I’ve officially lived in Illinois for about 11 days, now. I’ve had plenty of time to get all the computers set up and happy… as well as my TV, speakers, DVD player and Wii. It’s nice to live with a bunch of people again, getting to learn their schedules and habits and such. I feel at home already. Still have those loose ends hanging around… local bank account, switching driver’s license, insurance, car ownership, whatever address change requests I forgot, etc. Life is pretty damn good, though.
I’m also officially a bum, and so is Sarah. So we get to spend oodles and oodles of time around each other, which is fun. Threadless laid her off… right after the sale ended, though they kept her through the holiday party and such, so we got a bunch of cool free shwag and a good time out of them before she left. We haven’t figured out their reasoning, they said she did nothing wrong, but they still had the temps on for a couple weeks after she left. My best theory is that it has something to do with their new VC partners, but we haven’t heard about any other lay-offs of part-time people, so there’s no real answer.
Anyway, that leaves us both as jobless bums. Sarah’s knitting a lot, though mostly gifts at this point, but there’s still some interest in trying to make a living out of it… we have to find some sort of small project that’s the cash cow to support the big projects, though. perhaps some other simple craft.
Meanwhile, I need to start getting in touch with all those prospects I made initial contact with around Thanksgiving, to see what the actual job possibilities are. Most of them had the same message back in November: call us next year. Well, it’s next year… so I gotta start getting on that. Otherwise, I’ll have to take some weird job in retail or something.
Speaking of retail, there’s a buttload of it out here. I don’t understand it. The population density is about the same out here as it was in New England, but there’s retail as far as the eye can see here… and it seems like retail struggled to stay open back east. I haven’t seen an empty abandoned strip mall, yet. I do have a new favorite store, Meijer. It’s like Wal-Mart or a Target… of the super variety (full grocery and department store)… but it seems somehow less evil. And they carry Apple Soda and Matt’s Real Cookies, my favorites. And they’re right down the street; everything is right down the street. Driving ten miles to a store is a foreign concept to Sarah’s family. The only things within ten miles of my place in Woonsocket, was the Bargain Outlet, Box Seats, a White Hen, Ye Olde Fish & Chips and a few Dunkin Donuts (which are seriously lacking, or perhaps in a more reasonable abundance, out here) … and about 10,000 triple decker apartment buildings full of people who don’t shop retail as much as people in the midwest do, apparently. I guess the East Coast megalopolis is just spread a little too thin or something.
I miss the east coast a bit, obviously I miss Mom and some other people, but life out here is good. I’m getting used to the differences in the landscape and the commerce and such. It doesn’t seem like anything here is any worse than out there, just different. I guess I missed out on a lot of goodbyes during the weekend that Sarah was out visiting. I spent some time in Dudley and made a final daytrip to NYC, which was a lot of fun, but sort preempted any trips to Worcester or Amherst or Northampton. Now that I’m here, it doesn’t seem like much of a loss, though.
So, what do you think? Got any employment opportunities I should check out, or know of some hidden talent I have that I could live on like Odd Todd? Lemme know how you all are, too.
I’ll have to wait until my contract with Verizon is up to try out that thing. I got the LG enV, since most of my phone activity has been text messages. I also used a cool program and a cable to load up some ringtones and such. They sound way better than they did on the old phone. I definitely like it, it’s a big step up from what I had before, don’t really want to go back to T9 for texting ever again… though I do a whole lot less texting, now that I live with Sarah. I’m sure it’ll pick up when we have jobs.
