Looking for the end of that long white line

Hurricane Florence has come and gone through the Carolinas. And coincidentally, so have I. With the wind literally at my back after days of boxing, sorting and storing my remaining stuff, of which there is still too much, I have officially moved out of Charlotte. 

No ill will towards the city but after 8 months, I just couldn’t find a reason to stick around. 

Charlotte is well on its way to being a big city, It’s growing quickly and there are a lot of good paying jobs. It supports 2 pro sports teams, a minor league baseball team and, at last count, 22 micro breweries that are generally packed with the youthful citizenry. Judging from the nice cars in the parking lot and beer prices in the pubs, a well-paid citizenry. 

You would think that with all the nice cars, people would be better drivers. Not so much. I was on a bike ride on Sunday morning and almost got hit 3 times in the first mile. The city is growing rapidly and getting a lot more cars than it is built for. So besides congestion, all the construction going on slows everyone down to a frustrating crawl. Lots of distracted driving to put up with the slow speed boredom. Texting and pretty girls being the main distractions. The traffic lights are set to a long cycle before the green comes around again. Knowing that, people seem to think there is a grace period after the yellow turns to red. 

My apartment complex was near the city center so I didn’t need to drive much. Probably just as well, Charlotte is a beer connoisseur’s paradise, unless you’re like me and your favorite style of beer is cheap. I have begrudgingly paid as much as $9 for a single pint of beer and I didn’t even get to keep the glass. Additionally, North Carolina has outlawed my beloved Happy Hour drink discounts. So drinking and driving wouldn’t have been a problem even if I lived out in the suburbs. 

To be honest, I don’t get out to the bars much these days. Sometimes I just grab a 6 pack of beer at the grocery store and nurse my way through it over the next week. 6 packs of beer cost 10 to 12 dollars, and up. An outrageous price to pay for beer in my opinion. They do sell the old standby Bud Light and Miller Light level beers for less than 10 bucks a 12 pack. But with all the beer snobs here, it is only less embarrassing to be seen walking down the street with a cheap 12 pack then to be stuck in the slow line of hot single mothers at the Costco checkout with a carton of Depends and a jumbo sized multipack of Preparation H in your otherwise empty cart.

I had a real job for a few months. I knew I would be bored just sitting around all day so I threw my resume out in the employment winds and it landed on a desk of a hiring manager at a large Telecom company who thought I was a good fit. The team of folks I was working with were super nice and did their best to do their jobs well. My problem was I just wasn’t sure what my job was. Most of my time was spent jumping through convoluted reporting hoops that did nothing to move a project forward. My 3×3 foot cubicle and the worst tasting free office coffee I have ever tasted didn’t help either. So rather than spin my wheels and waste the company’s money, I ended the contract at the end of June with a North Carolina summer ahead of me.

I didn’t really do much though, I spent the rest of the summer whiling away my days around the apartment pool and napping. I have a pretty high tolerance for summer weather extremes but this one was not horribly hot and humid like I was expecting. That being said, I took up running again. It was good to lace up the runners again but the summer heat and humidity kept me from breaking the 2 mile mark more than a couple of times. At least that is what I am blaming my lack of endurance on

I still get frequent alerts on job openings there but I probably won’t be back except with a U-haul trailer and a map to somewhere else.

In the meantime, I have a deductible visit to my rental house in Seattle to take advantage of and some catching up to do so I’ll be out here for a few weeks then off to Ohio for a few weeks around the holidays. That’s as far as I have thought out.

Stay tuned.