confident they would make him an offer, but they told him they would let him know by the end of the week. 

He got home Tuesday night/Wednesday morning at 1am, and then the very next day he drove up to Ann Arbor, Michigan for his interview there.  This is for a Bone Marrow Transplant job which is very different from the OKC job.  He's always had a lot of interest in BMT, but has lacked the experience necessary to really be considered for this type of job.  Gratefully, he had a few connections with the people here at Nationwide Children's who have a great working relationship with University of Michigan, so they took a good look at Joel's CV, liked his area of research, and decided to bring him in for an interview.  It was another round of grueling interviews, but Joel felt really good about it.  His presentation of his research went well, and he really liked the people in the BMT department there.  He was the first of 3 to interview there, so he won't know if they're going to bring him back for a second interview until the end of this week.  The other girl who is the real competition does her research in BMT, so that could spell the death for Joel's second interview chances, but you never know.  What is meant to be will happen, so now we're just waiting.

Joel drove home Friday and then that evening he got an offer from OKC!  (They email the offer).  It's a really great offer, and we are both seriously SO relieved that we know now he'll have a job!  The street corner was getting a little too close for comfort!  Joel went ahead and canceled his interviews in Rochester and Detroit, because he feels good about either OKC or University of Michigan.  We have 2 weeks to make a decision about OKC, and in the mean time we will wait to see where Ann Arbor stands.  It's crazy to think that we may actually have some semblance of an idea where we're moving by the end of this month.  Phew!  Much more of this and I'm pretty sure I would have gotten an ulcer. 

Scrappy Mess Up

Ugh.  For the most part, I consider myself a rational, intelligent being, but every once in a while all sense leaves my body and I do stupid things. 

I put a heat reinforcement on the back of the fabric that had the slices in it.  The only problem is that there were actually 3 little slices and I only saw 2, so 1 of them didn't have any reinforcement.  I was so irritated about it I started sewing it closed without thinking about the fact that the fabric is a dark red and my thread is tan.  Ya- they don't exactly match.  The even worse part is I missed part of it the first go around, so I had to sew over it a second time and make a bigger mess of tan thread on red fabric. 

I seriously just wanted to throw away the quilt, because I was so irritated.  Plus, it was for my cousin who is crafty and sews, so I knew she would know it was a major error right away.  I calmed down and decided to give it to her anyway, because it's the thought that counts, right?  Anyway, if she doesn't like it she can get rid of it and I'll never know.  :)  On the bright side, I did use a lot of scraps.  Even the back was left over from the previous scrappy quilt I made, so we're making progress in the scrap department.

Scrappy Slices

I pieced together the fourth scrappy quilt top this past weekend.  I basically did a mini version of this tutorial.

I was feeling all proud of myself for getting this quilt top pieced together so quickly.  Then I noticed the red block has 3 slices in it.  I'm assuming it somehow found its way under my rotary cutter at some point.  I'm just grateful I saw it before I layered the quilt, and that it's at the edge of the quilt.  It shouldn't be too hard to remove and replace it.  (Famous last words I'm sure).  It's just a slight bump in the road to finishing the quilt.

Scrappy Finish #3

Phew.  The 3rd scrappy quilt of 4 is done!  It's heading in the mail tomorrow to a friend.  I'm grateful it came together quickly since she's already had the baby.

 The flannel backing is the other half of the receiving blanket I never made, so this entire quilt came directly from my fabric stash.  Wahoo!