Amazing News!

My wonderful hubby has been a volunteer firefighter for a few years now, and an EMT for about 2.5 years. There's been a lot of times when it's really waring on me, because he works at his normal job about 50-55 hours a week, plus he does duty crews with EMS every week, and some weekends - and on top of that runs Fire calls when he's home. Spring and Fall usually bring a lot of classes at the fire academy, which keep him out late nights.

He's been wanting to make the jump from volunteer to paid for a while now. He's high on the state lists (I think he's scored #32 in the state) for the jobs, but the State has been taking about forever and a day to get on the ball with hiring. We've been patiently waiting, for well over a year for these companies to get their butts in gear.

Well, about 2 weeks ago he interviewed for a job at Princeton University, and he got the job! He'll be a firefighter/emt/security for the Lab there. This is on Princeton University's campus, but it's not - from what I understand - it's not a student lab. Some of the greatest physics minds of our generation work here in an effort to create a new form of energy through fusion. In which case - energy would be cheap, and abundant - it would be amazing. Well, because of the nature of what they do - they require their own fire dept!

This is going to be great for us. Pension, excellent benefits w/ low co-pays, it's a Union - so pay and raises are managed very nicely. What is really awesome is if Sean wants to go to school, at any accredited University - he only pays 15% of tuition, they will pay the rest. When Neil goes to college? They will pay 50% of Neil's tuition. It's amazing. Princeton is about an hour from where we live now but he will be doing 24 hour shifts so really, he'll only work I think like 9 days a month. I think the schedule is like - 24 hrs on, 48 hrs off - once you work 5 revolutions of that, you get 5 days off. Sean will be home a lot more.

He'll be on a 90 day probationary period, and after that he'll be in the Union!

We are so thrilled. Not sure when he starts. Mon & Wed he has some physical/medical evals to do, and then he'll probably get a start date. I think he's planning on staying @ his current job and cutting back hours, since he'll have all those days off. He's going to do that for a while so we can stockpile a little money away just incase.