NEW JOB

Andre got a job :) He found a perfect job. He is the on call maintenance person at the U of I. His job duties require him to be available to respond within 30 minutes notice between the hours of 4 pm and 7 am monday through friday and then 7 am Saturday to 7 am Monday, every other week. During his weeks of being on call, he has to get at least 10 hours from being called in or dong some other work. He can work more if he wants to. The other weeks, he has no responsibilities. If he works more than 10 hours, or works at all on his off weeks, he gets paid minimum wage. The first 10 hours of his on call week he doesnt get paid for. Instead, we get to live in University Housing. FOR FREE. All we have to pay is utilities. We also get $1000 flex for the summer and $1500 for each semester. Flex dollars are ones that can only be used for food, and only on campus. There is a little grocery store, a cafeteria, a bunch of cafes and a dennys that we can use the money at. So, on June 13th, we are moving :) We got a two bedroom apartment on campus. Its a little bigger than our trailer, plus lots free-er. We are going to sell our trailer, hopefully soon! We feel so blessed that Andre got this job. We have been living super cheap (under $400/month for all our expenses), but this will be even cheaper, and the conditions will be better. Plus, since its gotten warm here, the trailer park has come alive.. and not in a good way. Some thing really make me laugh though.. We have a neighbor who set up a garage sell to try and sell some of his stuff. He has been sitting in his front yard every day for about three weeks with all his crap. Some how, every day, he accumulates more stuff. The only kind of advertising he has for the sell is a sign at the end of our park (mind you, our park is not any where near a main road) that says "Garage sell, number 12, please come." Its pretty awesome. He told Andre he has made $150 dollars so far, but no one has paid him yet because they are all going to pay him at the first of the month. He says hes not afraid that people wont pay him because he has a motorcycle gang that people know about. This person that said these things doesnt actually own a motorcycle. There are, however, two men with bikes who drive around without shirts on. They start their bikes about every half hour. This process takes about.. 20 minutes. Once they get their bikes started, they drive around our trailer park about twice. Then they stop. Half hour later, they repeat. There is also a guy that drives a gold car the honks every time he passes our trailer. I'm not sure who he is honking at, but it doesnt matter what time it is (last night, about 2 am he honked) he'll honk four or five times as he passes our trailer.. needless to say, I am excited that we are getting out.

We feel really blessed about this. Andre had applied for tons and tons of jobs, and even still that is the only one we heard back from. We had saved a bunch of money when I was working, but we had only saved enough to get us through May. We were getting a little worried (by we I mean I). But everything has worked out great. We are so excited :)