A big, long move across America.

I know. It has been an eternity since I last blogged... It's a little hard to do without my own working computer. With my blogging job, I have not had time on limited-use public computers to do this blog. But I have a few minutes right now, and hopefully there will be more time in the future.

Hopefully this won't be too surprising for most of you, but... we're in Georgia now! Paul did get into an Experimental Psychological graduate program here at Augusta State University, and here we are. I had three stressful weeks after we found out before we moved. We couldn't afford any moving van at all, so we ended up stuffing all we could into our car and leaving the rest. It was hard (made me cry), but we left Provo.

The journey was LONG and exhausting, but it was fun too. We stayed at my mom's house for a day and a half and then headed out for Denver. My cousin Lindsey and her husband Nick live there. (I realized just now that I don't know for sure if that's how she spells her name...) They were so nice to us! We had a bed to sleep in and great food to eat. I was sad to go. We drove from Denver all the way across the eastern part of Colorado and the broad expanse of Kansas. We loved Kansas because it was so open, green, and beautiful. The roads were almost empty, and the other drivers were polite and relaxed. I thought it would be a good place to live, although I had to laugh at all the religious billboards that said things like "I trust you, Jesus" and "Christ heals; pornography destroys." We flew through that state into Missouri. We veered from the freeway in Kansas City, Missouri, and headed north to a little town called Kidder, where a friend from Paul's mission lives.

His friend was Ammon Galbraith, and we stayed with him, his wife, and their four little boys. Ammon had taken the next day off work to spend with us, so we stayed in Missouri for a day with the Galbraith's. They took us to Liberty Jail, where the prophet Joseph Smith was imprisoned. It was a sweet heart-breaking experience to go there and see the tiny little basement where he was held. The Galbraith's, too, gave us great food and a bed to sleep on. I loved being there.

The next day was the long one. We drove from Kidder back down to Kansas City, across Missouri, into Illinois, through Kentucky, and finally through Atlanta, Georgia and we stopped for the night in Newnan. We stayed with some friends of Paul's from his old home ward, the Royle's. They were awesome, and once again, made us delicious food. (This time, it was a white chicken chili with corn bread!) The Royle's are actually an older couple whose children have all married and moved out, but their kids don't live far, and they called them home for a lunch with us. It was fun!

Newnan is about three hours from Augusta, so we had to make that last drive before we could find a house. Finally we were able to get a cute little blue house in a very quiet neighborhood. The house hadn't been lived in for months and it has required some cleaning on our part, but I love it and I'm so happy to be here. We have yet to meet a mean person here. Seriously everyone we meet is relaxed and nice, even if their accents are so strong that I can't understand half of what they say. And there are A LOT of bugs here, which is something I'm going to have to get used to.

I have had some trouble with my financial aid, and I'm not sure if I'm actually going to be able to go to school this semester. I might have to wait until next semester in order to get the financial aid that I need. That's kind of a pain in the butt, and it might just work out anyway, but in the meantime, I'm looking for another online writing job. I've spent the last hour and a half responding to Craigslist postings for writing jobs, so hopefully one or two of them will be interested in me. Please pray for me! I don't know what's going to happen, but on the bright side, Paul has his financial aid taken care of and he is registered and set to go in his program. I'm really proud of him for getting in, and I'm excited for him. We found the Psychology Department here and met another grad student who was way nice and made Paul feel good.

Well, that's enough for now. Blogs really shouldn't be this long... I'm going to re-do my blog background now, to fit the new settting. This is a different world, after all.