New Job and Car

The last few weeks have been pretty busy for me. To provide a bit of back story, I've been living in Appleton, WI with my girlfriend's parents working a few different contract jobs since May of 2009. While our income was enough to cover a few bills and loan payments, freelance web development wasn't earning enough to cover moving out, so I started applying for fulltime positions in the local area.

In the beginning of August I headed out east with the Reynolds family for a wedding in Ocean City, WA. This trip involved several incredible dinners and a visit to our nation's capital on top of meeting some of Katie's extended family. Near the end of the trip I received an email about a job offer from De Pere, only twenty minutes from Appleton. SparkNET, the founding company of EzineArticles, wanted me as a web developer, a position I quickly accepted.

I've only been working at SparkNET for a few days now, but so far it seems to be a great fit. The atmosphere is very welcoming and open, and the other programmers are very good at what they do. The sites I'll be working on receive high traffic loads and are (or will be) setup in a MVC format, two areas of web programming I could use some more experience in.

Since I sold my dependable, but aging, Ford Taurus before moving to Wisconsin, I started doing some car shopping as soon as we got back from the vacation. The final details have taken a bit of time to hammer out, but I hope to be driving a manual 2006 Saturn Ion by the end of this week, a significant improvement over my mid-90s rust bucket.

Over all, things are looking up. Being unemployed this summer was quite disheartening, especially after the entire amazing Upper Peninsula adventures of last year. I still don't know where I'll end up in five or ten years, but I'm pretty happy with how things are going right now.