Labor Day Weekend, 2009

I work a 4-day workweek, so I had last Friday off. Since we were going to be closing on our house here this week, we needed to go get our appliances out of my wife's house in "T or C" New Mexico, so we reserved a trailer down there, borrowed my father-in-law's truck with a towing hitch and headed on down. I-15 to Route 6 to I-70 to 191 to 491 to 64 to 550 to I-25.

You may notice that of the 700 mile trip, only about 200 of it is on the interstate. Still and all, the other roads are mostly in good repair and mostly have 65 or 70 mph speed limits, so overall it's about a 12 hour trip. If it was all on an interstate it'd probably be closer to 10, but... such is life.

Anyway, we made it there about 7pm and stopped off at our friend's house who we were staying with. took her and her husband out to La Cocina restaurant as an early thank you for letting us stay with them. Yeah, we have a house there but we stayed with friends. But that's becuz the house has renters and no spare beds or anything like that. It works out.

Saturday was bright and clear but never got much over 85 degrees, so it was quite pleasant. We got the trailer and headed for the house. The renters were actually house-sitting elsewhere, so we let ourselves in and got our washer and dryer and a few other things out and loaded inot the trailer. It took less than an hour. We looked through and figured what we'd need to look at fixing in order to have the house be saleable, and then.... back to our friends house, unhitched the trailer so we wouldn't be dragging it around the rest of the day or on Sunday, and then we took a nap. Yeah, we're boring, but we were also in BFE, NM. So sue us!

Did dinner at a local steakhouse that was pretty decent. A bit pricey, but not terrible. Visted with our friends in the evening, read a bit, and called it a night. Sunday was church where my wife got to visit a bunch of friends she hadn't seen since she moved out last year. She enjoyed the reunion and had lots of fun catching up with "everyone." Met in the afternoon with a real estate agent and walked through the house again. He gave us some names of contractors who can fix the roof, carpet the place, and repaint it. Then we went to his office and signed everything we needed to in order to hire him as our listing agent and put the house on the market come October 1 after the renters have moved out and we've had a chance to make the place look better.

Visited a few more of my wife's friends in the evening, thne back to where we were staying. Our friends there had made a lovely bbq chicken dinner for us all, so we enjoyed that. Visited for a while after, thought about watching a video, but decided that since we'd be pulling a trailer on the return trip the next day that going to bed early was a good idea. So we did.

Trip back was surprisingly quick, though. Once I got used to how the truck handled with the trailer I was able to more or less go the speed I normally would. A bit slower, but not much. took about 13 hours to get back, but we stopped in Moab for a half hour for dinner, so it was really only about 12.5 hours driving, even with the trailer. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Got back, dropped the truck and trailer off at the in-laws, picked up our dog and our car and headed home (only 10 minutes away from there).

Long day, and we were glad to be home. And my AWU 5 was set to complete in about 3 hours, so I logged in to EVE and queued up my next skill. Only took 26 days for AWU 5. About 6 for Caldari BS 4, then 34 more for Caldari BS5 and I'll be in my Golem. PLus I'll have a path paved for capital ships too, though it's gonna be a very long time before I think of training them.

We closed on our house up here yesterday, so tonight we start moving in -- drop the appliances and such in there tonight after work, then go return the trailer to Uhaul. the rest of the stuff we've got fits into a pickup easily enough (3 trips, but nothing's big) so we'll be doing that this weekend. Got the "vital" utilities set up, but still need to order cable. More for the internet than for TV, but the fall season's about to start, so it will be good to be able to watch Chuck, if nothing else.

In other news, we found out today that my company's contract is not being renewed so as of 9-30-09 I need to find new work. Rather... I need to find new work now so that once this current job ends I can move right on over. This is actually rather expected and I've been looking around for the past month or so, but anything I've seen so far has been in the neighborhood of 30-40% lower pay to start. There's a possibility that the new contract company will hire me, but even if they do it will still be about a 12% pay cut. Not really nice, but survivable, if it comes to that. Time will tell if the new company will hire me across, though. We shall see. I'll be more actively looking elsewhere too, though, and a friend of mine is a headhunter for my field so I'll see if I can enlist her services as well.

A bit unsettling, but .... life is change, right?