The Secret is out....

Our lives here in the Snow family are about to change...BIG!

We are going from this....

{photo taken of the airshow from our FRONT YARD- Pope AFB}

to this....

Ben has officially put in his retirement paperwork with the Air Force. 

It's been a crazy few months and I have been dying to tell you all the story, because it is certainly nothing that any of us anticipated, but we are so darn excited about it all.

So sit back and let me tell you the story...

These are my parents. 

My Dad has worked in the oil business for my entire life. The last 20 of those years has been spent at a wonderful family run oil company out of Dallas, although Dad works in the oilfields of West Texas (they live in Midland, Tx) as an Oilfield Production Supervisor. A year or two ago, this company acquired an additional oilfield that is a bit further away from where my Dad works and it makes it more difficult to manage efficiently.

The owners of this oil company realized that Ben was getting close to retirement age (20 years of service) from the Air Force and, seemingly out of the blue for all of us including Mom and Dad, asked Dad if he thought that he could train Ben to do what he does so that Ben could run this neighboring oil field. Wow! We were all quite shocked, but after thinking it over, everyone agrees that Ben would be fabulous at doing this. 

It's been really crazy, since the initial discussions about all of this happened when Ben was deployed so we had to wait until he was home and could fly to Dallas to talk with the company and subsequently accept the job and then go through the whole process of trying to get retired from the Air Force (NOT a simple thing...LOL!)

It will be a great career change for him and my Dad is going to train him in all that he needs to know. Ben is also going to go to several schools and is already doing some correspondence classes. We will be living in West Texas, around the San Angelo area (about 2 hours from my parents and one of my brothers and his family.) 

To say that we are all excited is putting it mildly. We go down in 2 1/2 weeks to try to find us a house to buy (we haven't bought our own house in 15 years....being with the military, we have always moved too often to make buying a feasible option.)

We hope to get a property with a  bit of land so that we can garden (Kat is excited about tomato plants...)

There are so many exciting things about this move:
*being close to family
*an exciting and new career for Ben
*being close to family
*finally back in Texas which we have been trying to do for the last 18 years in the AirForce
*being close to family
*finally a real place to call home....permanently
*being close to family
*in-state tuition for college (not that I am pushing for one in particular....)

*being close to family
*West Texas summer nights
*being close to family
*just hours away from New Mexico skiing
*being close to family
*Texas FOOTBALL!!
*being close to family
*home where ropers and trucks are the norm!
*being close to family
*Ben working for an amazing company
*being close to family
*having space for a garden
*being close to family

We feel very blessed.