My Wife Zsuzsa - Part 13

A couple days after my wife headed back to Germany, I headed out with my brother, uncle, and cousin, on the four-day backpacking trip that had already been planned long before I had even thought of getting married. I no longer wanted to go because I had a lot more important things to be doing. However, it was important to my brother that I didn't cancel, and since he would be helping me out over the next couple of weeks, I decided to go ahead and go. It ended up being a great trip and gave me lots of time to slow down and think about things and make a game plan for the next 2 weeks. Every night on the backpacking trip I worked on a long letter to Zsuzsa that I mailed to Germany the day I got back to civilization.

As soon as I got back from the trip, I got a good job at a company called Liberty Bell Alarm doing residential alarm systems. I had grown up helping my dad with electrical work, and a friend of my sister Raani already worked there and gave me a recommendation, so I was able to start work there immediately. They started me at $9.50/hour because I already had electrical experience, and I would be consistently working 50 hours per week Monday through Friday, with the option of working Saturdays on top of that whenever I wanted (which I ended up doing very rarely because I was newly married, and I felt that it was more important, once my wife returned, to spend as much time with her as possible in the early days of our marriage).

Finding an apartment turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. I thought that when an apartment complex had a bunch of balloons and a giant banner that said, "Now Renting," that they would actually have apartments available (imagine that!). It turned out that the vast majority had nothing available within the next month. Finally I found a nice apartment that was close to my job and would be ready 4 days after my wife was scheduled to come back.

Over the course of the weeks that my wife was in Germany, we exchanged a ton of emails and even spoke on the phone a couple of times. The last time I had spoken with her over the phone was the week that I met her when I had called and invited her to church.

Everything was going perfectly according to plan until 3 days before my wife would be back. That was when my mom got a piece of mail from Reno, Nevada, made out to Zsuzsanna Toth-Anderson.

To be continued…

Picture taken on the backpacking trip. I am in the bottom of the waterfall (look closely)