Darkest before the dawn

I'm sure that's attributed to someone but I don't feel like looking it up right now. I need to get writing. I need to make phone calls. I need to go buy some food and unpack some clothes. I need to think.

It's been a pretty intense 24 hours in the Knapp Sisters lives. Yesterday, as you know, we had a plan to go up to Los Angeles for Ang to interview with LA Unified. I get up early and walk (SIDEBAR: I walked my marathon this week and then some!!! 28 miles in all, I am pretty excited, even if I did gain 3 pounds, I am trying not to think about that, hopefully it's all leg muscle.) and shower and when I get out of the shower I can't find Ang. Then I find her and it's not good. She'd just talked to a man at the school district and he tells her she isn't qualified to teach middle school science and since they have 400 displaced elementary school teachers they're trying to find schools for, she might as well wait a month or two to interview. They're in no hurry he tells her, even to get subs.

As you can imagine, there was a bit of a panic.

And then, about 20 minutes into the panic, said man (I later find out his name is George) calls back. He proceeds to tell Ang he looked into her case and oops! she can in fact teach middle school science, and of course, elementary school, but they don't need her for that. They need her for science.

So we scrap the plans to pack her off to Nevada or Timbuktu or any other state in desperate need of teachers and pack a bag for LA. And away we go. The drive was uneventful and oddly quick this time around and we found the HUGE skyscraper of a building that is the Los Angeles Unified School District. We found the free parking lot and made our way inside (me waiting in the lobby, her going to the 15th floor).

According to her, it went well, I imagine she'll give you the gory details in her own blog. We decided not to waste the cash in spending the night and headed home. This was not an uneventful drive. This was leaving downtown Los Angeles at 5pm and hitting traffic. Mind you there's always traffic in LA but this is special traffic. But the upside is we never sat, we were always moving. And I even managed not to get a ticket (there was concern since the carpool lane changes to 3 people from 2 between 4 and 7pm, I mean seriously, how was I supposed to know?!?!? but I got out of the lane quickly just the same) and we found a Red Robin to eat at right off the freeway.

We got home about 11pm, another long day in the car. We'll go back up next Thursday for the placement fair she's been invited to (just for science teachers I guess) and hopefully she'll get a contract (all but guaranteed at this point) and we'll figure out where we'll live. We're still hoping for the Valley as opposed to east LA but at this point, she just wants a job. I don't blame her, I do too but I still have heard nothing. So I'll just keep pluggin' away.

On the living in a box front: not necessary at this moment in time. We called yesterday and we can extend out lease in Yuma 2 more weeks. Not an ideal situation because we'd really, really, really like to leave but it's just the way things are. And to top it all off I spent Wednesday packing up my entire room, including most of my clothes. Isn't great to be so on top of things!?!?!?

Ok, I've got my hard drive installed on my MacBook which means only one thing: there is absolutely no reason for me not to write now. So here I go...