Moving on with the love story portion (feel free to catch up by selecting the Love Story link there on the right), after turning down the bank, I crawled back to the temp agency and asked them what they had available that might pay about the same as the bank and be 8 to 5 Monday thru Friday. It took a week or so, but they found a position for an Office Manager at a builder in Broken Arrow: one Suncraft Homes. This amused me...a lot. Why would it amuse me? The post from May 16th, 2007 details an incident following a tornado where I destroyed a garage door. Yeah, that builder was Suncraft Homes. So, I was to basically apply to work at a place where I'd destroyed the garage door of one of their new houses. Fun.
I went in and interviewed and to my surprise, I got the job. Just like the bank, this job was very, very easy. My job was to answer the phone, file bills, prepare bills to mail, type when they wanted stuff type, make copies, and some other miscellaneous stuff that those front office people do. It was a couple weeks before I saw the superintendant for the first time, and indeed, he recognized me. That gave him a good laugh too, and I found there were definitely no hard feelings involved in my destruction of this door.
Now, a lot of stuff happened during this time beyond my job there at Suncraft. On the creative front, I was in constant contact with these guys from Sweden, and we were working together on a musical that they were looking to produce at their college over there. I assisted not only in the music area, where they had intended me to be, but I also worked on the script and story itself and even delved into the lyrics to make sure they were perfectly coherent. We worked on this whole thing in English before they translated it all into Swedish. I was also working closely with the guy who was going to direct the production, and he was about the most demanding little bugger I've ever met. Talk about fussy! But he did have a knack for tearing things apart and putting them back together better than they were the first time. I honestly learned a lot from him.
That production was slated for May of 2001, so round about April, they started in on rapidly translating it into Swedish for the local production. Well, during this, they needed some music done, and I was also responsible for listening to and extracting the music from their recordings, since none of them wrote music (well, they could write music, but not write or read musical notation, which I had been extensively trained in reading and writing). You see, they'd all done their music on sequencers and tape recorders while playing piano or something, so they didn't actually read music nor write any of it down. I had the fun of listening, extracting, and then creating sheet music in the Cakewalk program for their people to look at. I had a good enough grasp of Swedish at that point in time to be able to include the Swedish lyrics on the music.
But before that production went down, the Queen and I had other things going on. Rock Girl was going to be two in June and we'd been considering cutting off the birth control and having a second child. We knew we'd have to get an actual house before she gave birth, but we also figured that there'd be a month or so before the absence of the pills got her system going again, etc., before anything happened. So fun and fancy free, we hit Spring Break, and she got immediately pregnant. All we have to do is consider doing something without birth control, and we get another child. So that was March, and now we really need to find a house.
We'd been looking for a house for months, trying to get a rent house together so we could move out of the apartments into something more conducive to rearing a child, especially now that a second one was on the way. We didn't feel that we could buy a house, and thought renting one was a natural next step. We know better now, but that was then. After paying a monthly fee with a house hunting service to peruse rental houses, her parents told us about one that was caddy-corner to their house. We called the number and were informed that that house had already been rented to someone. This was the kind of luck we'd been having, but the guy then told us that there was another one in that same neighborhood we could look at. He said it was unlocked and we could just go right in and look around. Great!
We drove right over with Rock Girl in tow and pulled into the driveway of a red brick house with three bedrooms and an enclosed garage (which I particularly liked). A huge tree dominated the front yard, and we thought it would provide some nice shade in the summers (and it did). We walked into the modest living room that opened into the dining room that went on into the kitchen. The back door was missing its dead bolt and had a plastic bag stuffed in the hole. Not major, really. We walked down the hall checking out the bedrooms as we went back. We passed the bathroom, which was also modest in size to find ourselves in what would be considered the master bedroom. We figured it was since it has a half bath attached to it.
We went back down the hall through the dining room and into the kitchen, which was decently sized with a peninsula counter dividing it from the dining room. The Queen was happy with the size of the kitchen since our apartment had a short hallway masquerading as a kitchen. There was no refrigerator, but that was to be expected. Can't have everything.
We turned down the short hall into what would have been the garage. To one side there was a closet that housed the water heater, heat/air unit, and short ladder to the attic. On the other side was a laundry room where we'd clearly be storing our clothes before running them to the laundromat to wash them as we had no washer or dryer.
Then we passed into the enclosed, carpeted garage area that we referred to as the "den." It was a huge room since it was apparently a two car garage. I was excited, and the Queen seemed to like it too. We called the guy back and asked about getting it, but that we couldn't do anything until the next month since we were part way through the month in our rent at the apartment. He said he couldn't keep it on the market that long. The deposit was a month of rent, and I said we'd take it as is and just fix whatever was broken ourselves. Probably stupid, but we'd been looking for awhile. He accepted, and we gave our 30 day notice at the apartments.
We had a little party with that friend of the Queen's, who we'll call the Teacher since she had some teaching classes in college with the Queen and still teaches to this day, and her husband, who we'll just call Eagle, to take take advantage of his maintenance knowledge to fix the issues in the house. It didn't take long and we were even allowed to paint, which we did. And so, in May of 2001, we moved out of the apartments and into this rent house that thanks to its enclosed garage, had an enormous amount of square footage, though we only really used the den for storage for awhile.
But Rock Girl took the front bedroom, and we painted the back bedroom in a pale yellow (it turned out to be the brightest room in the entire house thanks to the color and the rooms placement in the house in relation to where the sun lives in the sky throughout the day. Rock Girl was still using the crib at the time, though, so the yellow room was rather devoid of furniture for while, but we knew Rock Girl would move into a "big girl bed" before the Queen's due date in December, so we'd be ready.
Add to the baby craze that the Queen's friend, Wendy, from the apartments got pregnant about a month earlier, and there was even a teacher at the school the Queen was teaching at at the time that got pregnant a month or so later. It was baby crazy around us for awhile.
But we had a house. And we were happy.
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