I’ve been struggling with motivation for writing these blog posts. One reason I know for sure is due to how busy we’ve been this year. I’m working full time, as a software engineer remotely while going to school part-time (a little more than part-time actually). I first started writing monthly updates in the form of a blog post sometime in 2014 when we decided to pack up and strike out on our own in the mythical land known as Arizona. We didn’t have jobs or a place to stay, we just arrived and said “Here we are!” and Arizona stared blankly back at us. Thankfully found an apartment and jobs within two week weeks while we were crashing with my brothers family. We’re already looking at that as one of the best choices we’ve ever made. The time we spent in Arizona was a period of deep growth and development. When we moved to Arizona was when we became truly independent and self-reliant. I can’t say it was immediately easy though, as nothing that makes you grow ever is. As I mentioned we had jobs, but they didn’t pay very well. We were both working less than part-time, I was at an “internship” making 10 dollars an hour and Emily was working as an office assistant making 14 dollars an hour. We only had one old Camry between the two of us, but we really lucked out because our jobs were within a couple of minutes of each other. It was enough to pay our bills, and that was about it. We lived like that for about a year. Looking retroactively, I feel stressed for our past selves, however mostly what I remember about that time was feeling happy and content. Emily and I grew to love and support each other as we learned how to support ourselves and use our hard earned money to pay our own rent, internet, food, everything without the aid of student loans or parental charity. I wouldhighly recommend going through at least a lean year or two as a young married couple. I, perhaps stupidly, never bothered to try and get my “internship” to count as a real internship. I was too busy soaking in as much knowledge about programming as I possibly could. We would come home from work around 3 or 4, we’d make and eat dinner quickly, maybe watch half a youtube video about board games or something (we would literally pause a video at the halfway mark to save time), and then I would start reading or practicing programming until bedtime around 9 o clock. I did that every single day for an entire year, as well as spending as much time on Saturday as I could. After a year I became incredibly bored at my current 10 dollar an hour job, and I started interviewing. I got a job offer at a more established company that provided a similar service to the one I was trying to escape, but it was in the complete opposite direction of Emily’s workplace, so I turned down the offer. However 40,000 seemed like a ton of money to my 10-dollar-an-hour self and it was then that I realized that I could actually do this - I could get a real “grown up” job. Eventually, I found a company that was building and maintaining a large backend web application which was more of what I was looking for rather than building dumb word wordpress sites and optimizing for search engines. I ended up getting offered a 45,000 dollar salary, which meant we weren’t just scraping by anymore. Except that we decided we should just scrape by. You see, we had been (stupidly) living on student loans for a while, and we felt we couldn’t be truly independent while we were beholden to someone else by the way of debt. We upgraded our standard of living a bit by moving to a better apartment, but after that we didn’t eat out, or spend money on any frivolity whatsoever, except for the occasional McDonalds ice cream cone from the spare change we collected. Every last penny we could spare we threw at the debt, while I listened to Dave Ramsey every day on my way to work to keep my motivation going. After it was over, we went to Texas Roadhouse and celebrated our freedom. Again, I look at that time of scrimping and saving and associate that time with a feeling of general happiness and contentedness. We simply didn’t need money or things to be happy. We had each other and our united pursuit of worthy goals. We decided that we didn’t really have any excuses to not have kids at that point, and we moved into a two bedroom condo. It’s not like we were desperate to have kids as apparently a lot of other people in similar situations are, but we just decided we would no longer actively prevent pregnancy. Well, it didn’t happen that first year but I scored another job upgrade, this time it was work from home and so the second bedroom functioned as an office. It was very nice to have a work from home job but I felt like I was in over my head and I was the weak link on the team. I remember being so stressed out at times that I would get physically dizzy, and I would often work late into the evening. After a while, the pressure eased as my skill level grew and I started to fit into my role better. About a year into the job I was starting to get dissatisfied and bored again. It was somewhere at this point that the idea of finishing up school entered my mind ever so subtly like a tiny seed planting, and started to grow slightly every month. It was many months before I was even slightly seriously considering going through with it, but I started to get an acute restlessness as my skill and growth started to stagnate and every day started feeling more and more monotonous. Maybe if we would have had kids at that point, I might not have felt so restless about “what’s next”, or maybe I would have freaked out due to the fact I was working at a place I was dissatisfied with. It’s hard to tell for sure, but I did the only thing I could think of doing: interview for another job. I eventually got hired on with a startup in Scottsdale, Arizona, helping write a large medical device inventory management and surgical appointment scheduling system that is hopefully going to cause some disruption in an industry that is stuck 1995, technology-wise. It seemed like an exciting opportunity, but it wasn’t too long I realized it just wasn’t doing much for me. I felt far too comfortable and stagnated from the beginning. It was a far cry from my previous job where I was about to pass out from the stress of it all. Although I was making good money, I couldn’t help but feel like there was so much more out there to learn and experience, but I was here in the office using the same framework, the same language, with coworkers who are half as skilled as my previous job (sorry, but it’s true). Emily and I were both in a funk at this point. We had moved to a three-bedroom house that we didn’t really like and was sucking too much money from us, which meant we didn’t have the consolation of “hey at least we’re saving a ton of money!” (although were and always are saving money). We weren’t really pursuing anything, we weren’t having kids although admittedly we were still only kind of half-heartedly trying. C’mon, having kids is incredibly scary! Around this time Emily started getting really bad periods. She’s always had pyscho, irregular periods, but when she started throwing up, that’s when we decided it was time to see a doctor. She waited 2 hours, was seen for 10 minutes and told to go see some specialists and we were charged 200 bucks for the visit. We weren’t too happy about that one. It probably didn’t help that we already have a mistrust of the medical industry, as it wasn’t too long previously when a simple checkup at the dentist turned into a 4000 dollar charge that we had to pay out of pocket, without any consent or warning beforehand. Our attitude lately has been to avoid seeing a doctor unless we feel there’s a danger we’re going to die otherwise. It was at this point that we were robbed, and although that was indeed a horrible experience, I see it as a necessary experience for us. Otherwise, I don’t know how long we would have lingered in that miserable rut we were in. We had spitballed just up and moving somewhere, perhaps to Oregon, perhaps to the East Coast or even somewhere crazy like South Africa, but going back to school had been one of those spitballs, and after the stress and trauma of the robbery it was suddenly crystal clear that was the best decision. We sure as hell weren’t staying at that house, and I didn’t particularly care for my job, so to Rexburg we went. I had previously already started taking online classes in anticipation that I would someday make it back to Rexburg, but the robbery incident propelled us far more quickly in the direction that we were already heading. In a way, I’m so glad that our house got broken into and our personal space invaded. Coming back to this quaint Idaho town was a huge culture shock for us since we had lived in the massive metropolitan of Phoenix for the past 5 years. Everyone is so homogenous and everything is so tame and quiet. At the last house we lived in, it wasn’t uncommon to hear what sounded suspiciously like gunshots in the middle of the night. Now we’re living in a place where doors aren’t locked. When we moved into our apartment they told us to just head right in, that it wasn’t locked. That was a Friday, and we didn’t get the key until Monday. We were still emotionally on-edge from the robbery, so we were afraid to leave the house. At some point, we both had to leave for some reason and Emily tried to make our Bluetooth speaker look like a camera and we put up a sign that essentially said: “We’re watching you!”. Needless to say, our stuff was safe. Now we laugh at that and every once in a while don’t even lock our doors. One of the first weeks we were here, somebody at the gas station approached me and my instinct was to reach for my wallet so I could throw him a dollar or whatever, but it turns out he just needed to borrow some jumper cables. After a while, we got used to the fact we’re surrounded by LDS farmers and LDS college students. Life here is certainly quiet, and we don’t really fit in, but we’re making progress again in our lives and we’re content. Emily went to a doctor that my sister Janae recommends to get some help with her issue, and he was empathetic and spent time with her to try and figure it out. She mentioned that she didn’t want to go on birth control because we were sort of trying to have kids. His response was that one of the ways to alleviate the awful periods would be to get pregnant, and prescribed her Chlomid, to make that easier. We didn’t really expect it to work, but it did and we’re freaking out a little bit even though we’re probably as well prepared to handle this huge life-altering commitment as you can be (I hope). It sort of feels like we got hired for a job we know nothing about, and we’re going to be at that job forever. I guess the only thing you can do at that point is to hope and pray that it’s a job that has some perks and we don’t dread going to every day. It was hard leaving Arizona because we have so many memories and it’s generally a place we like living, including the climate. I was feeling nostalgic and made a quick slideshow referencing the good times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVPFsBtr4Co&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3AePIaO3NtbYk468w2NMBVKkI3nl8AMNFaT5CARmD9GrMgsHWkTQCUp9Q