Greetings all, I just wanted to update this site with the latest on what’s going on in my life. I know that it’s been a while since I sat down to do a full update, but life has been fairly hectic the last couple of weeks. So hectic that even when I have time to write I’m not in the right mindset to do anything productive like updating this blog.
Since my last update I have actually made the move to Nebraska City in the southeast corner of Nebraska. I won’t go into the details on how much I like it here except to say that it looks and feels like the perfect small town in middle America. It really is beautiful. The town is small, I think I read somewhere that the population is about 9,000.
Last Saturday my Brother drove down from Portland, Oregon to drive me up to NC. It was so nice of him to do that, and it really made the move so much easier for me. Instead of taking more than 24 hours to go by bus, or even an estimated 12 hours to do a combination of flights and taxis, we made the trip in about 14 hours. Not bad considering how much nicer it was to not have to sit and wait for the plane to leave, or layovers for the next bus.
We got to the apartment building at about 5pm and moved my stuff into my apartment. The apartment is okay, kind of mid-seventies style, but it works for now. One of my major concerns was just finding a place to live and this works well for that. In a year or so I’ll probably start looking around for something that fits me a little better.
I spent most of this week walking to Walmart at least once a day, sometimes a couple of trips a day. Mostly for groceries and the basics of outfitting an apartment. It’s not that far, Google maps lists it at 1.6 miles away which seems about right. It may not be that far, but with the hills in the city my calves are aching at the end of the day.
I bought a car on Wednesday. Technically getting a vehicle has seemed the most daunting to me. I won’t lie, there have been a least a few times where I just wanted to give up on the whole process.
The school I’ll be working at is about 20 miles away, so a car is a necessity. There is no way around this, I have to have a car to function in my new position. The problem is that my last license expired in November of last year. So I need to get a new one except I haven’t had a permanent residence to prove I live in the state.
The whole process is like a Möbius strip that there doesn’t seem a place to get off of it once you get stuck inside. In order to get a license, I need a car. I can’t technically drive a car without insurance, and I can’t get insurance without a license. The only break in this ‘chain’ is that I could get insurance as a non-driver. I paid for that with a premium that was probably double what I’d pay otherwise, but at least I was able to get it. So although I stressed over everything for quite a while, I now have a car and insurance. On Monday, I expect to have a license too. So although it may be premature right now, it appears that everything will work out.
Oh, and the car I bought was an old Ford Explorer. I made the mistake of assuming that there would be a branch of my bank here, but I found out that it closed a couple of years ago. The nearest was about 60 miles away. There isn’t really a problem with that if I am doing purchases that I can use a debit card or cash that I can get out of an ATM, but when purchasing a car, you need cash, lots of it and I couldn’t seem to figure out a way to get my money here fast enough to buy a vehicle from a private party. I bit the bullet and went with a used car place, for the reason I could wire the money to them.
The car is a 2002 Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer. It’s okay, not something that I will keep long term, but it should get me back and forth from the school. Maybe next summer I can buy something more to my liking.
Anyway, I went into more details that I thought I would on this posting and I don’t know how much I’ll leave up. There’s a good chance I’ll go back in and edit it or delete things that seem to private for the blog. For now though, that’s my life in 500 words.
