Pierce/Hocker Christmas Blog 2016

 

A physical Christmas card is traditional and I love reading them, but I lack addresses, stamps, and envelopes to make the whole experience. I opted for a Christmas Blog since the people who want to read about my life will and if you wanted to skip over it on Facebook you absolutely could. Here is the very brief version of our 2016!

Cole
Cole continues to work for the State of Iowa Auditor. He travels considerably less than last year but still spends too much time in northwest Iowa. His phone continues to send him updates about who is retiring in O'Brien County, Iowa. He befriends lots of little old ladies in county government across the state. He even got a promotion in October! He is gradually gaining a little more responsibility, and a bit of a pay raise too!

Bre 
I graduated from Luther in May with a degree in psychology. I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do with the degree when I graduated and I still don't entirely know. I currently work as a loan servicing specialist 3 (titles are important!) at Wells Fargo. This is not a long term job but it helps to pay the bills for now. Perhaps I will be pursuing a new job or grad school in the future. My options are wide open right now which is both good and bad. I have a job right now and I can't complain.

Pretzel
For those who don't know, we got a German shorthair pointer puppy in June. She is a bundle of energy and cuteness. She takes up most of our free time, between walks and trips to the Raccoon River Dog Park. We make lots of friends every time we visit, usually befriending the largest dogs there first. We go on lots of walks after work and have enjoyed exploring different neighborhoods. Pretzel even passed puppy kindergarten in October–flying colors for responding to her own name! All too often people comment, "I've never seen a dog do [fill-in-the-blank] before!" She's a strange little dog that acts part dog, cat, monkey, and human at any given moment. We love her dearly anyway.

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The biggest news on the year is also the most recent. Cole bought a house in October and we moved in the week before Christmas (I am his favorite renter). It is a cute 3 bedroom house in Des Moines and it has a nice sized backyard for Pretzel to run to her little heart's content. I will be taking up gardening come spring, as there is already one in place. Cole will be able to put all his Luther grounds experience to good use as well, as we clear out some overgrowth. It has proven to have no shortage of projects and will likely be a work in progress for while. We are having a painting party this weekend with my family. Slowly but surely it will start to feel like "home." We enjoy the challenges of home ownership and it sure beats paying rent each month.

If you are ever in the Des Moines area, give us a ring! We have plenty of space for air mattresses, sleeping bags, and have extra pillows and blankets galore. We would love company! Give us a 2 minutes heads up and we can have an air mattress ready for you!

PetSmart/LifeSmart

Last week I spent a good amount of time in PetSmart. My boyfriend Cole and I are preparing to move across town and we will be slightly neglecting our dog for about 3 days. Don't worry, she will be left in good hands each day but she won't be getting the full attention from her parents that she normally gets on a weekend. Anyway, I was at PetSmart and bought her some long lasting (hypothetically, anyway) a couple of nifty new toys of moderate price ($7-9) and refrained from buying her the cheap Christmas toys at the front of the store, even though they were really cute and their squeaker features weren't the most annoying I had ever heard.

Well, I came home and told Cole about these cute, cheap, Christmas toys at PetSmart. So like any hip and fun couple we planned a date the following night and took our dog to PetSmart to buy her some festive stuff. Each toy was $1.47 and I bought 3 of them: a moose, a candy, and a reindeer. At this very moment, the candy is in the trash and I haven't seen the reindeer since yesterday morning. The moose and the candy were plushie/fleece and my dog has a knack for tearing the stuffing out of literally every toy she can (and her old dog bed). This wouldn't be a big problem but she likes to eat the stuffing and she has had enough trouble lately with her GI tract that she really doesn't need any more chaos going on there.

Every cheap toy I have ever bought her gets destroyed within in 2 days. Sure they are cute and fun for 48 hours but then they end up in the trash. A couple weeks ago she ate the fin off of a little red shark I bought for $1. Just today I threw away a tiger rope guy where she tore the stuff out of his face within 24 hours of owning him. We get him because he had a rope for a body but it turns out that was made of stuffing inside the rope. He was $3. Blue squeaker bone with rope ends? Shredded ropes in a week. It was only $5. Raccoon with ropes for feet? Rope torn out in 2 weeks. The raccoon is still intact but significantly less fun because it is hard to play tug of war with something a little bigger than a softball. He was also $5.

So here's the moral of the story: buy the $7 toys before you buy the $1.47 toys. Yes, they do cost more money. But they also last several months (they might last longer but I've only had the dog 6 months so I can't speak to the long term lasting effect here) longer than the cheap toys. You put a little more effort into buying quality toys and consequently they last a little longer. This also holds true in life.

I work in a division of Wells Fargo that handles loan servicing. I have worked there almost 6 months and I am working in my third process there. For one thing, we have hired close to 75 people in the last 2 months so I had to get moved to leave room for new people to do the starting process, but I also worked really hard at what I was doing in order to move up the ladder. Sure, my first process was ridiculously easy (borderline boring) but I did it with speed and did it right and was rewarded with more responsibilities. I got moved in 2 weeks. I got really good at the second process I worked in and was also moved on to the next process. With every bump step up on the ladder I get closer to the end of the process. There are several processes that make a up a single progression that makes sure people weren't overcharged for 2 lines on a closing disclosure (recording fees: yay government regulations!). In my current process I review the work of people who currently do my old jobs. I check for accuracy and then call settlements who are usually pleasant but occasionally annoyed about getting the customer money back. It's not fun to call and ask for a refund and it's certainly not fun to tell them if they don't do it we will do it for them and mark their noncompliance (I've only done that twice. Got refunds within the hour).

I guess this post is about investing in yourself. When I started writing this I wasn't sure where I was going with it. College students are coming up on finals and adults are closing in on the end of another year at work. It's too easy to cheap yourself out of hard work. Go the extra mile. Stay in the library or at your cubicle until the very end of the day. Hold yourself accountable to all the things you say you will do. Buy your dog the $7 toys. (Side note: beyond $15, the toys don't get exponentially better. You're paying for name brand at that point. I had a lot of free time in dog aisle once to notice this...) Sure the cheap toys in life are thrilling but they also disappear the fastest. Getting out of work early will seem like you are free but you end up leaving yourself more to do the following day(s). Sometimes my dog tries to dig her old toys out of the garbage can. You can't get back what you self sabotage-humans understand that but puppies don't.

Good luck on finals. Everyone makes it out alive. Just keep breathing and focusing on what you can control: your preparation. And best of luck to recent college grads who are not fully prepared to work so much over what has always been an extended break. Bring it on. Invest in yourself and be great.

 

Big Ugly #5

Many many many many apologies for dragging out the Big Uglies and for taking this long between posts. I've been living a big of chaos lately; on top of that, 11 of the last 16 days the internet has been out at my apartment. I finally got a night I could scoot up the street to Panera and I'm enjoying a smoothie as I type this. Some of you may know I'm lactose intolerant and will likely regret the smoothie choice later. YOLO (<--- is that still a thing?) I figured it would be rude to come mooch their wi-fi and not buy something. It does taste pretty good so it's not totally regrettable. Yet.

Any way..... The last Ugly Truth of adulthood I'm talking about is sleep. Just last week I was FaceTiming my brother. We had tried to do it a few nights before but I was getting in bed at 9 and he was working on homework still. The night we finally did FaceTime he was just getting back from meeting for a project and said he was going to be up until midnight or 1am and back up at 5am to go lift for football. I don't miss that part of college. I love leaving work each day and knowing I don't have to bring any work with me. I realize this is not the case with a lot of jobs but I am at work more than 10 hours a day and don't know that I could really handle spending a few more hours at home each night doing more work. Props to the people that do that. I don't miss the homework. Sidenote: last week (while on a stretch of home internet for a few days) I was researching how to start a garden. I was taking notes because gardens are a lot of work. I was copying and pasting notes left and right and didn't note what website any of it came from because I wasn't about to cite them. I just wanted the notes all in the same place.

The part of college I do miss is the ability to take a nap after class and not feel the slightest bit bad about it. Adulthood kinda sucks. You can't take a nap at your desk when the afternoon gets slow and no one is answering your calls. I have seen a few people do it and look very alarmed when they realized they fell asleep at their desk for an unknown amount of time. In college I always liked getting up early and going to the library to when no one else was there. I could claim a table and work distraction free for quite awhile. I could go to class and come back and take a nap undisturbed before my roommates got back. It was great. But citations weren't. You win some, you lose some.

I'm boring and go to bed around 9:30pm every night. Sorry to anyone that texts me after that point (aka Sarah Ea last night) because I read your message between 5 and 5:30am and then usually forget to respond because I decide I don't want to disturb normal people sleep schedules and respond at ungodly hours of the day. Or I respond and hope people don't get mad about me texting back while I eat breakfast at 6:15. Also my idea of sleeping in includes waking up after 7 on a weekend. I feel like I've gained 10 extra hours of sleep when I get to sleep in. It's really not that much extra but it sure feels like it. And I love it.

Sleep is precious in college; you get it where you can. In adulthood, you hope you never fall asleep at your desk or during a semi-important meeting. Sure, in college you can stay up late one night and sleep in the next day or take a heck of a midday nap to make up for lost sleep. But that doesn't happen in the adult world. I come from a family of serious nappers (aka my grandma takes the phone off the hook when she naps because she does not want to be awakened) and I really miss a good, midafternoon snooze to power through the evening. College students, cherish your afternoon naps because they don't exist in the real world (except on weekends and they are GLORIOUS then).