One Week Down....

Today marks my second Saturday here in Austin. It's been quite an interesting week. I knew it would be tough at first coming here and not knowing anyone...but I wasn't really worried about it. Let me just tell you, at one point early in the week, I had gone I think three days without having an in-person conversation with anyone outside of work! I found myself working overtime just because I knew I didn't want to come home and be there by myself. It's really depressing not knowing anyone, being alone. To think some people feel the way I did, and much worse, for weeks and months upon end is sad to me. Luckily some of my best friends from back home called when I really needed and gave me someone to talk to...that helped more than they know.

Things started changing around Wednesday, though. I had worked some things out with God and just felt better, plus my roommate came back from being stranded at home Wednesday night. But Thursday and Friday night I went down to UT (University of Texas) campus and hung out there. I met some of the Nav folk down there which was pretty cool. They are doing this big thing down there called Rez Week....sorta like a revival for the whole school where all the student ministries unite together to further the Kingdom and spread Christ's love. I think we get caught up a lot of times in what is going on in our lives and what God is or isn't doing around us...and don't ever realize how big He is. I mean, I come down here, 1200 miles, to find that He is doing and getting ready to do huge things completely apart from me or anyone I know. Pretty sweet.

Work has been going pretty good too. It's completely different from my last job working for the DoD. The consumer world is quite different. At my last job, we pretty much either got money from the government, or we didn't. But now, we're competing, and marketing is this huge new thing to me that everyone is talking about. How can we make a better product than Intel and how can we make our stuff sound better than theirs. Don't buy Intel chips by the way, AMD is much better :-)

But it's pretty laid back at work, a lot of people wear shorts and t-shirts and sandals and no one seems to care. I haven't yet, but maybe when it is above 100 degrees for 30 days straight, like it's supposed to be here, I'll start!! There is a ping-pong table and a Nintendo Wii in the cafeteria at work that we play on pretty much everyday....I wish I was as good at ping-pong as I was freshman year when we used to play every day in Daniel's. People do work really hard here though, and seem to enjoy what they do, which is great! I get to work a lot with hardware too, which is something I wanted to do. The days haven't dragged on at all, but have gone pretty quickly....which didn't happen too often at my last co-op. We'll see what happens in the next 5 months.

I'm still hoping to get to experience more of the music and the people down here...which are both supposed to be amazing. It's weird because everyone I've talked to or heard talk about Austin loves it....and it's a lot easier to like a place when the people who live there like it too.

Anyway, I've finally submitted to cheering on OSU....time to go watch the game....go BUCKS!!!