Another post? It's only been two days!! Who knew?!

Sooooooo, we signed the lease on the house. YIPPEEEE!!! I’m so pleased – it’s a really good house. I went yesterday and walked around in it and took pictures of the inside. It’s kind of old, but it’s got so much character… I can’t wait for our stuff to be in it. I’m so ready to have our own place again! And this place is going to be great. It’s going to be so nice to have a house, instead of an apartment, to live in. I’m so looking forward to NOT BEING STUCK IN A HUMAN FILING CABINET. That, and if we want to have friends over and be a little loud, we don’t have to worry about upstairs or downstairs neighbors. The neighborhood that this place is in is very quiet, though, so if we do have friends over (like for a party or something) we’ll have to remind them to keep it down when they’re outside. Which won’t be a problem, I’m sure.

51 days and counting… *sigh*

Dad’s birthday was good. We went to the Japanese restaurant, and then we came home and made home-made Oreo ice cream and gave him presents. I got him a DVD called “Lightning in a Bottle” which is an on-stage performance of the history of the blues played by a lot of different blues legends – B.B. King, Robert Cray, etc. He just got a new car with a killer stereo system and DVD player, so I think he’s gonna “watch” it on one of his long trips for work, which is just what I intended. He liked it a lot.

Has anyone seen the new movie “Stardust”? I think Erin and I are going to go see it this weekend (if we have time). A friend of mine went to see it and he said that it was REALLY good. It’s supposed to be in the same vein as The Princess Bride, Willow, Legend, Labyrinth, etc. I’m looking forward to it. I haven’t seen any really good movies lately, with the exception of Harry 5. I went to see 1408 last month, and the Simpsons movie. But true cinematic excellence has escaped me for a while. Hopefully this’ll be as good as my friend says it is. I’m a film enthusiast in any genre, so movies get me excited. I just wish that there was an artsy movie theater somewhere close so we could go see a really good one every now and again. There was a theater in Indy that I know I’m going to miss – the Landmark. It was an art cinema theater… there’s nothing like that around here. You’d have to drive to Atlanta to see anything like that… grr… and honestly, Greenville’s becoming enough of a frou-frou sort of town that I think a theater like that would do reasonably well. You’d have to put it downtown, of course. Why doesn’t Asheville have a theater like that?? Asheville’s only 45 minutes away…

Enough lamenting. I should get back to work…

~Becky

Houses and Moving and Cats... oh my!

Greetings programs!! (TRON reference, heh)

I’ve had a request from one of my faithful readers to update, so here it is. Thanks for the email, DNR – you made me feel missed, and special. :-D

First, the good news… WE FOUND A HOUSE!! Yippeeee!!! It’s a rental, and it’s perfect – it’s in the Augusta Road area of Greenville, which is nice but not too expensive (but that may change in a few years). It really kind of reminds me of a little English cottage. It’s incredibly cute – I may post some pictures soon. It’s two stories, with a little deck in the back and flower boxes under most of the windows. There is a green ivy pattern stenciled in paint on the mailbox, on the door to the storage shed behind the house, and the slats going around the sides of the deck. Inside, it’s kind of old, but it has LOTS of character. Hardwood floors, a fireplace, a teeny little kitchen and a breakfast nook. Upstairs, there’s a bedroom under the eaves, two dormer windows with window seats, and a tiny little room that’s going to be my office (you know where I might write something once in a while). The rent is a little less than what we were paying for the apartment in Indy, which is nice. And a washer and dryer are included in the cost of the rent.

The only drawback to the house is that we can’t move in until October 1st – the current residents won’t be out until the week before then, and the landlord wants to fix some things up before we get in there. It’s not a big deal so much, because we have places to stay and a place to put all our stuff that’s free. Also, Normandy’s mom has agreed to take care of our cats for the month. But still, I’M SO READY TO GET IN THERE!! 53 days and counting…

So, aside from that, things are going pretty much the same down here. The job is going well, though they STILL haven’t decided exactly where to put me yet. I’ve been helping out where it’s needed, but I still don’t have my own customers or responsibilities. However, I’ve stopped lamenting it so much, as I’ve realized that I should just enjoy this time where I’m kind of floating around, doing whatever, not shitting bricks and stressed to the eyeballs because I have five billion things to do and none of them are done yet. This has probably changed because an end to my non-assigned status is in sight – a person is transferring into the department to help, and when she comes we’ll probably both be given assigned responsibilities. Which is good.

Erin’s coming down next weekend. Her school starts the 20th, so she has to come down before we move all our stuff from Indy (on Labor Day weekend). It’ll be good to have her in the same town. She’s staying with her grandmother for the next few weeks, just to help out and be there for her. In return, she gets free room and board and we get a place (her grandmother’s two car garage) to put our stuff in while we wait for the new house to be ready for us to move in.

My dad’s birthday is today, and we’re going to the Japanese restaurant to celebrate. Yum! I’ve been doing all kinds of stuff, mainly on the weekends. Saturday night I stayed out all night with my friends Sarah and Crunchy. It was a good time. I’m glad that I’ve got a couple of people to hang out with, but it’ll be SO nice when Erin gets down here.

Wow, that was an incredibly random paragraph, wasn’t it? Time to get back to work…

Take care, all!
~Becky

Overdue Update

OK, it’s been forever since I updated, and I’ve been putting it off and putting it off because I just can’t think of anything to write that isn’t the same old drudgery: moving woes, job stuff, etc. I feel like my journal is getting a little self-serving and boring… I’m tired of writing about the same old things over and over. The problem is I can’t think of anything else to write at the moment, so I’ll get about five sentences into a draft of an entry and then realize what I’m doing and delete it.

That being said, if I don’t update now I probably won’t for months, and I like this journal and want to keep it around if at all possible. I’ve had journals in the past that I stopped updating for a few weeks and then realized that to go back and update would be ridiculous, so I just left them hanging in cyberspace, and I don’t want that to happen to this one if I can help it. So, inane or not, I decided to post a little about how things are going down here in SC.

I’m still looking for a rental house for us to move into; we decided that a rental house would suit us a lot better than an apartment. I heartily agree – I’ve lived in apartments for almost ten years now and good lord I’m tired of being stuck in a human filing cabinet. It’ll be nice to have a house, rental or not, where we don’t have to worry about playing music too loud for the upstairs neighbors. Honestly, privacy is the main reason we’re looking for a house instead of an apartment, but there are other positives too: a possible lease-to-own deal, month to month leasing instead of a yearly contract (so if we find a house we want to buy we can move out without breaking an expensive lease), more space, etc. But mostly it’s that feeling of being stuck in with two hundred other people that I want to leave behind… I’m really sick of it.

I’ve found a couple of prospects that look ok, but there’s not much of a rental market in Greenville right now, so it might all be a moot point – we may have to move into an apartment anyway. I did find one that would be absolutely perfect, but it won’t be vacant until the first of October. *sigh* Oh well… I’m going to look at one of the prospects on Friday, and take a ton of pictures to send to Erin. This is something else that’s holding up the process: choosing a place for us to live for a long(ish) period of time with her being 600 miles away. I am trying to send her five million pictures of these places, but it’s still very difficult to make any decisions with her being in Indianapolis.

The job’s going well, I guess. I still haven’t been assigned any serious responsibilities. I’m helping everyone out with all the work they just can’t get done because they’re so damn busy, and to be honest, it’s getting a little old. I’ll be glad when I’m assigned my own territory, my own customers, my own job. The first few weeks is always supposed to be like that I guess, but I’ve been here for a month now, and I’m tired of cutting my teeth on other people’s stuff.

It’s been strange living here without anyone besides my family – Jo and I got together one weekend, but he’s moved up to PA now and I don’t know when I’ll see him again. I went back to the game last weekend just so I could be around other people. I never realized how much of a social creature I am until I was forced to spend a month by myself. I even went to my ex-wife’s house the other day to see her and hang out with her for a while. We’ve gotten back to being friends since we haven’t been together in almost nine years, but it was still kind of strange. I’ll just be glad when we get everything together and get our lives going again. All this waiting is making me crazy. Erin should be down here the weekend of the 17th, as her school starts on the 20th, so I just have to make it two more weeks… I can do that. As for all our stuff moving down, we’re doing that the weekend of Labor Day, so that’s a little longer to go… I don’t like to think about another month in limbo, but Erin will be here halfway through that, so it won’t be so bad.

Hmmm… what else? I finished the seventh Harry Potter book. It was REALLY good. Well worth the wait. I can’t wait to see what they do with the sixth and seventh movies. Since I have friends that read this journal and the HP books, I won’t reveal any spoilers here. But suffice it to say, it’s a good read. If you are reading this and haven’t read the HP books, and you enjoy reading, I recommend them. They’re just as entertaining for adults as they are for kids. And that’s all the plugs I’m doing for those books (in this entry, at least).

I’m going to Florence this weekend to see my buddies. Hopefully it’ll help me get rid of some of this loneliness that’s been wrapping itself around me like an invisible cloak. Sounds melodramatic, right? But more and more I’ve been realizing that this is exactly what it’s like. Most of the time I don’t even realize that it’s there, but it always is. I’m just lonely for friends, lonely for Erin. My family’s great, but they don’t know me like she does. I feel like a guest, and that gets old after a while. It’s nothing that they do, it’s just something I impose on myself. It’ll be great to get back into a home after this. On the positive side, this time really is making me see how much I value the things I have – a great home, a woman that I love, etc. I’m anxious to get back to those things.

~Becky