Meant to be...or Coincidence?

We are on our way home.

We headed out hwy 42 and through Winston/Roseburg to get to I-5. I loved this part of Oregon. Small, mountainous cities woven around a beautiful river. No huge metro areas. No confusing "downtown" districts. Just ranchers on one side and business on the other. Slow paced. Clean. Nice. The drive down I-5 was fine. Our conversations during our travels ebbed in and out of moving discussions to what we need to do for the house this summer. Nothing serious. Nothing concrete. I had pretty much made up my mind still, I was nervous about making it known. I was concerned that Jason may really have his heart secretly set on moving back to Alaska. I wanted our plans to stem from debate from the heart, not what we hoped would make the other happiest.

As we drove down the mountain into Susanville, heading for 395, the last little hwy on our journey home, we slammed into a wall of smoke from the wildfires. We stopped in town for an ice cream and a walk but a quiet place was hard to find since most of the town was taken over by emergency vehicles and personnel prepping to go back to the fires. 2007 was a bad year for fires. Ca, Nv and OR were hit with one lightning storm after another. It was scary and I am saddened that so many people and animals were affected, but I do believe it is nature's way of doing what needs to be done. After our short stop we crammed back into the truck and I kicked the a/c into high and recycled the air in the cab to keep our lungs as safe as possible.

A couple hours down the road we pulled into Reno. It too was covered in haze. I felt cheated. During the very cold winters we are forced inside and now during the hot summers (fire or no fire) we are forced inside. My little family doesn't do well in the heat. I longed for the humid and green Sacramento Valley where I grew up. I longed even more for the clean, fresh, salty breeze on the Oregon coast. Yes, I was torturing myself. Even if we were to move it was at least a couple years out. Find a job, sell the house....blah blah blah. I needed to get my head back in the game. Get home, prep the swamp cooler, re-establish the kids' routines, laundry etc.

We drove past Jason's office in Carson City about 30 minutes from our house. Jason got this grimaced look on his face. I asked him what his problem was. He recanted what was going on at work and how frustrated he was being so limited. He had skills they didn't want to use and he was concerned that his supervisor was holding him down on purpose. I asked him why he thought this. He told me that his supervisor got chewed out because they audited the system and found that a lot of the original programs written by the supervisor had to be fixed, Jason was the one who did the fixing and being a mild guy he never made a stink about it. So, the "upper ups" figured that the supervisor was using his "team" to cover his ass. Since then Jason's supervisor was making things hard. Keeping track of personal conversation times ( no longer than 10 minutes a day allowed to talk to family or co-workers about non-work things), keeping a timer on breaks and lunch hours. I guess he even went so far as to write Jason up because I called him when I was worried that Felicia was really sick. The write up was thrown out when Jason protested, but it seemed things were getting really stressful for him.

This was odd to me. He loves being a nerd. I mean really LOVES it!! There are few of us who get the chance to be employed/paid for doing what we would do as a hobby. I have always been awed by the fact Jason was that lucky. Lately he was coming home grumpy and rarely talked about work. Now I knew why.

We were home for a few days, getting back to our routine when Jason found a few minutes to himself to go online. He searched newspapers in the coastal area of Oregon and then searched the papers for the smaller towns inland. He didn't find much of a market for nerds of his "caliber" so he asked me if I would live in the Eugene/Springfield area. I sighed. "Sure, it is two hours from my parents and from the nearest beach, the people seem to follow a "hippie" like politic but we could live on the edge of town if it doesn't make a huge commute for you." He giggled. It isn't that I am against "hugging" trees or recycling my trash, but my experience with the population of that area is that their politics take over their common sense and they get to be a bit wacky. There is (in my opinion) people out there that are "too green" and they seem to do more harm than good, not to mention they contradict themselves over and over again. Off the soap box, Paula.

So Jason did a search of the newspapers in Eugene and Springfield. Hit! The job looked good. Jason not only qualified, but it required stuff he really enjoyed and was held from at his current job. Great!! Jason read down the ad......Problem. It was a job through one of those "head hunter" typed places. He started to whine, "They make you jump through stupid hoops before you even find out where the job is or who it is with. Then you have to..." I stopped listening. My blood heated up and (I am sorry to say) the "feisty"side of me took over. I ranted something close to this, "It is like the 10th of July and my kids can't go outside because it is too hot and too smokey. We live like prisoners under the air conditioner in the summer and the heater in the winter...How the hell can you WHINE about jumping through a few stupid hoops to get a job that just a half second ago you were drooling over? What kind of wimpy moron are you? Did you not see how BEAUTIFULLY HAPPY WE ALL WERE on the beach? Get your damn priorities straight!!" I am sure there was more vulgarity and I am positive that my rant lasted at least five minutes. Needless to say, when I stopped to breathe and compose myself, my husband looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights. Can I blame PMS?

That night he started the application process. He had me check his cover letter and other things and we emailed it off the next morning. The next day the "head hunter" chick called. She talked to Jason for about an hour! After the call I asked him how it went. He grinned. "The job sounds great. She is forwarding my application and resume to the personnel dept. She suspects they will call me within a week. She said that it is a large company with offices all over, but the main office is in a smaller town and they have a hard time finding qualified professionals who want to work in a small town. She spent a lot of time asking me questions about our family. What environment we liked to live in and so on. Most of those who have left said they prefer the faster pace of Portland or Seattle because there is nothing to do in a small town." He looked smug. I warily asked him where it was. "The job is programming for Roseburg Forest Products in Winston/Dillard, Oregon." He grinned triumphantly. I screamed, "HOLY COW ON A STICK!! SHIT! NO WAY! You better NOT BE LYING!!" He assured me that he was being honest. ( Yes I remember the "cow stick" thing because he still teases me about it two years later.) This is too good to be true. We just drove through there like three or four days ago!! This is crazy. Insane!! I told him how much I have always loved that area. How I used to wonder how nice it would be to live there whenever I drove from Portland to my parents house. He simply grinned.

It wasn't long before Jason got called for an all day interview. He drove to Oregon. I stayed home. I was jealous but I knew if I went with him I would never leave. Two weeks or so after he got home we received a letter of intent to hire. They offered him a little more than what he was making in Nv. (With OR income taxes so high it worked out to be just about even). They offered a moving expense of $5,000. They wanted him to start work on Aug 27th. It was already Aug 2nd.

I called my mom and sister. I found boxes. I started packing! My mom and sister drove down to help us out. Mom is a school bus driver so I figured I would leave her with the task of driving that stupid unwieldy U-Haul. We found a renter for our Nv house. We crammed our lives into a box truck, my truck, Jason's truck and my houseplants into mom's car. The caravan headed out. We were on our way to Oregon!!!!