I’ve Come In From the Wilderness

It’s a quiet rainy Saturday morning and I am on my second cup of free apartment complex coffee. It is a pretty young crowd in my neighborhood with lots of breweries and bars within walking distance. So mornings are pretty quiet around here. 😉 I have a couple of hours of quiet and solitude before I need to quit procrastinating the pile of laundry waiting for me upstairs.

I thought it was high time that I take advantage of the quiet and my procrastination and get an update posted.

In case you weren’t aware, I have settled into Charlotte, NC.  

I was seriously considering Greenville, SC but after a few months there, I just wasn’t feeling it.  Don’t get me wrong. It’s a perfectly nice small city, people that I talked around town love living there. There just didn’t seem to be enough going on to keep me occupied for long. I thought I would run out of places to explore in a couple of weeks and then be bored stiff. The devil and idle hands and all.

I visited Charlotte a few times but just to look around. Then one evening, I was sitting in a cheap hotel on the side of I85 with a big beer and bag of Big Macs and French Fries wondering how my clothes shrunk so badly. It was apparent that I needed to take a break from driving around all day with a belly full of free breakfast waffles and going to bed at night filled up on fast food and cheap beer.

Waistline aside, hotels are disgustingly dirty. I was not staying in fleabags, just the usual mid-tier priced highway off ramp hotels that you can reserve through Expedia. I realize that highway hotels are not the place to show off your black light poster collection, but even I have limits. Since the time I folded down the bed on a first night’s stay and found some short curlies between the sheets, I have been using my sleeping bag instead.

I was definitely in need of a break from the road and the results of minimum wage cooks and cleaners.  There was a rare city stopping snow fall in Charlotte a few weeks earlier when I was there. I strolled around the empty city and was pretty happy. It took a couple of weeks but I decided that it was a sign, or an excuse, to hang my hat there.

I took out a lease on a studio at fancy apartment complex. Besides the free coffee, it has a nice big pool and outdoor grilling area, a gym, and a party room. It is very easy living compared to home ownership. I do miss the occasional home project but there is a Lowes 100 feet across the street so I just walk the aisles and read power tool specs to get over that urge.   

I even hopped back into the working world. I knew I would be bored just sitting around all day so I threw my resume out into the employment winds and it landed on a desk of a hiring manager at a large Telecom company. I have been doing project management there about 3 months. Not sure if I was spoiled at Microsoft or it’s an East Coast thing but I am having a bit of culture shock. I have to in or around my cubicle from 8 to 5. A cubicle smaller than the minimum space legally required to raise a goat. The coffee pot is always empty until I make more of the worst tasting free office coffee I have ever tasted. You can bring your own Keurig cups but I have never once seen anyone clean the machine. I think my job is to check status of projects that I really have no control over and spend every Thursday filling out reports that no one reads. In short, a typical corporate job. My contract is up at the end of June and I have decided to give all that glamour and excitement up. I am looking out the window right now at a big box Home Improvement store and am tempted to walk over there to see what they have for work.

It’s been a cold wet spring but it is finally starting to warm up to where it is going to be uncomfortable next week when the humidity kicks in.  I have heard it gets pretty bad so I am not looking forward to that. At least I don’t need to wear a jacket out at night here like I did in Seattle.

I am suitably caffeinated now and that laundry pile is getting any smaller so I’ll close this post here. Stay tuned. More details coming.