I left my job at Zonder at the end of October for another company that I thought would give me a great opportunity and help me advance in my career. That did not really work out and I was quite unhappy so after about a month at this new company I decided it was time to leave. It was only about a week in to this new job that I started looking for a new position but things took a few weeks to pull together.

I interviewed with several companies. I had a few interviews through a couple of recruiters, a couple of interviews through friends, and the others came from Internet sites such as craigslist, Dice.com, and UtahHelpWanted.com. Craigslist seemed to be the most fruitful place. When I was interviewing this time I did a lot better job of interviewing the companies that were interviewing me than I had ever done before and I was more picky about positions that I would continue on in the process.

In the end I received 4 offers, the first from STG, second was from SolutionStream, third was from UCN and finally one from Essential Learning. I decided to take the job with Essential Learning, they are a fairly small company with about 30 employees spread all over the country. Essential Learning provides a web-based Learning Management System designed to meet the needs of organizations that provide behavioral health, developmental disability, substance abuse and child welfare services. There were several things about Essential Learning that attracted me to them, since they don’t have an office it allowed me to work 100% from home which gives me a lot of flexibility and it was also a high enough position that I would have a lot of decision making ability with how things were done with the systems I would be working on. It was an offer I could not pass up!

I have been working for Essential Learning on a contract basis for the past month to be able to test out what we each think of each other and things are going well, they gave me an official offer on January 16th for full-time employment and I will be an official employee on February 1st as the Director of Software Development. I am pretty excited about the opportunity and really see a long-term position with this company.

My wife’s older brother just had their first child yesterday, we are all pretty excited! It is our first nephew and the first grandchild in her family also. Jodi’s mom, Kathy, was pretty excited about it! We all arrived at the hospital a few minutes before he was born and when they finally let us in the room after his birth Kathy went running to go see her first grandson! It was sad that Jodi’s dad, Kelley, was out of town in Arkansas for work and it doesn’t look like he’ll be able to make it back till later this week. We did what we could to get pictures sent as quickly as we could to him, technology can do a little bit to make those long distances feel shorter.

Everything went well with the birth, both Harrison and his mom are doing well and the dad, Josh, was grinning from ear to ear all day. Harrison is going to get a lot of love from his parents and extended family, there have already been fights over holding him. I was just hoping he would wait another day to be born so he and I could share the same birthday!

I have been claiming other people’s nieces and nephews for way too long. So I am happy to announce that I finally have one of my own! Harrison Joshua Green was born today. He is so freaking cute. He looks just like his Dad, its a little crazy. I am so grateful to Josh and Sabrina for adding a new member to our family.

Josh couldn’t wipe the smile off his face all day. I think he has been waiting for this day for most of his life. He is going to be a great Dad and I can already tell that Sabrina is going to be an amazing Mom. Harrison picked some pretty great parents.

It’s amazing how much happiness Harrison has brought to our family already and he isn’t even a day old yet. I already love that little kid so much. I can’t wait for him to get a little older so I can talk Josh and Sabrina into letting me babysit.

Today was a great day!