Some New Firsts

I personally would like to announce that I have now driven by myself on the left side of the road! This may sound like an easy feat, but it did make me feel a bit uneasy. I was just excited that I only got honked at once :) I feel like a brand new driver trying to remember all the important things while driving. I think the three hardest things are remembering to watch out for the left side of the car's boundaries since I am not sitting there and it would be best to not sideswipe cars parked on the side of the road. Mark has gasped only a few times because of this retraining of my brain. Let's hope I catch on quickly and we can quit having close calls! It is also difficult to remember my left hand uses the gear shift, not my right. A couple times my right hand ran into the door trying to grab for the shifter! I have yet to attempt a big round about and will avoid them as much as possible because they are rather chaotic. The other part of driving here that I do not care for is all the parallel parking on the streets. For some reason I never really had to learn this skill when I was learning to drive way back when. Mark has been trying to teach me and hopefully one of these days it will stick!

Unfortunately, we also had a first with the car yesterday as we came out after church to a parking ticket. We have concluded it would be good to learn more of the rules of the road here :) We really had thought we had picked a legal spot to park since other cars were parked there and it followed the parking guidelines someone else had given us, but somewhere in the rush to get to church we missed the sign that said no parking Mon-Sun 8am-6pm. In any case, we hope to not repeat that costly mistake again.

This morning I arrived unannounced to my first day of work! I had agreed with one of my new bosses (I think I have 3 or 4 and don't know exactly who is most responsible for me most....) that I would start today, but we hadn't set a time. I called HR and asked to have someone call and let me know but I never heard from anyone. I decided showing up at 9am would be better than going later so I did just that and brought my "flexibility" with me as I figured I would catch them off-guard. They were a little surprised, but they recovered nicely! I spent the morning trying to grasp what various people in the different departments do and how I would be helping all of them. There are 3 departments that work closely together in Admissions and they will all share me based on who needs me most at that point in time. I also got to have an official tour of the campus which was nice since Mark and I never did that. It filled in a few gaps and will probably be useful to me as down the road I may have future students or tourists asking me the same questions I was asking!

In other exciting news, we should have Internet by the end of the week! That's the goal and plan and we will all wait to see if it happens! If it does we will both be beside ourselves! We've been so grateful to have a phone this past week and know we will feel the same about Internet. Hopefully we'll never again take either of them for granted! Oh, and one other little follow-up to the phone--Mark "encouraged" the phone company to compensate us for the troubles they caused, taking so long, etc and they agreed to not charge us for our "line rental" the first 3 months! This is a decent savings (in fact, thinking about it now, it should pay for the parking ticket!) and we are grateful for this added blessing after all the hassles! God is good!