Looks like November is shaping up to be a somewhat exciting month.

First and foremost, happy birthday to my sister Ellen! Eat some cake and have fun today, sis.

Yesterday I had a phone interview with the corporate headquarters of Kohl's department stores, who are looking for an HRIS Analyst. Their national headquarters is in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, which is probably a 20-minute drive from here. I thought it went pretty well, and was told that they were looking at other candidates as well, and I should hear back in the next two weeks regarding whether or not they'd like to schedule a face to face interview. If I didn't hear back within two weeks, I could call them to see what the status of my application was.

They called me back this morning. This is a very good thing, since I absolutely hate waiting to hear on things like that. I've got an interview there on Thursday afternoon with both their executive recruiter and their HR manager.

God, I hope this works out. When we moved out here in December, I had wanted to be working again no later than the end of February. It's now early November, and while I've really enjoyed being at home and spending time with Jen and Gabriel, there's a certain twitchiness that sets in after a while.

Two weeks from today, we're all flying out to New York to visit my family for Thanksgiving. It's going to be a pretty big family affair. Me, Jen, Gabe, my parents, my sister Donna and maybe her future husband Matt (boy, that feels weird to type), my sister Ellen and maybe her boyfriend Brian, my brother John, his future wife Katie, and his soon-to-be-daughter Molly. Molly's a few months older than Gabriel is, and I can't wait for the two of them to meet. Gabe likes other people around his size.

When my parents visited here a few months back, my dad was walking around with a cane because of some disk issues in his back. I'm happy to say he's had surgery (on his neck, actually, which relieved the pressure all the way down his spine), and is back to his usual cartwheeling, skydiving, marathon-running self.

Okay, he's not that good - that would be some serious Six Million Dollar Man surgery involved for that. But he can walk around again without a cane, and he says the remnant pain is getting less and less by the day. Go dad!

Gabriel's growing by leaps and bounds, and his verbal skills are starting to come along, too. He's very demonstrative about what he wants - if there's something out of reach, he'll either push his highchair over to it and climb it like a ladder to get there, or grab one of us by the hand (or jacket or pants or whatever else is easily able to be grabbed) and walk us over to it. He shocked the heck out of me the other day when I asked him what he wanted, and he looked at me and clear as a bell said "My baba peez." It gave me chills.

Oh, and we may get snow flurries today.

That's it for now. I'll try and put up another entry with some sort of worth to it in about another month or so.

Maybe.