Be it ever so humble...

...It finally feels like home! I've finished unpacking most things, arranging and cleaning and rearranging and managing to make frames stay on the walls. The phone and Internet are both up and working smoothly again. There are still heaps of little things to do, but there’s no huge hurry for those things. (Yep, the knob on the dresser's top drawer is missing... one of the casualties of moving. It's still to be recovered from somewhere.)

So this Easter 4-day weekend, I get to relax at home. But today is Saturday, and I have to enjoy the day without Danny. He's working. All day. Why is he working all day long on a Saturday? Well, that's the really good news :) Today Dan is beginning his first pilot job. He takes small groups of friendly but slightly crazy adrenaline junkies up to 10,000 feet, and then drops them out of the sky. Then he winds back around to land the Cessna 182 on the runway that's only about as wide as a sidewalk, to pick up some more jumpers and do it all again. He'll be doing this every Saturday now, out at a skydiving club called Drop Zone. It's in the middle of a sprawling field near a town called Gatton, and it's about an hour and a half drive from here. It's going to mean he works 6 days every week now, and it's going to mean extreme budgeting for fuel for the 3-4 hours of driving he'll have to do to get there and back...those are the downsides. But we're really excited.

Danny gets to be a pilot! He gets to build up hours and hours of flight time as a pilot. He gets to make connections with other pilots and experience working in the industry, all of which can lead to many opportunities in the future. And he can do all that while still making the money through the week at the insurance job, which means we get to stay in Brisbane for at least a few more years. Many beginning pilots have to move to pretty remote places to find jobs in Australia. We may still need to do that one day, when he has enough hours of experience and a bit more training to be able to look for a more serious, full-time flying job. But for now, we get to stay here in Brissy, where we both feel at home.

And since we're staying here, we get to face another really exciting and somewhat overwhelming adventure. We're beginning to look into buying our first home. We think that dream is somewhere between 6 and 12 months away from coming true...and we'll keep you posted on what finally happens with that.

In other smaller bits of good news... Tomorrow we celebrate Easter Sunday with the extended family, and Monday we celebrate our 2-year wedding anniversary all on our own :)

Tuesday I go back to work after a week of holiday, and this term I'm teaching full-time again. I've just been given another school to travel to, so I'll be working with students at 5 different schools in 5 days. Last term I worked with about 45 students in just 4 days, at 4 different schools, and the overwhelming majority of those students are refugees. I don't know much about this new school yet, but there is already one ESL teacher there, and she's getting a huge influx now of refugees in the school. So I get to go and support that school as well, and I'm really looking forward to it! (Yes, the ESL programming and funding here is a completely different world from the St. Paul school district. But I love what I do and I love the students, so I'll save the complaining about the politics of education for another time!)

Oh, and for Danny's birthday on Tuesday, I baked my first ever gluten-free cake, that turned out really nice if I do say so myself. Danny said so too :)

May you have a beautiful, peaceful, and very happy Easter weekend.