Merry Christmas!

Posted on by Jordan

HerbieTree

Heather and I have a (short) tradition of getting a new ornament every year. Herbie got the honors this year… Heather sometimes talks like I am the only one who feels weird about being in Iowa, but I think we both have strong allegiances there. We have the same little tree from last year, it works really well in our space-limited apartment. We still don’t have many Christmas decorations, but the tree does a lot to make the apartment feel the holiday spirit.

Speaking of the holiday spirit, Heather and I have discovered that we listened to different Christmas music while doing traditional things like decorating the tree…. and I find that I don’t feel as into it without that. Heather’s tradition is to watch “White Christmas” during/after the tree decorating. I know my family always listened to the same albums of Christmas music… I just don’t know what those albums were called. Heather has actually accused me of being “a scrooge” but I just don’t care for some of the more…. artistic interpretations of traditional Christmas songs.

Along with tree decorating, Heather spearheaded baking some Christmas treats. More than spearheaded, I didn’t even help. Not to say I wasn’t willing, but we have found that only one person should work in our galley kitchen at a time. It only takes a few times bumping into the other person when you are trying to quick get something done to think it isn’t fun anymore. After making some amazing cookies, Heather broke them up into a bunch of gift plates:

HeatherCookies

We then worked our way around the building giving them away to any of our neighbors who happened to be home. It was a fun thing to do, and I am really glad she took the initiative to do it. I think about half our neighbors weren’t sure what to think, but it’s hard to complain about a plate of cookies!

I know this is a few days early, but we are looking to slip out of Des Moines before another wave of ice and snow shuts the city down, so I probably won’t get the chance to post closer to the actual day…. Merry Christmas!!!

-Jordan

p.s. I don’t think I ever mentioned before, the ornament from last year was a sand timer… we only had a month until the wedding at Christmas 🙂

Move In, Day Five

Posted on by Jordan

As I write this, the last load of move-backlogged laundry is in the drier, and Heather and I almost have our bedroom closet stocked with work clothes instead of whatever happened to be at the top of the box that got dropped in the room Saturday.

As anyone who was involved with any part of our moving may remember, we have a lot of clothes… and when I say “we” I in this case mean Heather. Although, I do find that a XXL sweatshirt of mine takes up a lot more room than most of the things Heather has… anyway, our new place has maybe one third the closet space we had in Omaha. A lot more room, just not as much storage. We are going to have to get creative, and I fear buy a few items to make our new home feel as tidy as things were back in Omaha.

No mate what it takes to finish getting moved into the new place, the reduction in drive time is amazing! Getting two (plus) hours put into your day makes life so much better! I know I had an easy commute before this all started, but having gone without that extra time for a few months makes me really enjoy my evenings. Granted, most of my evening time has been spent unpacking, but this is only the third work day I have lived in Des Moines. I am sure I will come to take it for granted, but it certainly makes having moved feel good.

… and that load of laundry I mentioned just buzzed, better go attend to it 🙂

-Jordan

Live From Des Moines

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I have finally managed to move all of our stuff into the new place in Des Moines. 48 hours after we picked up the keys, the majority of our stuff is unpacked and in it’s proper place!

We couldn’t have done it without the help of a few great people! Heather’s parents came bright and early Saturday morning, and recruited her cousin Blake and one of his friends. My friend Corey made the drive from Omaha as well. With an abundance of help, and the fact that Heather and I pushed hard Friday night to get everything into boxes, loading the truck went really fast.

On the unload side, a few guys from my new company came buy and helped unload. They were a huge help!

Having so many people on hand to help with the move made things go really fast. Were returning the truck by 3:30pm on Saturday, leaving us with a good chunk of the day to start unpacking.

I think we are really going to like this place, and I can’t wait to throw up a few new pictures of everything, but I wan’t to take the “after” pictures and we need to wrap up a little bit more of the unpacking 🙂

-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

Iowa!

Posted on by Jordan

I am still like a month behind in the updates plan, but we have some rather big news!

Jobs are generally not talked about here, but Heather was promoted and transferred to Des Moines!

We didn’t get much warning, so life has been pretty hectic over the past week, and looks to continue for the duration of this week.

Our basic plan is to move to a small town roughly half way between Des Moines and Iowa, and both Heather and I will have to drive quite a ways to work.

As of this posting we have a verbal agreement with the landlord, meaning we have a place to live found. Our goal is to move this coming Saturday, but there are still a few details to hammer out.

j_packing

In the meantime, our apartment looks like a disaster, no decorations on the walls, and huge piles of stuff everywhere. We started packing yesterday, and  made a good dent in what needs packed. Heather and I take somewhat different approaches to a lot of things, and working together to move has been interesting. In the end good, but interesting 🙂

-Jordan