Typical Hawaiian December

Hello.

Merry Christmas! :)

Here I am, my last December in Hawaii (well, my last one for now). I just wanted to put in some pictures of what we’ve been up to (I decided to leave out the bleeding over students’ papers and all the grading of finals hehe).

 

 

 

My mom’s ornaments were stuck together…

 Jake looks so cute hanging ornaments. (He’s got a good eye.)

 Sorry it’s kind of blurry—but this little one is our tree. We love it.

And below are our two NEW ornaments (Jake’s is the santa, mine is the chipmunks):

 

On the blue board is Jake.

 

 

 

 

Here’s Jake again. We were driving past Pipeline and, well I’ll let the picture speak for itself (Let’s just say that these waves were HUGE)

 

 

 

 

 

One lucky surfer. 

 

Waimea. I will miss my beautiful Hawaii.

 

Jake was saying that it doesn’t feel Christmas. I said “Weird, rain and huge waves feel like Christmas to me.” Granted, it was a beautiful sunny day, but the huge waves at Waimea still made it feel like Christmas. :)

Plan B…for now :)

So I know there are a lot (all seven of you wonderful, kind people that follow our blog) of people are wondering what’s going on with us. Well, here’s what we’ve got so far:

Our plan up until going to Korea is still pretty much the same. We are still flying out of here come December 20th. We’ll be flying into Portland and then get picked up by Jake’s dad. We’ll stay with the in-laws, go to Pocatello, ID for Jake’s younger brother’s wedding on the 27th. We’re thinking (still not for sure yet) that we might stay in Pocatello longer to spend time with all the wonderful people that live there :) Plus we want to do some poking around to figure out where we want to stay. Also, for those of you that missed the Facebook status I had a while ago, my senior paper got accepted into a Harry Potter Conference….in SCOTLAND! so part of our plan now includes going! :) (Pretty cool, huh?)

While we are super bummed that we won’t be teaching in Korea, it has opened some doors for us (You’re right, Meghan. Definitely God’s little stepping stones at work here). We were afraid we wouldn’t be able to go to Scotland because we’d be busy in Korea, and we were sure the school wouldn’t give us time off (not twice). See, my best friend is getting hitched in July and the conference is in May. See the issue? BUT, now that there is no Korea, we can drive down the wedding in Utah, and, instead of buying one round-trip ticket from Korea to Utah for the wedding, save that money and use it to buy two round-trip tickets to Scotland for the conference. Pretty sweet deal. I mean, don’t get me wrong we were stoked to go to Korea, but we’re stoked to do this, too.

One last note. The plan now includes getting jobs and saving (and choosing) for grad-school. We still don’t know where exactly we’ll be settling down (so to speak) for now. The community college in Pendleton is hiring; now provided we can get those jobs, we’ll stay in Pendleton. But, if there are no jobs, then we might venture into Pocatello to find work. Ultimately we’d rather do something that involves our English degrees, but work is work, money is money and all that. :)

So…that’s where we are for now. Wish us luck.

we got an e-mail...

Here's the jist:
"I am very sorry to inform you that we’ve decided to put the Teach Abroad program on a temporary year-long hiatus, effective immediately. This hiatus means that no participants will be sent on program in 2012, including those who have paid their deposit or paid in full."

translation: No more Korea.

It was good while it lasted. I was super excited...while I thought we were going.

I guess it's true: Stuff happens. Now we move on to Plan B...too bad we never bothered with a Plan B since Plan A was working out so well.