Opportunity Knocked

Ahhhh… I’ve been waiting to write this post for weeks and have been so anxious to share our news! A little background: Allen has been looking around for work for about the last year. He is contacted pretty frequently by head hunters so he has been looking both inside his current company and outside. He has interviewed quite a bit and received a few offers but nothing has been a perfect fit. The location wasn’t right, job wasn’t right, salary wasn’t right… etc. At the beginning of this year I told him I was done looking and that I wanted to commit to staying in NM for one more year and then really focus on finding a new job. Allen agreed. Less than 1 week later he was contacted by an acquaintance he met about a year ago through his current job. They had hit it off at an industry event and exchanged contact information. A year later he had switched companies and was looking to recruit a team for his new company. He immediately thought of Allen and contacted him to see if he was interested.

Allen was very interested and did some phone interviews later that week with the HR team and some other people he would be working with. They wanted to fly him to the company HQs as soon as possible to formally interview. It took us a couple weeks to work out vacation time for him to get up there. They loved him and we had a job offer in hand 2 days after his interview. After quite a bit of negotiation I am happy/nervous/excited to announce that we are moving back to….. SEATTLE Washington! CRAZY! Our heads are still spinning that we have made this decision in less than 6 weeks! Allen will be starting his new job in 2 weeks and will be commuting back and forth until school is out here. I won’t mention the company he will be working for but will say that it is the software GIANT of the world and let you figure it out from there. We have talked to every single person we know that does/has ever worked for the company and have heard nothing but glowing reports about the company culture and benefits. His new job is very cool and he will be providing expertise that the company currently does not have (call me if you want more details). To say he is thrilled for this opportunity would be an understatement.

I honestly never thought we would ever be back in the PNW. We loved living there for the year we were there right after business school. It will be a huge, huge change climate wise but we are super excited. Of course it is bittersweet to leave a place we have grown to love so much. Even though we have always known NM was a short stopping point for us we have made some of the most wonderful friends of our lives here. We will miss it so much.

We will be renting a home for a short time while we figure out where we want to be permanently. We’re not thrilled with that but we want to try to buy a foreclosure/short sale and if that doesn’t work out we will probably build a new home. Neither option is a quick solution but we don’t want to make a snap decision based on the current state of the housing market.

Things I will miss about NM: Living close to my parents, our friends, green chile, balloon fiesta, sunny weather year-round, C&M's school

Things I will not miss: The wind, the drive to the kid's school, brown EVERYTHING

Things I am looking forward to about living in WA: Living near my sister again (2.5 hours away), GREEN, Homes with character instead of stucco, Great neighborhood schools, great shopping/restaurants/culture

So that is the BIG NEWS around here! It is going to be a crazy couple couple of months while we wrap things up here, Allen commutes and I do a lot of single parenting! Wish us LUCK!