My summer with Sears Holdings Corp

As most of our readers likely know, we spent the summer in Chicago.  But why?  I had an internship with Sears Holdings, the company that owns and directs the Sears and Kmart retail stores as well as brands such as Kenmore, Craftsman, Diehard, Lands End, and others.

This was in my email signature. :)

I worked on the Business Development and Strategy team for the Kenmore Craftsman Diehard business unit and spent most of my summer analyzing opportunities for the Craftsman brand.  I was there as a Business Analyst, part of a very neat program at Sears Holdings that gives talented undergrads the chance to work for a number of different businesses within Sears while also receiving a lot of mentoring and exposure to senior leadership.  We had a weekly "Senior Speaker Series" speech about every two weeks as well as weekly cohort meetings where we interacted with impressive people or got training on specific subjects.

I really enjoyed my time there. I learned a lot, I was exposed to a lot, and I found that I really enjoy being committed to and contributing to a work team.  My boss was fantastic, serving as a great mentor and friend throughout the summer.  I also really enjoyed many of the coworkers around me and miss them already.  It was a fun place to work.

Will I be going back?  We don't know yet.  We loved the area, we found wonderful friends, and I really enjoyed what I was doing.  Sears Holdings did extend an offer to me to return full-time - a very strong offer, too - but I'm exploring other full-time opportunities just to ensure Heidi and I can weigh our options fully.  I'm still very attracted to the drum-beat of thoroughbred management consulting, so we'll see what opportunities appear in that space.

View from outside... I didn't take this one.

 View from inside: main atrium.  This building was designed to feel like a mall.

180 degree turn around from where I stood to take previous picture

{Newest Member of the Family!!}

We would like to introduce you to our newest member of the family - this is the husband's new bike :) we're still trying to figure out a name...

Ha - you thought this was going to be about the baby, right? Too bad - she has not yet arrived - but do keep checking back, she'll come soon :)

Seriously though, we bought this bike of KSL last week, got it some new tires, and here it is!

Here's the husband putting on the new tires:

My stud of a husband loves getting his picture taken, can you tell? these pictures are at such a lovely angle because I was laying on a blanket reading my book [The Hobbit] while watching the husband fix his bike up, and I wasn't going to stand up....nope.

Ta-da! Since we moved into our new wonderful 2 bdrm place we are a bit further from campus than we used to be and it's a little hike to get to campus. Now, with the bike, the husband can get to and from school/work much faster - that means he can sleep in a little bit and get home earlier - hooray! :)

{Family in Town}

The day after we got back to Provo we had lotsa family in town!

My baby brother, Scott, and the husband's sister, Caitlan, are both freshman this year at BYU! Woot Woot!! So we had my mom, my baby brother, my older brother, the husband's mom, and the husband's sister all arriving in town the day after we got back. It was so great to see all of them! After a rocky drive up [rocky as in 2 popped tires, ruined wheel, rental car, 3 hour delay, nobody hurt.....] they came and had dinner with us, it was awesome.

Over the weekend Scott and Caitlan got settled into their BYU life, Dan got back into his groove, and we got to hang out with our mothers for a bit. It was wonderful!

On Thursday we went to the Oquirrh Mountain Temple:

On Friday night we had a get together with my mom's side of the family. It was super fun.

Good long game of Egyptian Rat Screw...

Food and talking....

And a good ol' game of kickball.......Yes, I played and yes, I did hurt the next day lol but it was fun

That Saturday my wonderful Aunt Judy also threw me a family baby shower! It was cute and fun! It was mostly great to be able to spend time with family [especially since both mothers were able to attend] - we even had the folks from Idaho come down - what a fun surprise! Aunt Judy threw a fabulous shower with fabulous food, fabulous games, and fabulous flair, as she does everything in life. I'm so blessed to be surrounded by so many family members who are so loving and supportive - it was great to see a large majority of them under one roof!

Tuesday night we had a good-bye meal at Goodwood:

The mothers stayed for a few more days and then took off for Houston. But, the plan is that they will both be back [with other family members in tow..] in a few short weeks once Baby Evette decides to join us. PS - do you know how hard it is to plan things when you have no idea when the baby will decide to come? Oh well - she's calling the shots right now, and I'm just fine with that as long as she is happy and healthy!

Long gone

Everyone!

It's been a long, long time since I blogged last.  And even that last blog, as I remember it, was a rather short and inconsequential one.  Thankfully Heidi has been keeping good record of everything we've been up to, including our time hiking in Southern Utah (when Heidi was 5-6 months pregrant!), our road trip to Chicago, the millions of fun things we did there, our road trip back to Provo, and a couple of the things that has happened since our return to Happy Valley. [Note that I wanted to provide links to all of those things, but that would take hours I don't have, so if any of that piqued your interest just run a search or peruse our posts]

The biggest thing Heidi left out in all of those posts was what I was doing for most of the summer, in between all of those wonderful weekends exploring the sights of downtown Chicago, as well as what I've been up to since our return to Provo and where we're going from here.

I'll be taking care of all of that stuff.  I promise.  It may take some time, but I will.  In the interest of keeping order and helping things be searchable, I'll write individual posts for each of those topics instead of lumping them all together in one long, long post.

It's good to write again, though.  I miss the therapy.

{All things Baby}

We're getting close my friends, and Miss Evette's room is just about done...

The husband and I decided that for each of our children we want to get them a big nice print of Christ with a little child for their room. We decided on this one titled "Under His Wing" by Jay Bryant Ward for Evette. This is one of my favorite paintings and I hope that she will grow to love it as well.

Some of her books

Our make-shift closet/dresser for her :)

She already loves shoes just like her mommy and daddy :)

Magical swing..

Now we're just waiting for Miss Evette to arrive!

{Random pictures from the summer}

Here are some random pictures from the summer that didn't fit into a folder but need to be talked about....just because.

And of course we'll start off with food:

We ate a good amount of deep dish pizza in Chicago.....

 

Also, this is delicious spinach artichoke deep in the crust of a deep dish pizza. 

We went to a Famous Dave's Barbeque restaurant...oh my goodness it was heavenly....

One morning the husband woke up and made us a delicious breakfast quiche! What a talented husband I have! What I lucky wife I am!

we went to go see Circus Boy perform at the neighborhood library... that was an entertaining show!

Here are some pictures of the kids of the family that we were house sitting for all summer. We overlapped our stay with them for 1 week at the beginning of the summer and 2 weeks at the end. As you can note by my smaller belly, these pictures were taken during the first week of the summer.

Main street of our little town

It rains in Chicago like it rains in Texas... this is one of the big storms that we had.... it was crazy! Luckily our power only flickered for a minute as opposed to going off and staying off for the next 3 days like many neighborhoods close by....

Here is some of the debris that I cleaned up the next morning....crazy!

The family we were staying with had a pool table in their basement and during our last few weeks there we played a couple dozen games... it was awesome! Pool is fun even if you're bad....but we got to be pretty decent by the time we left! PS - check out this wonderful winning shot the husband set up for me :)

this is the pile of ironing that needed to get done once we got back to Provo... aughhhhh. I'm kind of OCD about ironing so no, I did not just throw them in the dryer and pull them out, but I [along with some help of some family in town :) ] ironed that whole blasted pile.

We reorganized our DVDs - mostly we were sick of all the room that they were taking up and wanted to do something about that. We thought about just putting them in a CD/DVD book and trashing the boxes, but we hated the idea of losing the cover art and we both agreed that it's quite difficult to find movies that you want to watch without the cover art....So we found this magical book on amazon that has a pocket for the cover art and allows for 2 dvds per cover art. Brilliant. So, now all of our DVDs are transferred to this big book and all those space-eating boxes are gone. [I was planning on just throwing them away, but the husband insisted we take them to the DI and to have someone else throw them away.... ha!] 

The husband's side of the family got us this wonderful desktop for my graduation present - it's beautiful! Plus, it has a massive screen....massive, friends. So, we sold our TV and use the desktop as a TV as well....the only TV we watch is on hulu and DVDs so....it's awesome!

  

{Good bye, Chicago}

Well, we are now back in Provo - a very bittersweet thing. We LOVED our time in Chicago. Loved it. We loved the area we were in, the husband loved his work [I'll let him blog about that sometime....now he's in school and busy again...bummer.] loved the ward that we attended, the wonderful friends that we met, and the millions of memories that we made. It was sad to leave, but exciting to go back "home" to Provo.

I say "home" because we are only living here temporarily while we finish up our collegiate careers, but we have been here for a while. It was nice to get back to our own house with our own things. I love our kitchen, I love our couches, I love our books, I love our pictures hanging all over the walls. It was weird living in someone else's house being surrounded by things that they love but don't mean a whole lot to us. I liked having our "things" surround us again, things that represent us, our values, what we love. It was nice to be back in our place.

We left early on Monday morning and drove all day....all day. We stopped every 2 hours or so for a bathroom/gas/stretch our legs break and then pushed on. Monday night we stayed in North Platte, NE and met up with some good friends of ours, the Porters! They were headed to Michigan to start their PhD program and we were both traveling on I-80 in opposite directions. They called us up and turns out we both had plans to stay the night in North Platte. It was fun to have some dinner/dessert with them that night - random, but good to catch up with them!

Tuesday we left early again and drove and drove and drove and made it to Provo right around dinner time. Our friends, the Rileys,  were nice enough to have us over for dinner that night which was great because they spent their whole summer in Russia so we had lots and lots to catch up on! It was great to see them.....

Here are some pictures of our very long, but fast drive back to provo:

Driving west means driving directly into the sunset - Also, bugs all over the windshield.

In North Platte they were having a cricket plague... nasty. Everywhere you stepped there were dozens of them... gross.

Good - I'm glad they have the best looking cashiers... because that's definitively what I'm looking for at a gas station. No, I did not go in to see if they had the best looking cashiers.... I would only go in if I could have taken a picture of them, but that would have just been super awkward, especially if they were not good looking....so it will forever be a mystery.

This sign was on the front of a gas station.... Yes, thank you for confirming that fact to me. I felt like our whole drive we were in the middle of nowhere...