We're Moving (kinda, but not really...)

It's Official... I can finally speak it outloud!!! Eric is getting transferred to a new account with Applied. (No, we are not moving, lest you started panicking!) He currently manages an account with Microchip in Tempe. His boss has been trying to get him transferred over to the Intel account and he'll be switching over the first week of February. Without disclosing our exact location, I will just say that his new office will be about 10 miles closer to our house than the current one! Yeah for less commuting!!!! :) This will be the "closest" we have ever lived to Eric's job since he first started with Applied Materials in 1996. It's going to be a weird feeling, I think...

Eric and I have both been "nervous" about this transfer. Everyone kept telling him it was the greatest gig on earth... and that he was "hand picked" for the move, but we had reservations. Whenever there is recession (and we've been in recession mode for a year now)... change is scary. You never want to be the "new kid on the block" when the next round of layoffs hits. But, we took a leap of faith and it seems already that it's going to pay off BIG. Eric just got word yesterday that Microchip is suffering from the recession and instead of layoffs they are going to go into "shutdown" three weeks a quarter. They will basically force their employees to take one week a month of time off whether they want to or not. ("Shutdown" is a common practice in the semi-conductor industry....) If you don't have enough vacation time in the bank, you take it unpaid. That's just the nature of this business. We've been through recession before and we survived the dot-com bust, so we feel like we've been there before. So, now it appears as though we've dodged another bullet and are switching accounts at just the right time. When Microchip goes to shutdown, so do all the Applied employees that work on the Microchip account. The dilemma for Eric is that Applied has already taken 4 weeks this year of shutdown in their own efforts to cut costs and avoid heavy layoffs... by the time January 1st comes around, we should have just one vacation day left in the bank. We've never gone this low on our reserve. It's a bit unnerving, to say the least. Eric has been the only one on his team to take shutdown this year, so his "team" hasn't been eating away their vacation time like we have.

It's a long complicated story, but the reason I'm sharing all this is to say how grateful I am for the Lord's guiding hand in our lives. We are not as prepared for recession as we should be. We should have more money in the bank and less debt. We should have more food in the pantry for a rainy day. But, despite all that, the Lord still blesses us and watches over us. Despite all that, I know it will all work out okay.