One Year Later

A lot can happen in a year.

I can realize my own apathy and try to fight against it.

People can ask me to update my blogspot and I'll have every intention to do it, but it probably won't happen.

But the biggest change is that I am 28 weeks (six months) pregnant. That's pretty exciting. I'm having a girl. I've been feeling her moving around a lot lately, and I've been showing a little more. It's taken awhile though. I guess it's a good thing I haven't gained a lot of weight (yet) and started to show definitively. I've had morning sickness, lots of feeling nauseated but I only throw up here and there, maybe two to three times a week. I count myself very lucky. My mom and my sisters have usually had morning sickness every day for nine months.

I got called to jury duty in St Louis near the end of January. I probably should have tried harder to get a doctor's note to get me out of it.

The mailing made me laugh. There are two major questions you have to answer and then turn the form back in. The first is: Are you a US citizen? If not, provide proof. (Most people don't want to do jury duty in the city of St Louis, and so they probably lie and say that they aren't citizens. But now you have to prove it, thanks to all the abusers. But if you're here illegally or something, wouldn't it be hard to get proof if you don't have any documentation anyway? But then again, you probably couldn't register your car or register as a voter, which is how they get your name for jury duty anyway. You better not be voting if you're not supposed to. Voter fraud makes me soooo angry!)

The second question you had to answer is, are you a resident of the city of St Louis? If not, provide proof. (So many people like to claim that they reside just outside the city in the county, and we live right on the line, but no such luck.)

Wow, are we all just a bunch of liars???

Then there is a spot about if you have a medical issue to keep you from serving, and yes, they want proof, a doctor's note or whatever, because apparently all St Louisians are liars. Well I wasn't sure if I was medically compromised enough NOT to be able to serve on a jury, so I went like a good citizen.

I figured jury duty here would be like jury duty in California, where you show up, they take volunteers, and then they start calling numbers. I had to serve three(?) times in CA, but never actually got called onto a jury, no jury selection, nothing. It was nice. Oh yeah, I had to do the call-in thing too in cali, but still, didn't have to show that time. And I never even got called to jury duty in Utah when I lived there. Weird.

Okay, a lot happened to me over the course of the three days of my jury service, I went through jury selection, I ended up on the jury after I told them I was pregnant. I just thought, "What are they thinking!?!". It was not a nice civil trial either, it was a criminal trial. I got to hear all about incest, how a father raped his 12-year-old daughter. Fun fun.

Anyway, I'm glad it's behind me. It would have been nice to obtain the doctor's note and get out of it for 12 months, but I thought it would be easier to get called to jury duty pregnant than when I'm trying to nurse a baby. And now I don't have to report for 40 months, and we'll probably be long gone by then, hopefully in Arlington VA or somewhere in the DC area. But then I'll probably just get called to jury duty there. Sigh.

Other updates: We are having a lot of fun in our ward. It's funny the different wards we've been in. I've been in so many singles wards, and single student wards, and then some family wards in Riverside. This is like a student/university ward, except that most of the people are young married couples, most of the husbands are in med school (lots of docs) and many ladies are pregnant or have little kids. We have waves of pregnancies, there was a big one last year (that I missed) and now I'm kinda leading this next wave, where we hear that new ladies are pregnant almost every week. "There are dozens of us! Dozens!"

I've had many jobs in a year. I did temping for awhile with Snelling and got called back to Missouri American Water twice. They wanted me again, but I needed to do my student teaching and was not allowed to work at the same time. I really enjoyed working there. Then I had an excellent time student teaching with two physics teachers at Ladue Horton Watkins High School. I feel bad, I haven't been in good contact with my cooperating teachers since. I haven't even told them I'm pregnant, and I'm six months along!

Then I graduated with my masters in education from Drexel, and Adam and I and my parents all went to Philly for the fun festivities. Adam hadn't ever been to Philly! I couldn't believe it! Then I got a job teaching at Bayless High School over the summer. I taught the students that had failed the physics/chem course. They were an interesting bunch. Some things were tough, and they didn't have the best of science backgrounds, but we worked through it. I liked the questions that they asked about science and they were pretty creative. We had fun reviewing with this Jeopardy game I found that I could populate with the questions. I had a SmartBoard in the class and used technology as much as I could, and they seemed to do well with that. Still, we had tests every three days. It was a crazy pace to learn science.

I also did some tutoring. I had a regular who, ironically, was taking physics classes online through BYU for a program she was entering in the fall, an alternative medicine PhD program. Very interesting. She was an excellent student to tutor. She found me through a Craiglist post, and we had tutoring sessions in a local public library (bc you never know what weirdos you might meet, and you definitely don't want them knowing where you live).

Then I got a crazy job through Snelling where I had to make calls back to back to gather medical info in Texas for this database. It was all general knowledge, but still, the receptionists and schedulers we would get didn't always want to give out the info freely. It was weird. It was supposed to last three weeks, I could handle it, but it wasn't the most fun. I don't really like having to call over 100 people a day. They wanted us to make a new call every two minutes. Yeesh!

Sarah my sister-in-law contacted me to let me know a temp position had opened up at her work, Virbac, to last about three weeks. My job was going to end in a week anyway. But before I left, Practice Match (the place where I had been making all the data-gathering calls) offered me a full-time position! They really liked my hustle! My boss there, Susan, was awesome, but I knew that I was still looking for a teaching position (unless I got pregnant in the meantime). So sadly, I turned them down. Plus I wanted to work with my sis-in-law.

I have been heading up the Virbac Iverhart recall for the last 4 months now. That temp job really extended! And Sarah was prego and my new boss, Pamela, asked me if I could take her job temporarily while Sarah was on maternity leave. That was fine, because I am pregnant too and I'll be pretty darn pregnant when Sarah comes back, and I might be ready to take some time off anyway, preparing for the baby to come.

We are ward missionaries in our church and I play the organ in Sacrament meetings. It's fun, I enjoy it. Adam just got called to be a teacher in gospel essentials. We really enjoy that class.

Recently, I hosted a great bookclub in our ward where we read Murder on the Orient Express, I made yummy English scones, and we had a fun tea party! Hooray for girly parties!

That's my life!

Adam has been busy with school, he had a great summer internship this past summer with a federal prosecutor. He's been applying everywhere for a summer internship for this summer, hopefully in the DC area, but he's been turned down, those lame-ohs! We even tried to work some Orrin Hatch connections that my dad has, but to no avail. Those DC snobs! Wash U is a highly ranked law school, and Adam is on the law review. You are stupid for not wanting him! I just want to know how this lame hiring process happens. Is it all just connections? Or being really really charismatic? Stupids. Where's the merit involved? I ask you.

He has also just been wait-listed for the DC clinic program (like a study abroad through Wash U) for fall semester. We were hoping for both a summer internship and the fall DC clinic so that we would move out to DC about a month after the baby girl comes, and just come back to St Louis for the winter semester and get a furnished place, then Adam graduates and back to DC for us, where Adam can start progressing his political career in becoming a lobbyist. :-)

A new direction we may be headed is - drum roll please - the Air Force. Adam is looking into being a JAG and the law school loan repayment program. We would only be with the air force for 3 or so years and they'd repay the loans, and Adam would be making pretty good money, tax free! And he's hoping we'll get sent to Germany for one of our transfers, and we would be able to tour a lot of Europe, just hop on a train and go basically anyway, Italy, France, Belgium, Denmark, wherever tickles our fancy! That would be great. I would have to laugh if we got sent to Hill Air Force Base. I'd be five minutes from my parents' house! So far, a lot of things have not been turning out the way we've planned, so we'll have to see if we are fortunate enough to end up in Germany.

Maybe I'll get some pics up soon! It's been forever! But they are sooo much easier to upload to facebook! Blogspot, take notice!

-Danelle