You may or may not have noticed, but I don’t live in California anymore. You may or may not have noticed, but I’ve been kinda busy, mostly because I got a new job and moved. I got most of my stuff packed up in boxes and stacked out in the garage before KrisDi and her parental units came out to help me. Then we were able to load the truck in two hours. The crappiest part was definitely cleaning. Man, I hate scrubbing glass. But, it paid off, since our landlord decided to give the entire deposit back (after he told us he was going to keep some). He wrote a little note saying, “Thanks for taking such great care of the house and for being good tenants.” So that was nice.
Then we started driving. Same drive as before, bigger truck. And a car that KrisDi can’t drive, so I drove it the whole way, and Papa Dubs drove the U-Haul the whole way. The W-Chicas were just there to look good and make decisions (which they did with aplomb). Unfortunately, Papa Dubs took a big bite out of the ‘skirt’ of the U-Haul when he hit a guard post thing at a gas station. The damage was free to me, because I got the silly insurance that covered any damage to the truck. Plus MEI payed for everything anyway.
KrisDi and I got a garage parking spot at our apartment complex in order to store all our stuff. It’s wired for 115VAC, so maybe I’ll plug in our fridge to use for beer…who knows. We can use it for emergency overflow storage, especially for things like the Trainer T-Day I plan to have on Sunday, 3 June. I’m going to cook all the regular T-Day stuff and make KrisDi teach me how to do it. We’re going to have people come and eat the food. I hope they leave me some leftovers. Mom might even teach me how to make her crazy fruit salad thing.
We already had folks over for food. It was a good plan. KrisDi made chile rellenos (and I helped!), which was a lot of work and incredibly tasty. We also had tacos using the frozen leftover tri-tip from the enchiladas she made months ago. It was awesome. Mr. and Mrs. Pope claimed to have liked it. Plus I got to drink scotch and bourbon with the Pope, and watch E-Dubs get stressed out over the nonsense game Apples to Apples. And we went and saw the White Sox at the Mariners, which they lost. It was fun to go (and the ballpark actually had beer I hadn’t even heard of), but it’s a shame they lost.
Oh, and we have a moochy duck. We named her LaFawnduck (after LaFawnduh). She nested in a basket hanging from our porch (left there by a previous occupant). She spends basically the whole day there, except a few hours in the evening (maybe she works a ‘night job’).
We’ve already started looking at houses. Our lease is up sometime around November, so we have some time, and the longer we wait, the bigger the down payment we can afford. It’s nice to be debt free and gainfully employed. I’ve heard that it’s better to look for houses after the school year starts, since most people want to move beforehand so their kids can get into the new area’s school.
So, now I work at Micro Encoder, Inc, which is nice so far (except for the drive — 25 miles can become a 60 minute drive if I leave at the wrong time). They’ve already given me a computer (with two monitors! I didn’t think I’d ever get two monitors at work! And all I had to do was ask! No forms or authorizations or hullaballoo, just, “Oh, you want a second monitor? Hold on a bit, we gotta go buy one for you.”). Anyway, I’m a test engineer, as I think I mentioned before, and I test QVPAK, the software for Mitutoyo’s QuickVision line of products.
KrisDi and I went to visit Ma last weekend. We rented a van so we could bring my old TV to her. Now she has a 32″ TV. Which is heavy as all hell. We also went to Best Buy and picked up a Yamaha surround sound home theater system to hook up to it, and laboriously put everything together. Mom will certainly raise hell if I don’t immediately fess up to having forgotten to connect a few wires.
We also went to Vancouver so we could go to Doolin’s so we could try Caffrey’s Irish Cream Ale. That is one tasty beer. Unfortunately, Coors won’t sell it in the US because they want to keep Killian’s Irish Red (not a bad beer, but certainly not as good as Caffrey’s) as the premier Irish beer in the US. Retards.
That’s what’s going on right now.