We Moved!

I haven’t looked back over my posts to see how much I’ve talked about this here, but if you know me at all, you know that we have been trying to get out of Texas ever since we moved here. Well, God has other plans for us, and it looks like we’re staying put for awhile.

One of the first things my husband said to me after the shutdown began in 2020, was that he feared for the private colleges around the United States. College tuition has been rising remarkably over the years, and that is what most education news stories and articles are about these days. But part of the problem in secondary education is the ever lowering enrollment. This is happening for a number of reasons. One is the high cost. One is the fact that the current and upcoming generations of college aged students is much smaller than any past generation. 

With a much lower, and expected future lowering, of enrollment, many small colleges are finding it impossible to make ends meet. They rely more and more on endowment, which is always a huge factor in private colleges financial wellness. I know of no private college who relies solely on tuition for operating costs. 

Because of this financial stress, some colleges are shutting down. Almost all are relying much more heavily on adjunct professors than in the past. These two issues combined mean that the number of jobs for a PhD physicist in private academia are shrinking rapidly. 

My husband could leave academia… but this is absolutely a place where he thrives. He has a gift for teaching, a love for teaching, and a love for student well being that cannot be fulfilled in any industry outside academia. And we absolutely love the small, Christian college life. The caliber of student is excellent, we can be open about our beliefs and help students as they navigate through a post-Christian world, and we enjoy the devotion to God that the entire institution has!

This is not true of all private colleges, but LeTourneau fits all of these qualities well. We’ve always said that we love LeTourneau. We just wish we could pick it up and move it above the Mason-Dixon line. 

The reasons we have wanted to leave Texas are not because we hate Texans! I want to make sure you understand that. The things we struggle with in Texas are: weather (we ARE northerners), bugs (there are so many things that can bite/sting you here it is ridiculous), and allergies (they are literally debilitating to my husband for most of the year). Granted, it is also frustrating to have moved to a place where politics is so slanted and cultural Christianity lives to loudly that it is hard to find deep understanding of theology (less so on a college campus), but that is not what makes it hard to live in Texas. 

Despite our desire to leave, my husband has gotten very few interviews from the myriad of applications he has put out over the years. Every job he applies for will have 100+ applicants. He looks pretty good on paper, and he interviews well. But with the reliance on adjuncts and the need to keep costs low, many places are going toward just-out-of-college PhDs or MSs who can be paid less. 

Because of these factors and my husband’s foresight as to what will likely happen post-pandemic in academia, he said that we should probably start looking for a more permanent home right here in East Texas. I began looking that day…

And found our dream home!! 

Calm down. We didn’t get it. It was slightly out of our price range, needed a new roof and windows, and would not have fitted our lifestyle quite as well as the one we actually purchased. But, MAN! Was it gorgeous!

This is the house we did buy:

And it has be practically perfect for us! 

Molly told me that she did not want to move unless we got a pool. Check. 

Edward wanted woods. Check.

I wanted a patio, garage, and library. Check. Check. Check. 

We also wanted to be able to have goats and chickens. Double Check. 

Edward and Milli wanted a long driveway for playing in. Check. 

And on and on. This house has spaces for entertaining, a room we rent out to help with costs, a game room, space for sewing, a pantry, and so much more. It has an outbuilding for goats (although, we need to improve the fencing out there before we use it), plenty of space for gardening and an orchard, room for outdoor play, and woods for adventuring and a club house! It is also within biking distance of LeTourneau’s airport location, so Edward can continue to be a bike commuter most days by cycling the first mile and taking the shuttle between campuses. 

It took us nearly a year to find this place. We looked at tons of homes and even put money down on one. But this place was meant for us! We plan to stay here until Edward retires. Granted, the whole point of this article is really that God has plans that may not be ours- but they are GOOD!

Our Busy Life

 I recently wrote about our pre-COVID life and our post-COVID return to life. Now I’ll talk about the craziness that is our current routine. 

During COVID, our life slowed down a lot. Our work life didn’t change that much, as the girls and I were still doing school at home. We would try to get to park day on Thursdays, and we hung out with the Metzgers, who were our pod. Edward was home more, but he still taught and prepped, and graded. He spent lots of time upstairs, so we didn’t see him much more. He did get some more house work done, and he got yard work done. 

In fall of 2020, Edward went back to campus, but we didn’t return to other activities until after vaccinations in spring of 2021. That spring was pretty crazy as we moved (see previous post) and I had books at both the CHEC and TACHE book sales that May. Collecting books and pricing them when your house is full of boxes and you’re still schooling your children is a hard thing to do! I had prepped several boxes before the move, but they all ended up in our living room on the day of the move. Still, I’d call both sales a success. The money went toward teacher back-pay for Legacy.

After that chaotic spring, we had our summer trips. But this post is mostly about our life getting to its new normal. In the fall of 2021, we began to add back into our lives the things we’d lost during the pandemic, and we picked up a few more activities along the way. My kids were a little older, and there were more options for extra curricular fun. 

The first thing we did was reinstate live music lessons for the girls. Molly had been doing them sporadically over the year. Her violin teacher is wonderful and a good friend of mine. Her life was also in flux, so we returned to the studio only to have it shut down in October. Milli has begun taking piano there, as well. Miss Lily was Molly’s teacher for one month shy of 5 years and it was hard to leave her. But she needed a season of rest from teaching other children (she homeschools her brood), so she recommended the Roberts Violin Studio in Kilgore. We began Molly there in November of 2021 and Milli with piano in January of 2022. 

This is actually an older picture from 2019, but I couldn't find a newer one of the two of them.

As much as we love and miss Miss Lily, having a different teaching style has been good for Molly’s development as a player. She spent 2 months with Miss Samantha and then changed to Mrs. Roberts in January. Both women taught very differently than Miss Lily and Molly has stretched to change (which is not her forte). Both my girls played for a much larger audience for their recital in the spring. My husband even accompanied Molly on piano!

This was the rehearsal- Molly dressed up on the day.

Aside from instruments, my daughters also joined the Greater Longview Area Children’s Chorus in September of 2021. This choir was a new group set up by several music teachers in the area (they also formed the Longview Chamber Singers, which we saw perform earlier that year). This choir is specifically geared toward music training- there is a lot of theory and voice training involved, not just fun singing together. I watched the children improve over the course of the year. 

My kids are right in the center.

When the choir started up again this fall, they worked out a few more kinks, and I am even more impressed! I’ve been volunteering more and have gotten to sit in on both the choirs (there are two levels for those with different music experience). I’m proud to have my children in this choir and love seeing them grown in another musical area!

I’m also back in the Civic Chorus! The chorus got back together spring of 2021, but I waited until I was fully vaccinated to join back up. Plus, I was moving that spring. Fall of 2021, we sat 6 feet apart and could wear masks if we chose. We lost almost all of the Civic members, so our director, Jim Taylor, combined us with the LeTourneau Singers. We’d sung concerts with them before, so it was not a hard change. Our meeting time changed from Monday nights to options of either Tuesday or Thursday or both nights. I chose both and have loved it! My relationship with students has branched out to many I would not have met otherwise. I’m in the Civic Chorus again this year and still loving it! 

This was chapel- I'm the second on the right in the front row

Molly also joined the junior orchestra this year! The first day was pretty hard for her. She was nervous, had so sight read at speed, which she has never really done well, and was with all bigger kids than herself. She went home crying hard over the whole thing. But the next week was better. And this past week, she even said that she felt like she had some of the best technique of all the members. She is stretching and growing in confidence and that is exactly what we wanted to see! (Although, you can't see it because I have yet to get any pictures of her in orchestra- wait until her concert in December, then I'll have some for sure).

Milli will be performing in her first play next month! She has been begging me to let her do Artsview Children’s Theatre for a couple of years, but it hasn’t fit in our schedule. I got her in for the December show, which begins practice  right after her choir concert and Thanksgiving. 

Other activities that we’ve started back up: Crochet Club (I’ll do a separate post on this), MEK (board game and anime club at LeTu that died in 2019 but has been revived), Alpha Omega (fraternity that my husband sponsors), having students over for Sunday dinner, and AWANA (this is new for us last year, but Ed did it as a kid, so I counted it as returning). 

Yup- our lives went from zero to 100 pretty darn fast. Welcome back to the land of living! 

Life After COVID

 Everything slowed down in 2020, and yet nothing really stopped.

In the last post I mentioned a few things that ended before COVID really hit, but everything go much slower on my birthday, March 13, 2020. My husband and I had made plans to go out to dinner and I had tons of birthday coupons yet to use. Our usual birthday outing was to Texas de Brazil, which was in Tyler. But, as it was a buffet, we didn’t trust it and then the next day it was closed along with many other places.

We were near the end of spring break and everything was suddenly up in the air. The university messaged all faculty and students to tell them to take another week of break while the administration made plans. I heard of this while standing in the living room of a friend. She got a text from a parent of a student who had just gotten the email. We raced home to see what that meant for my husband. He was on standby.

Different schools handled the shutdown in different ways. LeTourneau University decided to have students remain at home or go home for the rest of the semester. There were a few international students that were stuck on campus until they could get cleared to leave the country, but otherwise all were dismissed. That didn’t mean the school year was over. My dear husband had to figure out how to both teach and lead physics labs remotely! There are some subjects that are just as easy to teach, or nearly so, over the internet than others. Lab sciences are impossible.

Somehow we got through the year- just another 6 weeks. We watched as hospitals were overrun, people were dying, and pundits argued over one more thing. For some, life ramped up- essential workers and medical staff. For many, life slowed. It was nice in some ways to have my husband home. His work took less time after an initial learning curve to get the camera to work well and schedule class times. We were at home a lot but tried to get out in nature, as well.

That summer, we still took our trip to Michigan. It was a 10 day trip- 5 days at my in-laws and 5 in a hotel. Several members of my family were still working with the public and my in-laws felt unsafe with us going back and forth between each family. The 5 days with my in-laws were nice and peaceful- we read books and the kids played outside. I did have my usual breakfast with Christie and time with Keoina (oldest friends).

Kids enjoying Frosty Boy ice cream

The second week at the hotel was interesting. There were no ice buckets, limited room cleaning, no dining services, and no pool open. We essentially used it just for sleeping and spent the read of the time with my parents. The trip covered the 4th of July, but all city celebrations had been canceled. We did some small fireworks at my mom’s house. When we returned to the hotel around dusk, the parking lot was packed with locals! Our hotel was on one of the highest hills in Grand Rapids and they had all come to watch the illegal fireworks being shot up by dozens of people in town.

We gained two new members of the family in 2020! My husband’s brother married and his sister married! We experienced the sister’s wedding virtually, and Milli, Ed, and I sang a song in the virtual choir. The wedding was in May in Kentucky and it was very well done! Besides the choir song (prerecorded and pasted together like the Brady Bunch) there was a virtual reception and toast. The local Kentucky family were present and the wedding was lovely.

Tim is sitting next to Milli on the left and Lindsay is under Teddy on the right.

Ed’s brother and his wife married in an outdoor ceremony in the fall, so we only saw pictures. It was in Maryland in the mountains. We would have loved to have been there, but we also did not want to have life completely put on hold. Our new in-laws are loved and we all got together in summer of 2021 to celebrate.

Our fall trip home was completely canceled, as was our Christmas trip. That meant that after almost 9 years in Texas, we spent our first Christmas here.

Our kids were excited to get a tree. We got it from Ellis Pottery and each tree is named there. Ours was Ratchet. We set up Edward’s train set for the second time ever. I was sad to miss family celebrations, especially since all of my family live in the same town and got together. We called, but it wasn’t the same. Still, we 4 were together and did have a nice day. We opened presents on the Eve and sang carols on the day. We spent most of Christmas Day with our friends, The Metzgers, who were our pod during all things COVID. Our family members combined made 10, which was the upper limit allowed to gather at one point. We also did church together and some friends and family joined virtually. I led music and Edward preached.

In the fall of 2020, Ed’s job didn’t exactly go back to normal, but did get close. Students came back to campus and had regular COVID testing, including the day of arrival. There was contact tracing and quarantining and all around caution, but classes did resume. Anyone who was in quarantine could watch virtually and we had zero outbreaks.

I got my first vaccine shot on my birthday that year and my second on Maundy Thursday. Ed got his shot in May after classes let out. Neither of us got sick, a little achiness and some swelling, but that was all. By summer 2021, we had mostly resumed pre-COVID life with some masking at times.

Even though we came through the pandemic completely unscathed, we still pray it never happens again. And our hearts go out to all who lost so much more.

Life Before COVID

 

The last time I wrote an update about my life was in 2019 after a few year hiatus (hm, deja vu). At the time, my kids were 5 and 7 and attending a University Model School. They were in a sign language club, swim club, and science club. I volunteered at their school a ton and quite a bit at the University where my husband works. I was working out sporadically and busy all around.

That, of course, ended pretty abruptly in 2020.

But there were a few things that happened before COVID shut us down for awhile.

In 2019, I wrote that I was in a busy season and had little time for reading and writing. So, you’d think that would change with a shutdown… and it did a bit. I read 47 books that year. I’d read 67 the year before, but most of those were children’s books aloud to my kids. I also listened to many hours of podcasts and in 2021, I read 59 (Thank you, Goodreads.com for keeping track for me). That infers that I didn’t read more during 2020, but less.

One thing that happened before the pandemic shut us down was death. A dear friend of ours died at 12:45am on January 1, 2020. It was sudden and no one saw it coming. He was only in his 30s and left behind a wife and 3 children. The week after the funeral, we found out that our school had died, as well. Legacy Academy will be featured in another post, but right now I will say that it was a big blow.

So, 2020 began badly here. Yet we had no idea what was coming. I was listening to the news a lot and knew of the issues that China was having with the virus. I was vigilant but not worried. In fact, we even took a homeschool trip with friends to Chicago that January. That was a blast and we vowed to travel with that family more in future. Chicago had already had its first case of COVID and the news said that she even rode the L and subway home. But we rode it over and over, unperturbed, even though I knew how gross public transit can get.

Perhaps because it was winter and we all had gloves and scarves on a lot, or perhaps because there had only been the one case at that point and the likelihood that we had ridden the same train in the same car touching the same handles without hours of an infected person was low, we all returned in good health.

COVID could have been much worse for us. We were very lucky to avoid any illness of ourselves or loved ones. It wasn’t until Christmas of 2021 that any of my immediate family got sick and that was my mother and sister. Christmas was moved to my in-laws’ house and only my other sister and her family came. Eventually, in 2022, most of my side of the family had gotten it at one point or another. On my husband’s side, his sister who worked in a hospital got it in 2020 at some point. She came through it fine. My husband and I got it in July of 2022, and it sucked. But still mild cases. Very few people associated with us has actually died from COVID. Only one member of my choir, that I know of. No member of our church. One student at LeTourneau before returning for the fall semester. All in all, we were fairly unscathed.

I watched as the world both shut down and went into chaos mode. Tons has already been written about it. I will only say that we stayed out of the fray. Living in a small city in East Texas meant we experienced none of the riots of the summer of 2020. We had more fighting about masks than many places and less than others. Our town had really good communication from the Mayor and our Governor gave regular press conferences. Things opened up early here, but that was mostly due to our low population and spread, not because people were stubborn. I continued to wear masks in public until both my husband and I were vaccinated, and then still a few places after that, depending on the numbers, which I watched like a hawk, or the concentration of people.

It is now 2022. The worse has passed by, and while there is still COVID everywhere, its effects are minor now. Still, hoping to get a booster before heading back to Michigan this Christmas.

What I've Been Up To... Reprise

 

I find it funny that just two posts ago, I wrote about begin a writer and hoping to blog more consistently. Then almost 3 years of silence with just a post about pumpkins in there. This is what my journals always look like, too. “I’m going to start journaling regularly” they invariably say every few years. I used to journal regularly… when I was stuck in school every day with pen and paper. But since then, I tend to journal only when I’m stressed or sad. Future journal finders should take that into account when reading them. I don’t want you to think I had such a bad life, overall.

 When I got married, my husband asked me to keep a journal for us. I began writing several times a week. Then I went down to just Sundays and then I fell back into my “when I feel stressed” mode. So, definitely take that with a grain of salt because my marriage overall has been wonderful! I’m sitting at my desk looking at our journal right now.

So, here I am with an update. I’m sure you were all on tenterhooks (all 3 of you) to see what I’d say next. Sorry about the long wait. I will admit, I even though was pretty busy (as you will read), the hiatus is mostly due to slow internet. It was nearly impossibly to upload pictures at my old place, which I’m pretty sure I’d mentioned before. 

Old place? Yes! We have moved! But not, as we had hoped for so long, away from Texas. That is for another post. Our new place is just outside of town on a little under 10 acres.

 Other than that, what else has happened to us since 2019? Here’s a quick list, but some of these will be their own posts later:

- moved

- visited Michigan 7 times

- survived a pandemic

- seen all of New England in one week

- began to homeschool full time

- survived the end of Legacy Academy

- returned to choir

- kids joined choir and orchestra

- several concerts including the girls’ first symphony

- changed music studios

- resurrected crochet club and MEK

- taken on renters

- added two in-laws on the Hamilton side

- added two nieces to the family

- got my first smart phone

- took a hiatus from news

- discovered you tube and podcasts

There have been other adventures, but these are the ones that stick out to me right now. Look forward to telling you more about them!