Four Days and 600 Miles Left

Posted on by Jordan

… Until we start moving to Des Moines.

This blog is sadly the last place you will have heard this news, but we found a place in Des Moines. Heather and I are really excited to be nearing the end of this phase of our lives where we were driving so much each day. Unfortunately we have to survive a few more days of the drive, while trying to manage the details of a move, and get everything packed before Saturday.

I think this is shaping up to be one of our harder weeks, with respect to outside of work fatigue. My goal is to pack no less than one box each night, but judging from the number of used, but empty boxes I have in the corner… that isn’t going to get us packed in time.

For posterity (aka, my reference later), and anyone who hasn’t heard through more dependable channels… My job is somewhat similar to what I was doing in Omaha. While I have only been there a week, I think it is going to be a really great place to work!

The place Heather and I are moving into is in the extreme west part of West Des Moines, a really nice area. We managed to find a two bedroom, two bathroom place, with a garage for a really reasonable price (roughly the same as we were paying for our place in Omaha)

I really should get back to doing something more productive now, but I wanted to get a quick note posted of our current status!

-Jordan

Looking For Housing In Des Moines

Posted on by Jordan

So, the big news that sets up the post for today is that I have a job in Des Moines.  It will cut a few *hundred* miles out of the daily drive Heather and I were doing. The only catch is we have to find a place to move into before our drive actually improves.

To that end I spent yesterday looking into options in Des Moines. There are a lot of potential places we could live. After having my “we don’t have that much stuff” illusions shattered during the move to Atlantic, we definitely want to  find options that have plenty of room.

People often assume we will be buying a house and, while that option would certainly provide a lot of room, we aren’t going to do that right now. We hope to move into a house at some point, but right now we don’t even know how long we will be in Des Moines.  I realized that I am on track to move once a year, every year, from the day I left college.  That is kind of a sad fact.

Given the fact we don’t think buying house is an option right now, but apartments seem kind of small, we started looking into other rental options. There aren’t a lot of rental houses in the area we wanted to live (West Des Moines). There were a few duplexes that looked interesting. I should mention that Craigslist seems to be a pretty solid resource for finding houses and duplexes that aren’t listed in the apartment finder books.

What we found was that staying inside our price/location goals didn’t leave that many options beyond apartments even then. I took some time to visit the few we thought might work. I hate to be so down on the people doing the actual showing, but when your basically going to be doing business with an individual instead of a housing company… That first impression matters a lot to me. I went away from everything I looked at thinking “this place isn’t quite what we are looking for, and I don’t know about that guy as a landlord”

As our last option, the plan is to get an apartment and save like crazy towards a house down the road. I looked at a few apartments, and they were, well apartments. As a tangent to that, my last visit of the day (after five so Heather could come too) was to look at a condo an owner wanted to rent out.

The place was amazing! Really nicely done, two bedroom two bathroom unit. It basically had everything we were looking for, and the price was way cheaper than we expected to be paying for anything that big. We did not however decide to go with this option. Maybe you are wondering why. I am going to explain this in the form of a bulleted list addressed to the seller, who no doubt has the same question.

Why Heather and Jordan chose not to rent your condo:

  • Craigslist posting lacked essential things such as the location of the listing, and properly spelled words
  • Seller sounded disoriented on phone, gave rambling answers that lacked any content.
  • Touring a unit where the power has been turned off, while at dusk does not improve the presentation.
  • Seller said “I don’t want to live here!”, then declined to answer the follow up “why?”
  • Seller gave the impression he was going to be forced to move soon.

I don’t quite know how to put into words the general strangeness of the whole thing, but suffice to say we are still looking.

-Jordan

Creepy Crawlies

Posted on by Jordan

Our house in Atlantic seems to be trying to help get me in the mood for Halloween. I have found two small but still cringe-inducing critters around the house over the last week. I took a minute to look up what they are, and as it turns out the “House Centipede” is somewhat mundane.

All the same, I find them to be incredibly creepy in person. If you doubt me, feel free to follow that link for a better picture. I haven’t mentioned this creature to Heather yet, as she has managed to be out of the room when I found the two invaders. I suppose publishing this will increase the chances she will be concerned about them 🙂

-Jordan

Yay Wireless Plans

Posted on by Jordan

There are a few things I have wanted to post about, and this topic is the best non-picture post I can think of.

Heather has my PC tied up re-doing our budgeting system, it looks like we are going to abandon Quicken in favor of a multi-page spread sheet. I was expecting Quicken to be less intimidating as a finance tracking tool than Excel, but it appears Heather has far more familiarity with spreadsheets than I do. In reality, Quicken wasn’t a great tool anyway, as it is built to track what has happened and we were trying to use it to manage a forward looking budget. I know I am wandering off topic, but I am kind of excited to have Heather working up this spread sheet. 🙂

So, getting back to wireless calling plans….

Heather and I spend a lot of time in the car these days, and in the absence of much else to do, we make quite a few calls during this time. I had been trying to keep an eye on our minute usage, but our billing date is mid month somewhere and I clearly lapsed somewhere along the line. To make a long story short, we went over quite a bit. Like $120 over. More than a little disappointing considering I had realized this was a possibility, and then forgot to keep a close eye on remaining minutes as the billing month was coming to a close. what makes it even more frustrating is the fact that when I  changed our plan, the new service wasn’t that much more. The old plan was the most basic package, with a second line and unlimited texting thrown in. Upgrading to the next tier of plan meant we got the texting for free, doubled the minutes we could use, and added ten numbers we can call without using minutes (our choice as to what numbers for that). The new monthly bill hasn’t come in yet, but I think it will end up being about $10 more. That’s right, T – E – N as in 10… so the one month we went over will cost the same as upgrading our plan for an entire year. Makes me kind of annoyed at Verizon, but I doubt any of the other carriers are much better with this kind of thing.

-Jordan

Cooking!

Posted on by Jordan

This ends up being kind of a compound post, summing up most of the interesting cooking I have done from when we moved to Atlantic, up till tonight.

First off, I tried making hash browns:

Hashbrowns

This is actually my second attempt. The first attempt was *amazing* I was really happy with the appearance, texture, flavor everything. Heather felt that my first batch was nothing but butter, so the pictured hash browns have minimal oil. They aren’t as good that way, but still make for some nice variety, we pretty much eat nothing but oatmeal weekdays.

Next up, stuffed peppers:

Suffed_peppers

Red peppers are fairly cheap right now, and I happened to see some remarks on a blog I follow about making some stuffed peppers. Heather and I have talked a lot about how introducing more vegetables into our diet would be a good thing, but haven’t necessarily done a great job of actually executing that plan. This was a step in that direction, these basically just have beans, rice and cheese in them. They took forever to make as I discovered mid-recipe that I couldn’t run the stove-top burners to simmer the onions and cook the rice at the same time as I preheat the oven. The end result was pretty good even then, just a little slow… Something that frustrates Heather I think, but she was happy with the end result 🙂

Finally, something more interesting, “Fettuccine with Sweet Pepper-Cayenne“:

J_Pepper_Chop

Hey look! An action shot! 🙂 I sometimes get complaints about the dis-proportional number of pictures containing Heather vs. me. Hopefully this will be a step towards having a full time photographer for cooking related blog posts 😉

The full gallery of cooking pictures has a few of this recipe in-progress, and a finished product shot, if your interested check: here.

Not to get into a full play-by-play, but basically the cayenne made the sauce splicer than I had really planned, but fortunately Heather tolerates moderately spicy stuff pretty well. The texture and consistency ended up being a lot like stroganoff, but with a lot more kick. I am kind of proud of this one, not that it took any real skill, but it was something new that I didn’t exactly know what the end result would be like, and it came out pretty well.

I suppose if I am going to summarize all the cooking in September I should mention I made chili, but I don’t have any pictures of that. Really though, how exciting is chili? … I guess I have a kind of orphaned gallery I put up a long time ago of probably the last chili I made before my cooking had to take Heather into account. The gallery here has probably more onions than I have used in a single setting for almost two years. That chili is more interesting than the stuff I made last week 🙂 Not to say the new batch isn’t good, just not as interesting. … and now I am rambling

-Jordan

High-Miles September So Far

Posted on by Jordan

Wow, you would not believe how quickly the last 3 weeks have gone!

I am sure that is in part to the time we spend on the road each day, but still… I am still trying to get used to the idea that fall is coming.

I don’t know what all to cover, so I will just give some snap-shots of life in Atlantic.

We have *LOVED* being able to just roll our bikes outside! It may sound trivial, but not having to carry them down three flights of stairs makes the idea of a quick little evening ride so much less imposing. Also, living in a neighborhood makes rides a lot nicer. We have really enjoyed getting to explore Atlantic on bicycles.

The drive every day is tiring, but I think Heather and I have both found ways to make it easier. Heather has a whole stack of books on “tape” (CD) and I picked up a Zune, and have it loaded up with podcasts. Those things may not be our first choice of a way to use time, but at least you get to feel like you are doing something instead of just wasting your life driving and listening to top 40 radio.  I might throw up some of the better podcasts, once I have figured out what I like… There is an overwhelming selection out there.

News as of today is that Heather and I may have found a church we like in Atlantic. We visited one three weeks ago and it just wasn’t somewhere we wanted to be going. Two weeks ago we drove to Des Moines, and liked the Vineyard we checked out there. Unfortunately the fatigue from driving yet another day was pretty substantial, and we decided we just couldn’t do that on our day of rest. Today we tried another church in Atlantic (There are a lot of them here, sometimes using annoyingly similar names) and I think it is going to be a good place for us while we are here.

In more “wow time is going fast” news I had to renew the web-hosting for this site. I paid for a year when I started the site not too long after Heather and I were engaged. I was kind of surprised to have that come due again already.

-Jordan

Now Coming To You From Atlantic

Posted on by Jordan

It has now been a full week since Heather and I moved into the house here in Atlantic.

The drive is long, but I think we can handle it. The house is… Interesting… more on that later. We realized that this weekend is the first time we have ever stayed home over a three day weekend. Typically we are on the road to somewhere any time we had a free day off, and would have been this weekend too, but the unpacking and whatnot tied us down.

Going back to the house, I think we have both really liked living in a bigger space. I honestly have no idea how we managed to fit all the stuff we apparently own into the apartment in Omaha, because this house does not seem empty in the slightest. Being able to get by with just open windows has been really pleasant, something you forget is even possible living in an apartment. Atlantic is really quiet, and this weekend has been remarkably peaceful.

The more interesting aspects of this house involve power water and gas. Water was, as the crew who helped us move into the house discovered, slow. There isn’t enough water pressure to do two things at once anywhere in the house. After you flush the toilet, there won’t be much water at the sink until after the tank refills. If Heather is in the shower, I cannot start washing dishes. Speaking of dishes, due to the low water pressure, the house is apparently unable to sustain a dishwasher, so we get to hand-wash everything.

Moving on to gas, I assume, without really knowing, that this issue is more with the actual oven/range we have, and not so much the house, but I have no idea. I found out while trying a new recipe Friday night (hopefully I will get a quick summary and pictures of that up soon) that the burners won’t work while the oven is heating. they sort of sputter fire, and you smell a lot of gas, but they wont burn right. It didn’t cause a huge problem, it just slowed things down a lot as I needed to leave a few minutes to preheat between finishing the stuff in the pan, and putting it into the oven.

Finally, we come to power. There isn’t a single three-prong outlet in this house. The outlet positions are kind of strange too, but it’s and old house and I wont complain too much about that. The really disappointing thing about the power situation is that my heavy-duty battery backup system I run on my PC is not happy. It worked fine for about 3 days, and then something must have prompted it to check if it was really grounded, discovering that it was not grounded, it went into some sort of emergency safety shutdown, and didn’t even send the power-down signal to my PC before ceasing operation. My hope is that if I can plug it into a grounded outlet it will at least revert to a non-panic state.

This post is turning into kind of a novel, and I fear I spent too much time on the downsides of the house, so let me restate, Heather and I are really enjoying living in this little old house 🙂

I will leave you with this picture, and clicking on it should take you to an album of pictures from the move.

atlantic_house

-Jordan

Internet… Sorta

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I have been in Iowa for almost a week now, and I have internet connected to the house finally!

The only problem is that we are currently getting roughly 6% of the 7MBPS Qwest promised us.

The almost dead connection makes being online fairly frustrating… I guess I will be spending some time on the phone with tech support here soon!

************ Update ****************

After 30+ minutes on the phone with Qwest, it was discovered that I had plugged into the wrong port on the modem. I don’t quite know how the modem was even working int he state I had it in. It doesn’t make me feel any less dumb for having hooked the modem up wrong 😦

-Jordan

Fuel Numbers

Posted on by Jordan

This is semi-random, but given the amount of driving I am expecting to do now, fuel economy is fairly interesting to me.

It has been somewhat interesting to me from back last year when gas was so high. I have been keeping a spreadsheet with every tank of gas I put into my Escape, and the miles driven. Not too long ago I found a website that makes keeping track of that kind of thing a lot easier.

Fuelly

I had big plans to ether go back and re-enter an entire years worth of spreadsheet data into Fuelly, or to at least work up some summary numbers to post here. That may still happen, but in the mean time, my profile on Fuelly is publicly viewable, so check out what I have so far!

Jordan’s Escape on Fuelly

-Jordan

Move Complete!

Posted on by Jordan

Just a quick note, Heather and I got moved into a little house in Atlantic IA.

We don’t have internet hooked up to the house yet, so I probably won’t be getting a full-length post about the move up for a few more days.

The short story, the combined efforts of our parents, my siblings,  some amazingly helpful friends, and a cousin  made the move as painless as I think a move can be.

-Jordan