Welcome back!

It's certainly been a while, hasn't it? Here's what we've been up to since we last spoke in November.

- Thanksgiving with my sister for the first time in five years (her husband is in the Air Force, and living thousands of miles away from each other makes it hard to eat cornbread together: more on this later). It was the first Thanksgiving I had where the turkey was fried instead of baked. ZOMG so good. Shame of it is, it ruined other turkeys for me. None of them are as good as a fried turkey.

- Christmas was meh for me. The highlight was going to Christmas Day Mass with my wife Allicia and daughter Lucy. The reason it was meh was because I thought I'd be spending Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with my side of the family, something I hadn't done since 2009. But depending on how you look at it, my employer was either a mean kid with a magnifying glass, or a busy bureaucracy with little time for individual workers.

Both of those sounded bad didn't they? With apologies to my employer, I was unable to secure Christmas week off and had to "settle" for the week before Christmas getting to see my family. Oh boo hoo right? Some people don't even get that. But when your heart is set on one thing, and you firmly believed it would happen, you don't really feel like looking at things from a rational point of view.

- Another craptacular playoff run for New England. Holy sweetness if we don't get help on the defensive side of the ball in the offseason this year, I'm going to throw something through the TV.

- Lucy turned one year old.  The cake was amazing. The people coming over were amazing. MY DAUGHTER AGED A WHOLE YEAR AND NOW I FEEL OLD! Well, not terribly old. But now I look back at those grownups who would always say to me, "Oh you get so big so fast!" and I don't find them to be annoying and full of it.

- We moved.

Ah yes, we packed our bags. We emptied our house. And we headed from Harrisburg to Hampton Roads, VA, which is part of the Virginia Beach metropolitan area. It's more fun to tell people you moved to Virginia Beach, as they can envision me soaking up rays, watching dolphins in the ocean with crabs running all over the place. When you tell someone you moved to Hampton, they probably think of the Tiny Toons character or something like that.

We decided to move because our first moving plans to New Jersey were thwarted. The lease on the apartment we could no longer afford was up. I hated my job (not the people, just the job itself) to the point where I came home cranky and miserable, which made the rest of my family cranky and miserable.

So we prayed. And OMG did we pray. It's hard to explain that to people. When I've moved before, sometimes I used God to justify it, when in reality I should have stayed put. So now, when you tell your family you're moving, I could picture them rolling their eyes through the phone. I guess I kind of deserved that one. Still, with the lease on our apartment up and with a desire to find cheaper dwellings (and with no guilty feeling like we were doing something bad), we packed our bags and headed south.

Has it been easy? No. Allicia got a job with a medical company that pays decently well. As for me, well, I'm a different story. I've interviewed at a few places, but so far nothing. The design job didn't call back after promising they would. The lawn care company never called back. Heck, I can't even get retail stores to call back. The man with a print journalism degree, unhireable (the spell check says to turn that to unlikeable, which would explain a lot)!

Am I destined to be a freelancer? I feel that way sometimes. Maybe I don't need to be working in a retail store. Maybe I need to be at home with Lucy (saves money on daycare) and doing design projects on the side (I got a new computer to replace my 8-year-old eMac, so that makes freelancing much easier). What I do know for certain is that I need to spend more time doing daily prayer and Bible reading. And today's devotional? It was all about waiting for God's plan, that God has something great for you and that you need to be patient.

Right now, I don't know what that plan is. But while I'm waiting, I'm going to make the most of my time. You'll see a lot more blog posts from me. You'll see more podcasts. If this is how God wants me to spend my professional career, at home with Lucy, then the least I could do is let you come along for the ride.

God bless,
Dustin Faber