Update on the Update-We're Moving!

Hello Everyone!

I hope you are ready for the second installment of the Harris Family saga. We have decided to…insert drum roll here…move back to Utah for the next year! As I described in my last email, I was waiting to hear back about funding for the next year from a couple of different sources: the College funding I have received the last 3 years and a grant my mentor applied for. As it turned out, I was not able to receive funding from multiple sources per some College norm for graduate students. Additionally, my mentor emailed me this weekend to tell me that he did not think he was going to receive the National Science Foundation grant after all. Once you add this up, our decision was fairly easy to make so we can achieve our goal of getting me through school without incurring any debt.

So, Whit and I have already booked our moving truck and picked up a slew of boxes. We have decided to go ahead and move at the end of this month. (We are going to leave on May 26^th and get into Utah on May 28^th. I expect Collin to be waiting for me with open arms.) I only have funding through the middle of June and I told my College that I did not want to pay a full month’s rent to work for 2 weeks. They told me today that leaving at the end of May was fine as long as I did a couple of weeks or work from Utah to complete my commitment. Also, moving earlier rather than later will give Whit a chance to get started at her new job. And to top it all off, this means we can make it back to see Maggie and Brandon while they are in Utah for a wedding over Memorial Day weekend. (For those who don’t know, Maggie is pregnant which means she won’t be traveling much the next year and we will be too broke to go to Baltimore to visit, so we wanted to see them when we had the chance.)

All in all, Whit and I are excited to be closer to family and to see what the next year holds for us. It will be sad to say goodbye to our Tallahassee family, but if we don’t do it sooner we will have to later. We know it will be an adjustment from our independent life here, but we are extremely grateful for our family’s generosity and hospitality. In short, its time to warm up the oven Mama!