Wahoo! A Blog!

Okay, folks, here it is... our very first blog post! Finally! I only started setting a blog up when Charlotte was born!! Now that we are moving, I feel that this will be a great way to stay in touch with everyone that wants to know about our comings and goings. We leave for Arizona in a week and we have mixed emotions... we are super excited to start this next chapter in our lives, but we are sad to be leaving all of the friends and family members that we have enjoyed living near for so long. We are also a little bit sad to be leaving our first house... but I am happy that our forever house isn't too far away!

For those of you who don't know why we are moving, Bill has been accepted into grad school at Arizona State University. He will be getting a Masters degree in Business Analytics, which is a basically a lot of statistics and database manipulation. It is a fairly new field of study, but companies are paying people with this degree good money, which is exactly what we are after! The program is only two semesters long, but it will be intense for Bill for those 10 months! My boss is fantastic and is going to let me keep working from Arizona, which will be really nice. At the end of the program, we are going to go where ever a good job will take us. With Bill being from New Jersey and myself coming from Nevada, we feel that we can lay down roots just about anywhere and travel to visit family as necessary. We will most likely end up in one of four places: the Pacific Northwest, Northern California, North Carolina, or New Jersey (with Bill commuting to work in New York City). We will have a better idea of where ASU grads are getting hired at come September, but last year was ASU's first year offering a Business Analytics degree, so we don't have the job stats yet.

We just decided this week that the best housing option for us is going to take our good friends up on their offer to live with them. Since I will be the only adult not in school as a full-time student, we feel that it is a good cost saving option for all of us. Our friends, the Nelsons, have 2 kids, so Charlotte will have insta-friends (she adores their 4 year old, Riley) and we have missed the Nelsons since they moved to Arizona 7+ years ago, so it will be nice to be able to spend so much time with them!

We are excited to get on the road next week and to start our new adventure!

Best Wishes!
Bill, Mariah, Charlotte and Cinnamon