Weekend Recap
Thursday night I flew out to Phoenix for the weekend. When my plane landed a little after 10PM, the pilot told us it was 103 degrees outside. Walking out of the terminal, a blast of scorching air hit me like a giant blowdryer.
We had a single task this weekend: to finish moving all of our belongings out of our apartment and into a friend's second bedroom. Luckily she lives in the same complex, so the distance is short, but in 110+ degree heat and direct sun, you break a sweat just breathing. Ladan had moved the majority of our stuff already, over the course of a few weeks, and she'd sold most of our furniture. That made us the most lean-and-mean we've ever been, in terms of material possessions. Thursday night I wanted to take advantage of the sun being down and so I jumped right into it, moving a carload of heavy boxes of mostly books from 1-2AM.
Friday we continued moving things, and by Saturday morning we'd finished ... the moving part. We still had to clean the whole apartment - again, Ladan had done a lot of this already - and then dig our friend's apartment out of the bombardment of boxes that we'd dropped on it over the past two days. Luckily she was out of town for the weekend so we had no real need to organize as we dropped things off. But that meant that by Saturday evening, we had a whole lot of cleaning up to do.
By Sunday afternoon, the job was done. It got up to 115 on Saturday, and oh man is that hot. You start to appreciate ice-cold drinks like you've never done before. I was constantly chugging sodas and water.
So the move's done and as I've said in the past, it's a very strange to feeling to end a chapter in our lives that never really started: Ladan lived there for a year without me, and our original plan to both move to Arizona never materialized. Over the course of my many trips out there, the area has grown on me and I feel truly relaxed while there. I think we could have been happy there, at least for a few years. Even though the middle of the summer is unbearable, the rest of the year makes up for it.
But in the end, Phoenix just doesn't have what we want: a real city, real culture, and new career opportunities for both of us. That's why DC is so appealing. Frustratingly, though, most of our friends have moved out of the DC area and closer to the west coast, so this move will push us further away from them. And I'm still dreading the cold weather after being spoiled by so much sun the past two years.
I still feel like it's the right thing to do, though. I'm increasingly wary of being comfortable to the point of becoming lazy, in terms of changing careers, and that's not good. I don't want to live in DC forever, and heck the Japan trip again proved to me that I don't even want to live in the US forever, but for now, I think we need to do this.
We had a single task this weekend: to finish moving all of our belongings out of our apartment and into a friend's second bedroom. Luckily she lives in the same complex, so the distance is short, but in 110+ degree heat and direct sun, you break a sweat just breathing. Ladan had moved the majority of our stuff already, over the course of a few weeks, and she'd sold most of our furniture. That made us the most lean-and-mean we've ever been, in terms of material possessions. Thursday night I wanted to take advantage of the sun being down and so I jumped right into it, moving a carload of heavy boxes of mostly books from 1-2AM.
Friday we continued moving things, and by Saturday morning we'd finished ... the moving part. We still had to clean the whole apartment - again, Ladan had done a lot of this already - and then dig our friend's apartment out of the bombardment of boxes that we'd dropped on it over the past two days. Luckily she was out of town for the weekend so we had no real need to organize as we dropped things off. But that meant that by Saturday evening, we had a whole lot of cleaning up to do.
By Sunday afternoon, the job was done. It got up to 115 on Saturday, and oh man is that hot. You start to appreciate ice-cold drinks like you've never done before. I was constantly chugging sodas and water.
So the move's done and as I've said in the past, it's a very strange to feeling to end a chapter in our lives that never really started: Ladan lived there for a year without me, and our original plan to both move to Arizona never materialized. Over the course of my many trips out there, the area has grown on me and I feel truly relaxed while there. I think we could have been happy there, at least for a few years. Even though the middle of the summer is unbearable, the rest of the year makes up for it.
But in the end, Phoenix just doesn't have what we want: a real city, real culture, and new career opportunities for both of us. That's why DC is so appealing. Frustratingly, though, most of our friends have moved out of the DC area and closer to the west coast, so this move will push us further away from them. And I'm still dreading the cold weather after being spoiled by so much sun the past two years.
I still feel like it's the right thing to do, though. I'm increasingly wary of being comfortable to the point of becoming lazy, in terms of changing careers, and that's not good. I don't want to live in DC forever, and heck the Japan trip again proved to me that I don't even want to live in the US forever, but for now, I think we need to do this.
posted by GregP at 7:14 PM
2 Comments:
So when's the actual move gonna happen? Do you guys have jobs lined up?
I'm quickly approaching the point where I give up on trying to find non-defense jobs; all my searching has yielded pretty much nothing on that front.
I've applied for a handful of defense jobs, but since they're all within the same community of people and companies that I already know, the progress there will be partly controlled by how hard I push on them. As of now, I haven't pushed very hard. But I think within the next 2-3 weeks I will be.
We've got this [crazy?] idea of taking 2-3 months off before starting to work, say, mid-August to mid-October, and doing a lot of traveling. We'd like to attend a friend's wedding in Iran at the end of August and a cousin's wedding in London in early September, so if we could get to DC and settle in by mid-August, that would be ideal.
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