So in a previous blog I mentioned that we moved across the country, a lot of stuff happened, and I thought I'd take a few minutes to flesh this out a little.
I left my job as a probation officer in Indianapolis on November 14th, 2014. My wife stayed behind to work and make a few extra dollars while my (then) only kid and I drove up to North Dakota. My daughter stayed with my wife's family in one town, while I worked halfway across the state and her mom worked halfway across the country. We were all divided up in the name of making money and getting ahead.
My wife ended up staying with her family about 4 weeks later when she moved all of our stuff into storage (with the help of her brother and mom). So she was with our daughter while I stayed in a really, really crappy hotel. I'm talking, "I'm shocked there's not that many dead hookers in this place" bad.
I had to pass a test to keep my job. No, I had to pass a few tests to keep my job that I moved halfway across the country to work at.
And I passed them. All of them.
While I was studying and passing tests, my wife was finding us a place to live in Bismarck. Rent here is ridiculous and nobody wanted us to bring our idiot dog. I don't blame them, I wish my wife would have "forgotten" him in Indiana. Or maybe forgot she tied him to the bumper of the moving truck like they did in that Chevy Chase movie...
Anyway, we got all moved in and then there was talk of lay offs, or as they liked to call them, "furloughs." So I chased work.
I had to go to another city, live out of my car (only for a couple of days, thankfully), and work some more, only to ultimately be laid off after about another month, and having passed more tests that enabled me to do more work for a company that no longer needed me or about 300 other guys they'd promised "so much work and money" to that "we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves."
I roomed with my friend Justin for that month, was away from my family except when I'd got a day or two off and could drive home.
I wasn't a dad for those months I was away. I wasn't a husband. I was a constant paycheck and part-time face in the house.
At least that's how I felt.
Then I was laid off and the company that had promised so much cared just enough to remind me that Union dues would still be coming out of my last paycheck, and that my insurance would last only a few more months (which was fortunate, since we now had a baby on the way).
I was out of work for a couple of months before I could find something else that would at least offer full-time pay and benefits. My wife found a job, despite being pregnant, working for the state.
We're far behind on bills, we're struggling to find a daycare, but at least we're all together now as a family.
We're moving forward and soon, I hope, we'll be able to look back at this year as the year we moved to North Dakota and though it began rough, it turned out great.
So there you have it. That's the basics of my last year. Sure, there's more to the story, like the names of friends I made along the way, the time I almost got ran over by a train because a coworker wasn't paying attention, and how my wife hit a deer and totaled our car... but you probably don't want to read about that stuff.
