Ellensburg Update

Well, we’re here! We’re finally officially out of Kent and living in Ellensburg, in a cute little one-bedroom apartment just a block off of the CWU campus.

Though the official ceremony won’t be until June, I am now officially a CWU graduate, having earned my Bachelor’s degree from the Law and Justice program. Not only that, but I graduated with honors, Magna Cum Laude! I’m not sure what my final cumulative GPA was (the one that’s used to calculate honors status, after combining the CWU GPA with the NSCC GPA from when I was earning my AA degree), but my final CWU GPA was a very respectable 3.925.

After winter quarter finished, Prairie came over the mountains to Kent, and we spent the next week and a half packing up everything in our Kent apartment. We donated a ton of stuff to various local organizations (over a trunkload of food to Northwest Harvest, two trips totaling roughly a carload and a half of stuff to St. Vincent de Paul, and our old pay-as-you-go cellphones to the Domestic Abuse Women’s Network), almost completely filled a 10’x20′ storage unit with the majority of our belongings, and took us and one final carload of stuff back over to Ellensburg. A day or so of unpacking and organizing, and we’re nicely settled in.

The first week in Ellensburg has been pretty good to me, as it turns out. Over the past two quarters, I’ve been working with CWU-Des Moines Law and Justice department head Professor Reimund on putting together some outreach material, one Des Moines-centric, and one covering the entire CWU Law and Justice department to be distributed to alumni. As we’ve been working on this, we’d started playing with ideas on how to improve the LAJ department’s online outreach. Well, it looks like I’ll be able to continue working on those ideas, as thanks to a recommendation from Professor Reimund, I’ve been hired by CWU to work with the LAJ department on revamping their website. It’s a temporary part-time position through this spring quarter, but not only is it better than being unemployed, with luck this may lead to other opportunities in the future.

So, the next few months are going to be a mix of some fun part-time work drawing on my geek tendencies and generally relaxing and exploring eastern Washington, with a jaunt over to Norwescon come Easter weekend. I think it’s going to be a good spring and summer.