What's been happening in my world:
- My husband, Jason, flew to California in August. He stayed with a friend (thanks Ray!) on his couch and worked from the California branch of his company while he looked for a job in the 3d industry.
- We were apart for two months, but he flew back for a few days so he could be a groomsman in a wedding.
- He landed what can only be described as his dream job. Yay for employment in 3d!
- We were apart for almost two more months until he flew back for our first road trip across the country!
- We have two dogs, Bailey and Suzie. Bailey loves car rides and he is just as happy as can be riding in the backseat. Suzie, however, gets violently car sick, so we had medicine from the vet which we administered every five hours, like clockwork.
- We drove from Illinois to California, so we went through Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Unfortunately, we drove through some of the states at night, so I only have pictures of part of our journey.
- Jason had a cold during our trip. If you know my husband, you know he's a talker. A road trip is a great opportunity for conversations and it also helps pass the time. Guess who barely had a voice? It hurt his throat to speak, so we mostly listened to music.
- As we started nearing Los Angeles, we ran into rush hour plus Thanksgiving Day traffic. I was terrified, and instead of one hand on the "'Oh $#!+' handle", I was actually clutching both hands on it at one point, in attempts to stave sheer panic. Jason did a great job driving, but the speed and the number of cars weaving in and out of lanes was quite overwhelming.
- We arrived in Long Beach on Thanksgiving. Trying to get ANY sort of food on Thanksgiving was darn near impossible! Thankfully, a single Domino's was open, so we had cheese and mushroom pizza as our Thanksgiving feast.
- While driving, I was compiling a list of possible homes for us, because right now, I can officially say that we are homeless. What I've learned from our adventure so far? Trying to find nice, affordable housing is easier than finding a needle in a haystack... but not by much. We did find a few houses within our price range, and had two tours yesterday. We really liked the last house we saw, and filled out an application.
- Having minimal credit has proved to be a hindrance for us. The house we like is within the realm of possibility, but it will cost a lot of money up front. I think we can pull it off, but the upcoming weeks are going to be extremely tight. This means that all of our belongings, which are in a storage unit in Illinois, won't be delivered to us for awhile. All we have with us are the clothes on our backs, some extras in our suitcases, the dogs, the dog kennels, and a sweater that I've been knitting.
- Speaking of clothes, I used the hotel's washer and dryer this evening. We had about four days worth of dirty clothes, so I hauled everything to the hotel's laundry room. Thanks to my mom, I had some dryer sheets and a few of the laundry detergent pods, which is great, because they didn't have any supplies to buy. There were two washers and two dryers. Dryer 1 ended up not working, and all of our clothes were still wet and cold. Dryer 2 worked fine, so I put the still wet clothes in for a tumble. Jason and I switched off, so he sat with the clothes while I came back to our room. He comes back almost an hour later with only part of our clothes. The rest were at the front desk, where he had been talking to the hotel employees. Apparently, the clothes had been burned in the dryer. Every piece of clothing has little scorch marks and a quick sniff proved that the spots were actually burns. The manager will not be back until Monday, so we're not sure what's going to happen. This would not be that big of a deal, except we only have a small amount of clothing to wear until our belongings get here (in a month, maybe two?) and Jason starts his new job on Monday.
I am excited about all of changes and adventures we've been having, but some have been better than others. I really hope we get the house we want. I'll take some burned clothes if we are able to get that house!
I plan on uploading some pictures within the next few days. Oh, what a journey this has been!
