J-O-B

You may recall a few weeks ago on the same day Austin had a final interview that led to a job offer with Kindred, and we also got an offer on our house. Well, today was another one of those days (surely we've now used up our lifetime quota of 2 remarkably good things happening on the same day). That's because today we closed on the sale of our house, Austin got the terms of a pending job offer, and he accepted a job!


The slightly longer version: After a grueling job search, Austin wound up with two very good job offers. The first was with Kindred Healthcare in their hospital division. The big surprise is that when he interviewed for the job it was going to be in Chicago, but he turned enough heads that they offered to move the position to Greensboro, NC, which is about 40 miles from here. The second position was with GlaxoSmithKline, whose US headquarters are here in RTP, but the program rotates three or four times over the first four years, including one international rotation.


Today, Austin accepted the position at GSK! We are very grateful and excited for such an excellent professional opportunity, and although it will require a few moves, we're looking forward to living in different places and gaining a greater appreciation for the diversity of people and places. The one thing we still don't know is what the location of the first placement will be. Austin has to meet with someone to find a good match between him and a market, but he'll be starting off in managed care. We hope this can happen next week so we can figure everything out. But we will surely sleep well tonight having made it through the house sale and knowing he has a fabulous job (plus we are just plain exhausted from moving).

Speaking of moving, given that our house just sold, this week we have been moving into an apartment in Chapel Hill. We are actually moving to family student housing at UNC, which is a great arrangement but will certainly take some getting used to coming from our nice home and yard. We think it's pretty ironic that we sold our house, among other reasons, because it was getting too small for all of the kid paraphernalia and now we are moving to an apartment that is half as big. Of course the other obvious joke is that we made it all the way through having us both simulataneously in grad school, and now that one of us has a job we're moving to student housing. What can we say, we needed geographic flexibility and got a really good offer, so we are thrilled to have it sold!

We're sure Ainsleigh will love living in such a high-density playmate place. And as for Ripken, at least it won't matter if his hand prints get all over the walls, now :)