The Move

Hey Everybody,

Here are some pictures from our move a few weeks ago. The move went pretty well, all things considered (uninterestingly enough, those last three words are the title of an NPR program that I listened to a lot on the radio while I was driving across the country during the move...sorry for the digression). My dad was kind enough to fly out to Denver to help us drive. He landed at DIA and immediately got in the car and began driving back from whence he came. What a guy. We had a Budget truck, pulling a U-Haul trailer (made for a funny picture), and Heidi and my dad took turns driving the Subaru.

Seven years ago, I remember being so excited, driving the opposite way on the same highway, leaving Michigan and moving out West, first to the Tetons and then Colorado. I had such a sense of adventure and such a sense that life was calling me out. It's funny how God works. Now I'm headed back, along the same highway, to the area I couldn't wait to leave, with the same excitement, for a whole new adventure. Life is not so much about places and careers and even experiences, as much as it's about doing our best to tap into God's grand plan for our lives, as He fits us each, in a small way, into the story He's writing. No matter where or how that takes us.

Ikea

We went to Ikea last night, as apparently does every other last person that moves anywhere near to Chicago. I think they were all there last night, at about 10 minutes to closing, with us. If you've not heard of Ikea...wait, everybody has heard of Ikea. They sell what I'm going to call "near-furniture". You can get a bed, a dresser, a lamp, a table, and maybe a kitchen, for like $87. And, it will all fit neatly into your car in square boxes. Of course, assembling the stuff and actually getting it to look anything like what you saw at the store will require the same skill and diligence used by NASA crews when assembling rockets and boosters to the space shuttle prior to launch. In terms of what the near-furniture is made of, it's analagous to spam (the food) - there's probably some meat in there, but then there's also all kinds of "other". With the Ikea near-furniture, some of it is wood, but a lot of it is smoke and mirrors or, I guess, particle board and laminate.

That company has got it figured out. I was actually so impressed by their scheme that I went home and tried to buy their stock. Turns out, they're private. And Swedish. Figures. They don't need equity investors because they're making money hand over fist. The consumer thinks he's getting a great deal because he can scrounge around in his old couch for enough money to go buy a new one at Ikea. But really, he's the one holding the short straw because all he is buying is raw materials, and really crappy ones at that, and supplying all the labor himself. So instead of paying more and getting a nice piece of furniture made of solid, durable wood, expertly designed and hand-crafted together, you get glorified cardboard which will be assembled by an idiot (you) using cams, a provided screwdriver, and other nondescript parts, which came in a little baggie, guided by directions with pictures and no words. All the company has to do is cobble together this mess of cardboard into a big store, set up one of everything, and watch the people go nuts. You even have to go to the warehouse with a number and pull the box yourself, like you're doing inventory. There aren't any employees to help. All these functions which would normally be undertaken by the company, like building the furniture or manning the warehouse, are transferred to the customer. And customers keep coming in droves. Lots of sales, little overhead. It's genius!

Alas, I suppose the night was successful. We got out of there with a dining room table and a bookshelf (I use those terms loosely) for less than I've spent on a good pair of shoes. But the image of all those people, looking idiot-faced and wild-eyed, stampeding through that ginormous store like they'd just won a shopping spree at Pottery Barn, will be seared into my memory forever. Or maybe just until tomorrow, hopefully.

In summary, here's what our dining room table, and four chairs mind you, looked like when we bought it...



And after assembly...


It's magical. It's Ikea.

Josh

Costa Rica

Costa Rica was great. We spent a week there with a group of students and spouses from the University of Chicago - it was one of the Random Walks that pre-students go on every year to meet other people prior to starting school. The country is similiar to say, Hawaii, in terms of landscape and topography. It's near the Equator so it's hot, humid and gets a lot of rain. The rain part was especially true last week due to Hurricane Dean. Fortunately, it wasn't enough to keep us from going or from enjoying all the activities we had. There are small mountains, thick jungles, white-sand beaches, and black-sand beaches, which I think are unique to that area. The language is Spanish, and Heidi and I were able to use ours to help the group, although tourism is a huge income source for the country and many people speak some English. It's main exports are coffee, sugar and bananas. The country also has loads of bugs, many of which we had never seen before and wouldn't mind never seeing again.

Our first resort was on the beach and the views were spectacular. This was the view from our room.



Here are more pics from the resort.





We went zip-lining twice. This is where you go to a jungle area and fly between tree-top platforms, sometimes 100+ feet in the air, secured to cable by equipment. Not for the faint of heart or height-averse folks.




One neat part about it is that you see monkeys in the trees. At the end, I got to hold a baby one.



Heidi went for a slightly more dangerous creature.



Snorkeling was probably the most fun activity because we saw tons of different fish. We went to two different areas - one pretty far out in the ocean and one closer to a cove (see pic below). Sea kayaking was also a good time.




Other activities included seeing a volcano...



and hiking to and swimming in a waterfall...



All in all, a great way to spend a vacation. We were once again awed at the beauty and vastness of God's creation. It was so different than the purple mountains and sprawling tundra of the Colorado Rockies, yet equally amazing.

Hope you all are well.

Josh

The House, the CFA, and Costa Rica

Hey Everybody,

I´m writing you from our hotel in Costa Rica. We´ve got lots of stories, pictures and news from the last week or so, but because time is currently limited (we´re paying by the hour for the computer here), I´ll fill you in on the main points.

- Could the house situation finally be over? The day we drove away from Colorado, even as we were getting in the car to leave, a couple drove up to have their second showing of our place. They would later make an offer and we are currently under contract. The price we settled on was very low, and we have to dump even more money into fixing stuff we didn´t even know was wrong, which turned up in the inpesction. So, the deal here is definitely being had by the buyer - they are milking us for every penny they can get. (I have thoughts about how, even as capitalistic as I am, it is wrong, as a decent human being, and especially as a Christian, to kick somebody while they are down in the name of free markets, but that's another post.) But at least we may be getting out. I won't really celebrate until the closing at the end of September.

- I passed Level II of the CFA. Some of you know how much of one's life the CFA program consumes for four to five months, three separate times (if you pass all three on the first try), so this was good news.

- The move to Chicago went pretty well. Moving is basically an excercise in minimizing the bad, as opposed to generating good. Nothing broke during the journey, we're more or less set up and ready to go in Chicago, and our marriage survived. I would have liked to have spent about half of what we did, but I guess that's not "realistic", as my wife likes to say.

Now, we are in Costa Rica for a week, and we've been enjoying zip-lining, snorkeling and natural hot springs in between torrential, Hurricane Dean-induced rains.

The wheeler adventure continues. More stories and pictures to come when we get back...

Josh

The Rearview Mirror

Today as we headed out of town, I looked into the rearview mirror and I saw them… and I realized that we were truly leaving our beloved state of Colorado. The mountains were as tall and majestic looking as they had ever looked; the sun was shining brightly over the vast expanse of the Front Range. I had come out here seven years ago singing to the tune Wide Open Spaces by the Dixie Chicks - a young single girl with lots of dreams of adventure, love, and what would be. Today I left a woman, who was embarking on a new type of adventure, who had found love, and is still wondering what will be…

I can’t believe we are gone. The entirety of mine and Josh’s history has been made with CO as the home base. We made, and just left, great friends, left jobs we enjoyed, left family, and left a place where trailheads were an hour away. So, what awaits us? The city I swore I would never return to… I mean I actually said out loud when I left Chicago after college, “I am never coming back here.” You can’t say things like that out loud, because somehow it ends up a loud echo bouncing back from the past.

So it will take many weeks or months to not expect to see those mountains when we look in the rearview mirror, but we will be looking forward too…to whatever God and life brings us.

Heidi

One Last Excursion

The majority of incoming MBA students take the summer before school off from work to enjoy relaxing and traveling prior to the mayhem that is the first year of business school. The thought is that this is probably the last period of prolonged downtime that one will have for four or five years, and what’s another $X grand on top of all the rest of the debt you’ll be racking up. Almost as soon as you get to campus of a top business school, recruiting starts, which means several events a day, including mixers, industry seminars and company presentations. It’s all great stuff, and having access to the biggest and best companies in the world is a huge benefit of attending a top school. But it’s very taxing and time consuming. Not to mention the workload in terms of classes, studying, preparing for interviews, involvement in clubs and extra-curricular activities (necessary for networking). I know, boo-hoo, I get to go to college again. But from what I understand, it’s actually quite stressful and exhausting. Then, you work all summer in your internship, where you’ll likely be working many hours (no less than 60 a week and as many as 90 or 100, depending on if its investment management or I-Banking, my two areas of interest). Then there’s the second year and more of the same, including actually trying to land your full-time job, followed by your job out of school, where your work schedule will likely be just as hectic and vacations will be short and infrequent, if at all. (Everyone’s heard the I-Banking horror stories of two-week, extravagant excursions being canceled at the last minute due to workloads.)

However, while most students are in the middle of trekking around the world or lying by the beach, that wasn’t really an option for me. I’m still working – my last day is Friday the 10th. Our house has been on the market for over three months and we’re going to get far less than we had hoped for it. Heidi is working all the way to the end of our time in Colorado as well, and I just couldn’t justify quitting work sooner. The loss of income and the double whammy on the money spent for a several month vacation just could not be justified at this point. Plus, I really don’t like debt, and it’s already hard to swallow the amount I’ll have to borrow as it is.

All this leads up to the mini-vacation we did take last week – our final wilderness excursion into the backcountry of the Colorado mountains, particularly an idyllic 35-mile loop in between Aspen and Crested Butte (called the four-pass loop). We are backpackers and have explored a good bit of Colorado in our short time here, and we really wanted to take advantage of our proximity to such incredible backcountry opportunities one more time. Heidi and I had done this trip once before, I think in 2004, but it was so great then that we wanted to go back. Plus, my brother Joe was going with us, and we wanted to show him what might be the most striking chunk of scenery in Colorado. As it turns out, it was probably in the top three tips we’ve ever taken.

We did it in four days, three nights, and got heavily rained on during the first day. Contrary to most storms in Colorado which hit for a few hours in the afternoon then go away, it rained on us until about 10pm on the first day, which really made setting up camp miserable. But the next three days were rain free and we had some fabulous campsites each night. The trip was slightly tainted on the last day, when Heidi, while trying to toss me a trekking pole so I could cross a stream easier, threw it like a harpoon from about 12 feet away. There was basically no time to think, and I just reacted and stuck my right hand out to catch it. The pole was basically a spear at that point (they have sharp metal ends so as to be able to cling to rock), traveling perfectly parallel with the ground and at a high rate of speed. It sunk into my hand in the webbing between the first finger and thumb and gashed it pretty good. Blood gushed immediately. Now, Heidi is great at many things, but she doesn’t really excel at throwing stuff. Fortunately, she’s a great nurse and had a nice fist aid kit along. The skill with which she tended to my wound matched the utter lack of skill with which we she tossed (more like a javelin throw) the pole. We were still five miles from the car, and we didn’t make it back to Denver until over six hours from the time of the accident, so it was too late for stitches, although stitches would have been highly advisable had we been close to a hospital. Yet, the hand has healed really well and I think I’m ready to lift weights (and lots of boxes and furniture) just over a week later.

This was preceded the night before by Joe chasing after an annoying elk, yelling like a madman and clanging pots together. Watching that was, in a word, awesome. Heidi was laughing uncontrollably. All in all, a great trip with just a minor accident, some rain and a parade of people to keep it from being a 10. Check out these pictures.

Colorado, representing…

This Blog

This blog will be a place where Heidi and I can chronicle the happenings of our lives which, at the moment, are pretty detached from the mundane, standard homogeny in which most of us live at any given time (and in which we will undoubtedly live again in the future). Hence, it should be good blogging material. Our lives are actually rather interesting right now. I know, it seems a bit presumptuous to have a blog for the sole purpose of telling everyone about your life, but we’ve actually been encouraged to do this by a lot of people as we’re getting set to embark on some serious life change.

I started a blog once before, but abandoned it after a short time when I began to feel like I was simply adding my useless opinion on politics, religion, etc. to the already existing sea of useless opinions that existed in countless other blogsites. The reality is that, now that everyone and anyone can have a blog, there are far more people commenting on weighty issues than are actually worth reading on such subjects. Many such bloggers are enamored with the idea it's beneficial to society to have something such as the Internet to allow the "little guy's" voice to come through. It just kind of feels right - something about the democratic-ness and the entrepreneurial-ness and the challenge-the-status-quo-ness of it all. Alas, however, it doesn't change the fact that there are simply a relative few people who are educated, informed and lucid enough to present worthwhile thoughts on those big things. But as you can probably already detect, I like to fancy myself a writer and thinker, so I can't promise that some of those opinion-type posts won't come through occasionally...

But the primary purpose of this blog is for us to stay in contact with the community we've developed here in Colorado, as we journey to Chicago, and to keep friends and family updated on our lives. All that to say, I think we'll actually stick with this blog and have fun with it, as the motivation is to keep up with people and stay in contact, versus the delusional notion that I'm writing as authority on anything.

So, the transition, in summary, is this. After 6+ years since college, I (Josh) have worked as a waiter, musician, financial salesman, and mostly as a music director at a church and a senior debt underwriter for a regional commercial bank. I've finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up (which has been heavily influenced by what I can be when I grow up, a.k.a., not a rockstar), which is a professional investor (either in I-Banking or Investment Management), so I'm headed off to the University of Chicago to get an MBA. God has blessed me immensely with the opportunity to go to a top five business school (#1 in BusinessWeek, http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/06/, and #5 in U.S. News, http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/mba/brief/mbarank_brief.php) and I’m really excited. Heidi has been working in nursing since college and has really done well in her career. She’s just finishing her masters in nursing at the University of Colorado, and she’ll be a nurse practitioner in a few short months. She’s already got a great job in Chicago working at Northwestern Memorial Hospital downtown as an advanced practice nurse. We’ve also got an apartment that’s 20 blocks south of downtown in the South Loop. It’s a pretty nice place, close to downtown, restaurants, the lake, and good for public transportation, especially for Heidi to get downtown.

This transition is, of course, bittersweet. It’s amazing the kind of community we found in Colorado in just a few years – mostly due to our involvement at Pinecrest Community Church in Parker. I was the music/worship guy there from 2001 through 2007, and Heidi was involved in lots of different ways, but primarily as a singer on the worship team. The church went through some very intense times, as well as strong growth, during that period. Pinecrest had a beautiful goodbye event for me a few weeks back and Heidi and I were truly touched by that. God gets all the glory, and it was so powerful to hear people’s sentiments to me about how their lives had been affected by God’s work through the music ministry. It’s those types of events that really dispel the feelings of futility and frustration one has when working in the thick of some kind of endeavor over a period of time. Pinecrest: thank you so much!!! It was truly my pleasure and benefit.

Leaving Vectra Bank will also be somewhat sad. Everyone there has been so supportive to me – from supporting me as I took a nine-month sabbatical to work full-time at the church to being tremendously helpful as I was applying to business schools. They’ve put up with more from me than most employers probably would. Plus, I’ve got some great friends there as well.

So, that’s enough for the first post. Heidi will be also be checking in soon, I’m sure. Drop me a line and keep me updated on your lives as well. Let me know that it’s not just our moms reading this thing.

Josh