Long Overdue Post: My Move
For those of you who don't know, I moved to Boston last month. It was somewhat of a last minute decision as I had a great opportunity open up. In short, B unexpectedly had a room in his place open up, and he invited me to take it! Once I said yes (and recovered from a horrid cold that hit me that same week), everything just seemed to fall right into place. My move went more smoothly than I ever could have asked for.
I spent all May packing and sorting out things to sell or give away. xcalamity_janex helped me out a ton by donating all her boxes to me as she unpacked at her new place.
Then my friend Dave, who'd just graduated in May, had some free time and offered to drive my car behind my moving truck so that I only needed to make one trip instead of two! Super awesome of him! On top of that, ashoemaker found a fantastic deal online for one-way plane tickets from Boston to Roanoke, so Dave had a reasonably cheap way to get back home.
Once I had the truck, I asked for help from friends to load it, and they amazed me with their mad puzzle skills. In about 1.5 hours, my entire house had been loaded into the 10' truck. And this included a moment of panic where they told me that not everything was going to fit! Gotta love the deceptiveness of good puzzles.
And for those of you who are reading this who helped that day - Thank You yet again! You guys were awesome.
After cleaning the apartment, I did dinner at Gillie's Restaurant with my gang one last time and crashed at aliencrabcakes' place that night. She did a good job of tempting me to stay by waking me up the next morning with homemade waffles and strawberry sauce - made with strawberries right out of her garden. Yum! But I resisted, ran my last few errands and then picked up Dave where we grabbed lunch at She-sha's before hitting the road.
We stopped the first night in Pennsylvania to crash at my friend Wendy's house. It was just a little less than halfway to Boston and the timing couldn't have been better. Just as we reached her house, the rain had become too heavy to keep driving in even had we wanted to keep going. It was great getting to visit Wendy and meet her husband & daughter. Julia is about 3 and she had a blast showing off for her visitors. I was awarded a scribble drawing from her coloring book that she made sure I knew she used the BLACK crayon to do it. ;D
Dave & I headed out the next morning and either saw only light rain or none for the rest of our drive. The challenges were more in the floods of traffic as we got close to the larger cities. We took I-81 up to I-84 and then over to I-90 into Boston so that we could skip over NJ and NYC, but we still couldn't avoid the traffic once we were in NY and CT. But somehow, we managed to mostly stay together the entire drive - quite an accomplishment! And I only scared him badly once when I changed lanes suddenly trying to get the correct exit in the poorly marked tunnels just as we got into Boston.
We rolled into B's driveway about 8p, May 29, and went out for Indian after peeking into the back of the truck to see if anything had shifted too insanely. All was well, so we left unloading until Saturday morning when we learned some rain had obviously leaked in at one corner, but most of what got wet was washable, so no big deal there. Once we finished and had returned the truck, we were able to grab sandwhiches in Davis Square before taking Dave to the airport.
Now I'm just doing the job search thing, and it seems to be going much better now that I'm here in the city than when I was trying to hunt from Blacksburg. I've had a chance to hit a couple of job fairs, talk to some recruiters, start a bit of networking and even have a couple of pre-screening appointments set up for early next week. And, of course, more than just moving & job hunting has gone on since I've been here, but that will need to wait for another post.
I spent all May packing and sorting out things to sell or give away. xcalamity_janex helped me out a ton by donating all her boxes to me as she unpacked at her new place.
Then my friend Dave, who'd just graduated in May, had some free time and offered to drive my car behind my moving truck so that I only needed to make one trip instead of two! Super awesome of him! On top of that, ashoemaker found a fantastic deal online for one-way plane tickets from Boston to Roanoke, so Dave had a reasonably cheap way to get back home.
Once I had the truck, I asked for help from friends to load it, and they amazed me with their mad puzzle skills. In about 1.5 hours, my entire house had been loaded into the 10' truck. And this included a moment of panic where they told me that not everything was going to fit! Gotta love the deceptiveness of good puzzles.
And for those of you who are reading this who helped that day - Thank You yet again! You guys were awesome.
After cleaning the apartment, I did dinner at Gillie's Restaurant with my gang one last time and crashed at aliencrabcakes' place that night. She did a good job of tempting me to stay by waking me up the next morning with homemade waffles and strawberry sauce - made with strawberries right out of her garden. Yum! But I resisted, ran my last few errands and then picked up Dave where we grabbed lunch at She-sha's before hitting the road.
We stopped the first night in Pennsylvania to crash at my friend Wendy's house. It was just a little less than halfway to Boston and the timing couldn't have been better. Just as we reached her house, the rain had become too heavy to keep driving in even had we wanted to keep going. It was great getting to visit Wendy and meet her husband & daughter. Julia is about 3 and she had a blast showing off for her visitors. I was awarded a scribble drawing from her coloring book that she made sure I knew she used the BLACK crayon to do it. ;D
Dave & I headed out the next morning and either saw only light rain or none for the rest of our drive. The challenges were more in the floods of traffic as we got close to the larger cities. We took I-81 up to I-84 and then over to I-90 into Boston so that we could skip over NJ and NYC, but we still couldn't avoid the traffic once we were in NY and CT. But somehow, we managed to mostly stay together the entire drive - quite an accomplishment! And I only scared him badly once when I changed lanes suddenly trying to get the correct exit in the poorly marked tunnels just as we got into Boston.
We rolled into B's driveway about 8p, May 29, and went out for Indian after peeking into the back of the truck to see if anything had shifted too insanely. All was well, so we left unloading until Saturday morning when we learned some rain had obviously leaked in at one corner, but most of what got wet was washable, so no big deal there. Once we finished and had returned the truck, we were able to grab sandwhiches in Davis Square before taking Dave to the airport.
Now I'm just doing the job search thing, and it seems to be going much better now that I'm here in the city than when I was trying to hunt from Blacksburg. I've had a chance to hit a couple of job fairs, talk to some recruiters, start a bit of networking and even have a couple of pre-screening appointments set up for early next week. And, of course, more than just moving & job hunting has gone on since I've been here, but that will need to wait for another post.