jenniferhawke.com

I’m a gracious winner and sore loser. Is that a good enough reason to give us the gold?

The entire nation is hoping our boys skate their butts off. This household is decidedly divided. Maddy and Suh can’t stop trash-talking.

so! Brandon and i are looking for ways to get our finances to stretch a little better between student loan disbursements. having to pay $10,000 every 4 months is really tough and when he’s back in rotations, it will be $20,000! ouch. most of you have jobs and income flowing in the green and even you can’t imagine dropping $20,000 three times a year.

as i mentioned on Twitter last night, being Canadian on the wrong side of the border obviously limits my job opportunities. i can’t just start bringing in tips for slinging pie and coffee at the local diner. so i started perusing craigslist last night for something (of the non-adult employment industry variety) i can do.

and i came across a few ads looking for freelance article writers.

i can do that! i can write! i can even use capital letters when i need to!

this morning i was looking for a couple of non-fiction samples to submit to Suite101.com and ended up being swallowed whole by my experiences in Africa. my gosh! it’s like i completely forgot how insane that trip was. and i forgot how proud i was of some of that writing. some of those stories sucked me in as if i didn’t experience it first-hand.

i didn’t find anything suitable to submit to the online writers’ network. they are asking for third-person non-fiction and we all know how often that happens here. hah.

so! if you have any tips for me down here, i would appreciate the advice. another friend recommended looking into Google Ads, but i really don’t think i generate the kind of traffic that would make advertising revenue lucrative or worthwhile. looking into it though.

1 month and 1 week

“The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”
~ Charles Du Bos

i know that more than a few of you were surprised when i decided to take Brandon’s family name as my own. the following post is a few excerpts from an email to a friend last month when he claimed he wouldn’t know me as anything other than “JHawke”.

i have to admit, there were a few years that i didn’t think i’d change my name. none of the guys i dated seemed to care (not that they wanted to get married anyway) and when i ended up on the med school track, Doc Hawke was just too cool. then i met Brandon. from our first hours of daydreaming about a future together (which were surprisingly early), i told him that i would be keeping my name. and i hoped he was okay with that. he was. he never mentioned it again and never tried to talk me out of it.

then i met his extended family.

and they were just so flippin’ cool. i loved them to pieces and i really enjoyed the way they warmly welcomed me into their extended fold in Small Town Nebraska. becoming part of his family felt more than just symbolic. and taking his name suddenly felt like more than just tradition.

i wanted his family to know how important they are to me. and taking their name on my professional degree and children and the rest of our lives was the best way i could think of doing that. shortly after Christmas holidays, i told Brandon about my change of heart. he was genuinely surprised. i was sort of surprised at myself too. but it feels right.

my new last name isn’t top secret. you could easily find it with a little digging. but i now have one of the most common names in North America and that’s kinda nice. there are 7,000+ people with my name on Facebook alone. 7,000!

continuing to write under jenniferhawke.com gives me a certain degree of anonymity. nowadays, the residents and doctors i work with know me only by my married name. it would take a little bit of work (or a sideswiping unexpected query) for them to uncover my website and i like it like that.

oh, and yesterday we finally got the documentation and money ($355 – yikes!) together to send in the first set of papers to U.S. Customs & Immigration. if Form I-130 goes through without a hitch, i will be formally registered as an Alien Family Member.

————
photo: Duke got down in the dirt for this shot.

happy Canadian thanksgiving!

Brandon baked a ham and i am so thankful to have him around!