It's a boy!

It's been a while since we've sent out an update on our lives. There's been a lot of the same old, but with a few exciting bits.

Alex got an email a couple of weeks ago informing him that there was a discrepancy between BYU's records and the Social Security Administration's records in the gender field. After a lengthy trip through the ridiculous automated phone system for the Social Security offices where you have to enter pretty much all of your personal information Alex was finally able to talk to a real person, to whom he had to give all of his personal information--again. As it turns out for the past 22 years the government had Alex down as a girl. You'd think they might catch something like that since he's gotten a passport, gotten married to a woman, et cetera. After filling out and submitting the appropriate forms Alex is now officially a boy! Congratulations to him!

One apartment in the 4-plex here has some very nice tile in the kitchen and bathroom. Our landlords recently decided that it would be really nice to go ahead and put tile in the other three apartments as well. The project in our apartment is slated to begin sometime this next week, so Alex decided it would be good to get started with his plans to paint the apartment by taking care of the kitchen yesterday. Carolyn and Jacob were over and offered to help, so we put them to work and got it done in just a couple of hours.

Alex is still going along in his semester. He took a couple of midterms the other night and was happy to report that on his World Music Cultures test he was able to enjoy the satisfying feeling of seeing "Perfect!" next to his name and 100% score. He also patched up his bike tire and has started riding it to school on nicer days. It take about the same amount of time to bike as it does to drive, but Alex gets to feel healthier so it works out well.

I've been continuing to sort books at Worldwide Book Drive. Sometimes it's okay, sometimes I don't like my job, and sometimes I really don't like my job. As some of you might have heard I have continued to look for other jobs. A couple of months ago I interviewed at TaxHawk, the
online tax preparation company where Carolyn works. It looked really promising at first. I had a second interview and things didn't look quite so promising because they had several applicants who were finishing up Masters of Accountancy degrees. That doesn't make my Bachelor's in English Linguistics look very good. My sister-in-law Robin was inquiring about the situation when we were visiting last week and just a few minutes after I was telling her about this I got a call asking if I could come for another interview. That one seemed to go okay and Friday evening I got an email offering me the job! And there was much rejoicing. "Yay." I don't start work there until the middle of May, but at least there's a light at the end of the tunnel. I just realized that I didn't even say what kind of job it is. The official title is a "Tax Analyst." Which means that I look at tax forms and translate them into pseudo-code outlines for the programmers to use to program the web pages. Since most of my experience with programming is talking to Alex about things and most of my experience with taxes is just filing my own, I will have a lot to learn, but at least it will intellectually stimulating. I feel like the most intellectually stimulating thing at my current job is judging the spatial relations of books that I'm trying to pack into a cardboard box.