November Catch Up

November was crazy busy for Guy.

November was all about job interviews for Guy and time with family. The second weekend of November he went to Denver, Iowa (10 miles north of Waterloo) and interviewed with Schumacher Elevator. The company is a smaller family owned company that makes and designs speciality passenger elevators. He met with several different engineers, the CFO, VP of operations, VP of field operations and HR rep. The company is a little smaller but they were really friendly. Guy really enjoyed visiting the area and said the company was great and that he could see himself working there. They seemed really impressed by him and he enjoyed and got along with a lot of the older engineers as well. This is the first time the company has hired anybody straight from college and Guy said he felt comfortable with the company as well as he thought they felt comfortable with him.

It snowed while Guy was in LA. Tree with leaves and 8 in of snow!

The following Wednesday Schumacher called to let Guy know that he was on their short list of perspective hires. They would let him know after Thanksgiving is he was offered the position. The next day (Thursday) Guy flew down to Shreveport, Louisiana for an interview with a company called International Paper (IP). IP is a paper mill company. They make a variety of different paper type products. Two of the products that they make are the Starbucks coffee cups and the boxes that Amazon uses to ship products to you. Their interview process was a little different. They flew about 70 people in for the interviews. During their interview process they had team building exercises, and dinner with people who work at the different paper mills. There are about 20 mills throughout the south, one in Washington and 1 in Cedar Rapids. While he was finishing the interview process there were 2 different mills that really wanted him to work for them (Texarkana and Valliant, OK).  Guy was gone Thursday-Saturday with the interview.

Two days later (the Monday before Thanksgiving), we found out that Guy had been offered a position with IP working at the Valliant, OK mill. We had 3 weeks to decide.

We spent Thanksgiving in Chilicothe with the Lasley clan. Guy and his brothers worked on cleaning out the garage. As well as doing several odds and ends around the house. All of the close family members were able to come down with their families. The food was delicious and the company was excellent. On black Friday most of the women went shopping. It wasn't too crazy of a shopping trip but it was pretty nice to get out and spend some time chatting with family. The Saturday after Thanksgiving we left to spend time with my sister Katie and brother in law Brian at my Oma's house in West Des Moines. It was fun to spend time with them and socialize and get to know Brian a little better.

The Monday after Thanksgiving we found out that Guy had been offered a position with Schumacher and that he was their top pick. We weren't given a set time frame for when we needed to let the company know, but they did ask us to let them know as soon as possible so that they could notify the other choices as well.

December Update

To summarize December up until this point:

The first weekend of December we went to Texas so that Guy could tour the mill in the Oklahoma. That will be a separate blog post so I'll come back to that later.

After our trip to Texas we had the Pro Commercial (Guy's company) Christmas party. Dinner was pretty good, we had prime rib and salad and rolls and french silk pie for dessert. There was also a white elephant gift exchange. We left with some pretty interesting gifts.

The following night was our ward's Christmas party. The theme was Polar Express. The last few years we haven't had the best experience at the Christmas party so this year we opted to instead go out to dinner with Barry Sines. We took him to our favorite restaurant in Ankeny...Jethro's.

Our little Christmas Tree

After that was finals at the university. Guy spent a lot of time studying, and his studying has paid off. We've seen the grades for all but 1 of his classes. So far he's smoked all of them and has gotten A's on each exam. He's really grateful since all of his classes this semester were pretty hard and he's wanted to bump his GPA a few more points. As far as we know he ended with B's or better in all of his classes.

With December being so crazy we were a little late decorating our Christmas tree, but we did finally tackle putting new lights on it today! So here is our cute little tree with the mini nativity set.


We're looking forward to heading to Colorado Springs this week to celebrate Christmas with my family and then we'll come back to do New Year's in Chillicothe with some of Guy's family.

Trip to Paris....

Texas that is.

2nd largest Paris in the world. 

As part of the job offer we got from International Paper they offered to fly both Guy and I down to the area so that we could get to know the community a little better. Most of the salaried employees live in Paris as opposed to Valliant, OK. Valliant is a town with about 700 people in it. Paris is one of the largest towns in Northeastern Texas (25,000). We flew into Dallas and made the drive north. The drive was a little less than 2 hours. Even though it was night, it was a pretty easy drive and not too bad at all. Guy thought it was easier than the drive down to his parents (1.5 hrs).

We got there on Thursday and that night we met with the local bishop to ask him about the area. The bishop and his wife had nothing but praises for Paris. They said it was a great area with all of the people being really friendly. The bishop and his family had lived in Northern Missouri for a few years so they thought it was a similar Midwest kind of nice.

3rd Largest Eiffel Tower

We checked into our hotel and pretty much crashed for the night. On Friday, Guy left early to go tour the mill (~45 min away). I stayed in the hotel and met up with one of the female engineers who started at the company a few months earlier. She took me around and gave me the grand tour of Paris. It was a lot of fun! We went to the Chamber of Commerce and got a HUGE sack of information about the area. She also took me to several of the different shops and stores so that I could get a better picture about living there. We also saw where several of the engineers and their spouses live. We ate lunch at Perry's off the square, which is pretty much a French café. The food was phenomenal.

Guy enjoyed touring the plant and seeing the area. He said the team was all friendly there and that he would be a reliability engineer. When he got home from the tour we went and drove around Paris to look at some of the houses and neighborhoods. We plan on buying a house wherever we move to so we wanted to get a look at the neighborhoods and what was in our price range.

That night we went and ate dinner with several of the employees. The company tries to get together and do something every month or do dinner or breakfast pretty often. We ate at this hamburger restaurant that was pretty good. Everything's bigger in Texas though, so the portions were large. We also went and looked at all the Christmas lights in the park. They also had Santa, the Grinch and a reindeer petting area so it was fun to get to see all of that while we were there.

Saturday morning we went and had breakfast at the local bread/pastry shop. It's a cute store and all of the breakfast dishes were delicious. We learned as well that they make a pizza every Saturday night that is brick oven style and they use the ingredients from the Farmer's market, so the flavor of pizza changes weekly.


Paris has a lot to do for a smaller town. It's about 1.5 hours south of the Ozark Mountains so there's a lot of mountain biking, rock climbing, hiking, road bike racing, kayaking, fishing and pretty much any outdoor activity that you can think of. It's also not far from Dallas, so about once a month the engineers do a group activity down there.

We fasted and prayed after our trip as well as during our trip and we both received confirmation and feel like Texas is the new place for us! We're excited for the new adventure to Paris but sad to be leaving everyone here. I'm especially sad to be leaving my job with the USDA. I have a great boss and have loved working for him as well as my group. We're excited for the new adventure though!

Paris....here we come!

October Catchup

Time got away from me so now I will be playing catch up and summarizing what happened the last quarter of the year.

October-

October 17th was my 24th birthday. The day before I ran 6.5 miles as part of my training for my half marathon. I was pretty tired after that so we kept it a little low key. My birthday was one of the first cooler days of the year. Guy and I went trail bike riding in the morning then came back and I rested and then we went to meet Paul Fenton and family and Kristen and Scott Radke for Jeff's pizza and a little tailgating before the Iowa State football game. They played TCU and lost 45-21. Guy helped me make my birthday cake. I had a butterfinger ice cream cake.  We watched the game on TV and then just relaxed at home. We went a few weeks later to Biaggi's in DSM to celebrate.

Later that month I was still feeling pretty tired and lethargic.  My lymph nodes in my neck were also pretty swollen. I went to the doctor a few days after my birthday and she thought it was just a viral infection. So I went home but I still wasn't feeling any better and pretty tired. I went back to the doctor the Wednesday before Halloween. We found out what was making me sick....mononucleosis. Not so fun to have. I can still feel some of the effects of the mono. I've found I get sick easier and it hits me harder when I do have it.

The last Wednesday of October we went to our ward's trunk or treat. We didn't dress up since it was pretty cold out. Guy helped pass out candy with Matt Burnham while I walked around with Veronica Burnham and their 2 boys, Jackson and Mavrick. Jackson was dressed as Baymax from Big Hero 6. Mavrick was Fredzilla also from the movie.

Halloween was pretty low speed. We stayed in and watched a movie, we didn't see too many trick or treaters out and I was still pretty tired and wiped.