We're moving to Wisconsin. . . What the?!

Back in January I posted about the all of the things that Jared and I want to do in 2012. I can only shake my head at the irony of that list now haha. So I mentioned that Jared wanted to get his dream job at REI Headquarters and I wanted to try and teach at BYU. Well I did get scheduled to teach some classes on campus at BYU next year, but unfortunately, I won't be doing that. You see, even though Jared has had no leads on a job at REI, he's taken a job offer with Trek Bikes, which is his other dream job. This is great news right? Yes it is great news, only problem is that this job happens to be located in Madison Wisconsin, which is not so great.

Here's the story. . . A about a month ago I was randomly looking a design blog and saw a posting for a graphic designer at Trek. I can't tell you why I was looking at that blog, I have no clue, honestly no idea. I mentioned the job posting to Jared because anybody who knows my husband well knows that he's obsessed with all things biking. It wasn't like I told him because I wanted him to apply for it though, it was something along the lines of

Stace: Looks like Trek is trying to hire a new designer
Jared: Hmm

And we went on to other things that night. The next morning Jared casually mentions that he "might have applied for that job at Trek" but he was mostly doing it to see if they'd even email him back about it. You see, he had applied for a design job out there over the summer after he graduated and he never even got an email back from them saying they had decided to go in a different direction. So this time around he wanted to see if he'd get any feedback from them since he now has a little bit of professional experience on his resume. After he told me he applied for it, I told him that they were going to want to interview him. He didn't think so, but sure enough not three days later they emailed back saying the wanted to do a Skype interview.

Jared: I'm going to do the interview with them
Stace: Uh huh and they are going to want to hire you, you know that right
Jared: I don't know, but even if they do, we had already decided that we were going to stay in SLC
Stace: True, but you are going to start talking to them, you are going to like what they have to say and you are going to want to take the job
Jared: No that won't happen

As you can imagine, my gift of predicting the future is spot on when it comes to stuff like this. He does the interview. They tell him that out of hundreds of applicants, he's the guy they want for the job. He likes what they have to say. They say want to fly us out there so Jared can do an interview in person with them. They say that unless something crazy happens, they are going to offer him the job, so he needs to decide if he's really serious about taking it or not. After we talked about it and weighed the pros and cons of the job and of moving, we decided that we would move forward with the interview process and have them fly us out there.

We went over the last weekend of January and it went really well. The area itself is pretty nice, to us it kind of felt like a mix between the suburbs of Cleveland where I grew up and then Yakima where Jared grew up. The actual town that Trek is located, Waterloo, is about a half hour outside of Madison and in the middle of a bunch of farmland. . . kind of random but for us its better than working and living in a big city.

It's taken a couple of weeks to finally get the offer and then do some negotiating, but now Jared has accepted it so we'll be moving to Wisconsin. Jared will head out there within the next few weeks, but I'll be staying in Provo till May or June so I can finish my thesis. Obviously the long distance thing isn't ideal, but that's just what is going to have to happen for a few months.

When it comes down to it, the job itself is an amazing opportunity for Jared. In fact, I probably couldn't even hand pick a better job for him. Trek is one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, biking company in the world. Jared loves the company and the particular market that they target. He'll get to work on projects that he's alot more interested in compared to what he is doing now, the salary is significantly higher, and there's potential for him to move up in the company in the future. Why am I not super stoked and jumping for joy you ask? Well people, it just kind of a bummer that the job is 2000 miles away in the freezing cold of Wisconsin doom! :)  It's hard to think of moving that far away from our families.

I will say this though. . . After having a few weeks to process everything, I wouldn't say I'm necessarily excited about the idea of moving out there, but I'm not completely dreading it like I was at first. I know that it's the right thing to do for Jared's career, and I'm sure that when we get out there, we will meet new people who we will eventually come to think of as family.

So there you have it. . . not even 6 weeks into the new year and our whole lives have turned completely upside down. It will be interesting to see what the rest of the year brings.

Here are a few pics from our trip, not the best quality given Jared's iphone, but what do ya do?! Our hotel was right in downtown Madison, which actually kind of reminded us of Seattle a little bit.

This is the view out one window of our hotel room

this is the State Capitol, its a really pretty building

This was the view out the other windows in our room

The whole downtown area was really pretty

Haha, we saw this farm as we were driving out to Trek for his interview

Underneath the cow it says "We Stand Behind Our Business" Bahaha

I hope everybody had a great Valentines Day! We stayed at home and had dinner and then watched a movie, nothing too special but it sure beats trying to battle with the crazy crouds in all of the restaurants in Provo on Valentines!