Officially Moved

We have officially moved!  We had our final walk through in our old apartment.  Technically we have been living down in Hastings since the 21st because that was when we ha all of our big furniture brought down here, but now we only have one set of keys.

It's not a house (unfortunately) but a big step up in that we are renting a townhouse.  Tons more room, no more people living above us, a washer and dryer!  So it's new and exciting.  We do have a big hill to climb in unpacking everything, but that we can do one box at a time.

55/120

Elongated Move

We get the keys to our new place in eleven days.  Exciting stuff.  It's weird, though, because I look around our current apartment and still see the majority of our stuff out and being used.  Some might look at it and think we haven't done much, but in actuality..well, no.  We really haven't.  I was going to try and paint a picture of productivity, but I can't.  And here's the reason why.  We have a two week overlap between the time we can move into our new place and the time we need to be out of our old place.  That creates a little bit of a predicament. 

When we left Kansas, it was easy because we knew we had to have everything packed up and ready to go because we were leaving the state.  We had a rental truck and had to pack everything into it the day before leaving.  There was a date in concrete of packing.  This time around, we don't have that.  We are going to be making trips back and forth with our vehicles.  Days off will just mean multiple trips, and that is just fine because we can take breaks, and will have all day.  When we moved from Kansas, we just wanted it to be over and done with. 

One problem is figuring out what we can live without for this two week overlap.  We have packed up non-essentials such as books, games and movies.  Winter clothes that were already in boxes are going to be making a trip early on as well.  We have a pantry full of shelf stable food, but we have to plan out meals and make sure we don't pack away something that we might want to eat during this span.  Looking at all the dishes we have, how many can we pack away and still function without primarily using paper plates?  Same goes for pots and pans, although we use them all so they might be hanging out here for a bit. 

And the other thing to consider is when do we stop living in our current place and start living in the new one?  When do we move all the furniture down there?  A week before our lease is up?  Or just a few days ahead of time?  One of the bad things about apartment living and moving is having to make the place look presentable to get the deposit back.  It's especially annoying because you know they are just going to come in and paint and replace the carpets, but you just have to do it to get that money back. 

52/120

House Hunting Hiatus

You know how you find something really big to focus on and that is all you can think about?  And when it turns out you can't have that really big thing and you go into a state of denial about not being able to have said really big thing?  That has happened.  And it revolves around home ownership.

We have been renting apartments since we were in college.  We are both sick of it.  This past January, my wife finally found a job after looking for a handful of years.  We finally had a second income and by the time our lease in our current apartment was up at the end of September, we thought we would have money for a house.  We started looking, passively, as we looked at our options.  We didn't want to get our hopes too high.  We started paying off more and more of our debt in an attempt to increase our credit scores.  I went to a first time home owners' seminar put on by our bank to get some information we might not have known or found via the internet.  We even found an area in the Twin Cities that we started to look at houses and even looked at a couple in person.  After we came to the decision that buying a house is what we wanted to do, we put in paperwork for a home mortgage pre-approval to see what price range we could look at.  We didn't want to fall in love with a house only to not afford it.  Then we got a phone call and the bottom fell out.

My wife's employer is considered a temp agency and therefore her income will not be considered when it comes to a home mortgage.  Even after talking with the loan officer about the fact that this wasn't a job that was going to be going away any time soon, some of my wife's co-workers have been employed by this temp agency at her current employer for the past five years, it was to no avail.  Some questions we have had to answer revolve around going to work directly for the employer she has her job at instead of working through the temp agency.  Here's the problem, the shifts that are available for this employer are either overnight (midnight to eight in the morning) type shifts or early morning (four in the morning to noon) type shifts.  The fact that she drives forty five minutes each way put those shifts out of the question.  So my wife has been looking for a job again, in the hopes of finding something permanent in the eyes of a loan officer.  It was very disheartening, or in the words of my dad 'fucking bullshit'.

We did find a new place to live, though.  So there's that positive note.  We will be moving into a townhouse at the end of September.  There are many positives to this move.  It cuts my wife's commute time in half while only adding about eight to ten miles of a commute for me.  There is way more space than we have now.  There is room for a grill (MGT will once again be a thing)!  We'll have a second bedroom for any visitors instead of a couch, air mattress, or hotel...as soon as we get a second bed. 

So we took a totally negative situation and turned it into a positive.  This will give us even more time to pay off debt.  We are getting ever so closer to paying off our college loans.  We will be able to stash away money for another year or two to put towards a down payment.  Whenever it is that we can buy a house.  Sure, it would be nice to be a homeowner and have a place to call our own, but thanks to the banks, sub-prime mortgages, and the housing bubble burst, we'll just have to stave off the American dream a few more years.        

48/120

A year later

We have been in Minnesota for a year today.  We packed up our stuff and made the move from Kansas in the hopes that the job market would be better.  There are other factors that were taken into consideration when we moved, but that was the big one.  As my wife is finding out, even though there are more jobs around here, it pays to know someone on the inside. 

While the job search continues we have found that living in such a larger city there is just so much more to do.  I'm not just talking about going to malls, games, or museums.  There are places to just go and walk around.  There are lots of streets in St. Paul and Minneapolis that are developed to be a place to just go around and walk and see.  Sure there are stores and restaurants, but sometimes it is fun to just walk around the area and people watch.  On top of the run of the mill stuff you will find in any larger city, there are tons of parks.  Free parks, which is great.  A place to get out and walk around and because it's not always one hundred degrees in the middle of summer, you can enjoy them while the weather is nice.

One of the greatest things about living up here is how close we are to home.  Since moving here last fall, we have made it home four times.  Living down in Wichita, we would make it home about two times a year.  So we have doubled the times we have been home.  It's just been so nice to get home, but we have put on quite the amount of mileage on the cars in the process.  On the other hand, we don't fly any more, so that is a great bonus.  Speaking of home, living in Minnesota is almost home.  We missed having trees and water and even green grass.

In the end, I don't really regret moving from Wichita to the Twin Cities.  The toughest part was leaving all of our friends and a place we were comfortable.  Part of the adventure of life is the unknown, and we are living that right now. 

One more move

Wednesday is going to feel like deja vu.  We have to pack up a U-Haul trailer and move the next day.  Feel like you've read this before?  I know it feels like I have typed this before.  We have been staying with my uncle until the first of September when we can finally move into our apartment. 

The two weeks we have been spending here have flown by and just when we get use to everything it's time to move.  The nice thing is that it is going to be a bit more permanent than the first move.  We signed our lease last week and got to do a walk through of a similar size apartment in comparison to the one we will be living in.  Going from a two bedroom, two bathroom apartment with a washer and a dryer to a one bed/one bath no washer or dryer is going to definitely be a change.  Not only are there less things like that, it is also about three hundred square feet smaller, but there are some benefits.  Like having a storage garage for all the tubs of shit holiday decorations we have.  There is also a nice big walk in pantry to make up for the lack of cupboards in the kitchen.    The biggest benefit though?  The amount of money we will save on rent.  The endgame is a house (whether it is renting or buying) in the near future. 

While apartments are nice because they require little upkeep, a house is a house.  It's the adult thing to do.  Once you get to a certain age, I think that it sounds a little funny to say that you live in an apartment.  As you start to get older and get more established the next step in life has always seemed to be house ownership.  And you can go from there and expand your family if you want via a pet or via the human pet (also known as a kid). 

I wrote about wanting a house earlier this year and I still want to live in one.  In the two weeks we have staying with my uncle, it has been nice to live somewhere that has stairs in it not going up to it.  It breaks everything up and separates everything.  Which is kind of why people who live in houses acquire more shit.  It all gets spread out and it looks like you have less than what you have.  Oh well. 





Wednesday.  The last part of our escape from the flat state of Kansas. 

Love and hate for Kansas (part two)

After writing why I enjoyed moving away from Kansas a few days ago, I figured I would follow it up with why I enjoyed living there. 

A stepping stone.  It was a good place to start our professional lives.  Out of college, we agreed to move to the first place that gave either of us a decent paying job.  As it turns out, it was Wichita, Kansas.  The major downside from the get go was the distance from home.  The furthest we had lived from home was in college and it was only a three hour drive.  To go from that to practically four states away was rough to start with, but it was part of growing up.  Wichita is big enough to get a big city feel, but still small enough where you didn't have to worry about a ton of traffic or too much urban sprawl.

Broader horizons.  We saw part of the country that we would not have ever seen.  And who would blame us?  Who wants to go on a vacation to see Kansas or Missouri when you have no family or friends to visit?  Because we lived down there, we visited Colorado to see my brother-in-law, took several trips to southwestern Missouri for float trips, hell Andrea went down to Oklahoma to go wedding dress shopping.  We got to see Texas first hand when we went down there for a birthday weekend to see the Red Wings play the Stars.  Nebraska was a stopping point for a weekend five years ago when I was playing vintage base ball (yes, it's two words when you play old school style).  So the southern mid-west was explored and would have remained just some crazy right wing states that we never went to if we never lived in Kansas.  Were they the greatest trips and vacations?  Not really.  They were mostly for a weekend and there was purpose to them, it was not to just go and relax.  But we got to do these trips with friends and that is what counts.

Our friends.  Wherever you go, you are always going to make friends.  When you leave, you must obviously leave these friends behind.  Sometimes, these friends keep in contact for a few years only to start drifting away to the recesses of your memories and stories.  Other times, they stick with you for the rest of your life.  I hope that our friends stick with us.  I know that it is a two way street with keeping in contact, and it is hard sometimes to really go that extra mile which is why things like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs are so helpful these days.  If we need a reason to go back to Kansas, that would be the only one, friends.  There is no point in visiting if you can't see the people that made the state worthwhile.  The nice thing about moving up to Minnesota, is that we already have some friends from high school that are here.  It's good to have that little base just in case it takes a while to settle in at work and find people that are worth hanging out with (that sounds snooty and pretentious but I'm sticking with it).  

 You know, I tried to balance the love and the hate out by coming up with equal numbers, but I can only think of three reasons why I enjoyed our time in Kansas.  I came up with four hates, although two of the four kind of go hand in hand.  But, such is life. 





And besides, I don't live there anymore so I don't have to worry about it. 

Love and hate for Kansas (part one)

We have officially left the state of Kansas and moved to Minnesota.  We are currently in between apartments while we wait for our new living quarters to open up.  My uncle was nice enough to put us up for a couple of weeks because we could not get a lease until 1 September.  In the mean time, we live in limbo with no address.  I told Andrea that this is our one chance to get off the grid and live a life away from the government.  She didn't go for it.

While we took the ten hours to drive up here, there was some time to look back at the six years that we lived in Kansas.  As always, there are pluses and minuses to anywhere you live.  There are a few places in this world where you can honestly say 'this is the perfect place to live for the rest of my life.'  Kansas was not one of those places for us.  However, there were some nice things about living there (look for that post in the near future).

Because I would like to end these entries on a positive note, lets take a look at some of the negative things about living in the Sunflower State. 

The hardest thing about living there was being so far away from family.  In college, we were just a three hour car ride from home.  A weekend trip was something that could be done very easily.  We left after class was done on Friday and had three full days at home.  Being in Kansas, we could only go home for vacations.  Having to work, we only made it home twice a year.  Maybe.  Our parents came down to see us a few times a year, so we got to see them and they got to see a state that they would have otherwise may not have ever seen.

The weather.  This summer has been extremely hot.  Hotter than usual.  About a month and a half (possibly more) of days over the one hundred degree mark.  That's too much, but we have grown accustom to having a few weeks of that kind of temperature, but a total of six weeks?  Way too much.  And then there is the winter, or lack thereof.  Growing up in the U.P., we are use to see two to three to four feet of snow in December and into January.  Kansas doesn't have that.  If there was two inches of snow on the ground at one time, it would be a good week.

And let's talk about the government.  When the governor states that he would sign any law that came across his desk that was anti-abortion, without even reading everything that was involved, you know there is something wrong.  The law could say that for every abortion that is stopped, a puppy gets punched in the face and he would pass it.  You can be pro-choice or pro-life, I don't care, but the minute you put out a blanket statement like that, there is something wrong with you.  It is all about pushing his agenda and not what is best for the people in the state.  This is also the governor who went down to Texas for Rick Perry's day of prayer.  Nothing like separating church and state...

Speaking of church, the religious nut jobs that are in Kansas pushed me further and further away from the First Estate.  I found some great people and friends that are quiet religious and they were not beating people over the heads with their bibles and religious beliefs and those are the kinds of religious people that I enjoy.  People I can have a discussion with.  However, those people are few and far between.  The state is populated with religious extremists.  I'm not talking about Islamic extremists that Fox News is trying to scare you with, I'm talking about the Christian extremists.  They are out there.  Case in point:  Westboro Baptist Church.  There is nothing good about them.  They are the worst people in the world.  Not all the religious people in Kansas are as bad as the WBC, but oh do they love to judge those of us who do not share their same views.  I know that any state you go to is going to have these people, but in Kansas, they just seemed to be concentrated. 

Quiet month

Looking back at the month which is almost done, I haven't been writing too much.  I have been on vacation for the past two weeks which has taken up most of my time, which is great.  It's been relaxing.  I really don't care that there haven't been many writings.

Even if I hadn't gone on vacation, I don't really think I would have a ton to write about.  The government is falling apart, which is cool with me, they need a slap in the face from reality.  They need to get all their shit together and just realize that taxes need to be raised on the upper class to help out the budget.  Even if they don't want to give up their million dollar homes, their coke addictions, and their thousand dollar an hour hookers, they need to think of what is best for the people.  The people that they are suppose to represent.

The greatest news for this month is that we are going to be moving in August!  Moving to a suburb outside of Minneapolis.  Partly for my work, partly so Andrea can find a job.  Bigger city, closer to home, and in weather that we grew up in.  Gone are the winters with two inches of snow, gone are the months of too much heat, gone are the obnoxiously loud and overt Republicans who hate women and the working force.  It's exciting and very stressful.  We have been packing up our apartment for the past few months in the event that this situation happens.  It has, so we are a little ahead of the game, but there is still a little bit to be done down in Wichita.  I start up in Minnesota in a month and once again, it'll be nice to get some place new and start anew.

College and movies

Listening to Best of the Left podcast.  Liberals so far left, they are almost right.

As A and I were watching an episode of Gilmore Girls (yeah, what of it?)  the daughter was going away to college.  It was all sentimental and emotional and blah blah blah.  As the episode played out, I tried to recall my going away to college.  I don't remember it be a huge deal.  I'm sure that my mom cried as they drove home.  Come on, her baby went away to college, how could she not?  I don't recall having a fear come over me.  I just started unpacking and meeting some people.  Not too exciting.  Anyway, the episode was almost cliched, but it was subtle, which is what I like about that show.  Looking back at moments in that show, you see things that happen because it is a show.  Plus the humor is extremely smart.  You really need to pay attention to the jokes.  

The other thing I want to tackle is movie endings.  Particularly the happy ones.  The good guys always win and the bad guys get theirs in the end.  Why is that?  I know that there are the movies where the bad guys get away and people get a bit disappointed.  Take, for example, the Blair Witch Project.  Hands down the best ending for a movie in the past fifteen years that I have seen.  To see that guy stand in the corner and the camera falls, classic.  I have two movies that would have been so much better had the ending been different.  And this is just for the sake of the bad guys out there.  For the pessimists who want to see the good guys fail.  You are welcome

First movie:  Star Wars:  A New Hope

Plain and simple, Luke misses his shot to blow up the Death Star, Vader shoots him down and the rebel cause is bitched slapped into oblivion.  The ultimate bad guys win, flying away laughing.  

People are probably screaming at me through cyber space, but think about it.  The hope was there to save galactic democracy and in one instant, gone.  Wow, it would leave a movie theatre silent.  

Second movie:  The Matrix

As opposed to Neo being brought back to life by Trinity (and it was at that point that the movies started their decline into crap) and him 'killing' Agent Smith, he stays dead, the Agents walk away, and the sentinels destroy Morphious and Trinity and the movie ends.  

End the movie that way and the other two (plus the Animatrix) don't get made and people don't get pissed about it.  But once again, it is the system beating down a group trying to stand up against them.  It would make for great cinema.  

With those two endings, ten movies get trimmed down to two.