On the Road Again Part 2

When last we left off, we had made it to Savannah, GA. 

8:00: Enjoyed complimentary breakfast at the Marriott. Silently judged the misspelling of 'Sugar' on a sugar bottle. (It was labeled 'suger.')

8:45: Drove downtown and wandered around briefly to take some pictures. I've posted all the noteworthy ones on Instagram. It was OK. Probably not as cool in the early morning as it would be at night. The next time I find myself there, it's probably worth going on a ghost tour so I can get more of the history. 

9:15: Back on the road. I drove over an extremely tall bridge that went over the Savannah river that forms the border between GA and SC.

9:17: In SC! Finally!

9:19: Things already are much more green and lush and noticeably prettier. I drive through a nature preserve to make my way back to I-95.

10:00: I stop and gas up...and the gas is $3.55 - a full $.33 cents cheaper than it had been in Miami. Not bad. While in the store to buy a water bottle and some life savers, I notice a local newspaper. The main headline: "And that's when my dryer completely exploded..."

11:00: I make it to my turn and head up to Columbia.

12:00: I stop at the temple. It's microscopically small and on a very very small bit of land. I feel sorry for people who get married there, because there are no temple grounds. And I'm not just exaggerating. There. Are. No. Temple. Grounds. There is a tightly fenced-in sidewalk area. If you tried really hard, you could probably get a close-up picture at the south side of the temple. The scenery would be a big white wall behind you. I wonder why they didn't build on a spot with more grounds?

12:15: Back on the road to Greenville. There are hills!

12:45: OK I now realize I am slowly driving up a mountain. There are a lot of hills, and the altitude is steadily increasing. Scenery is great - lots of trees and still very lush!

1:30: I make it to town. Hooray!

The rest of this would involve me getting lunch and settling in at my palatial imitation extended stay apartment, but I'll spare you those thrilling details. So far, the city is like an A, the job is a B (has some issues but nothing that can't be solved) and my wife is an A+. She has handled the entire move all on her own while I've been up here. I head back down to Miami (on a plane) again tomorrow to help finish the move and bring everyone else back up! 

On the road again

I left for SC this morning around 8:30 or so. What follows is a brief travelogue, so far.

9:14 AM: Still in the Miami area. I know, because people are still trying to run me off the road.
9:30 AM: I finally make it to the I-95, where I will spend most of the following 2 days. I've driven on it to St. Augustine before - it's always under road construction, and is extremely straight and lacking in topography. This should be fun...
10:00 AM: Still on I-95.
11:00 AM: Still on I-95.
11:45 AM: I pull off and gas up and get some lunch. I have no idea where I am. I consult the map app and find that I am close to Cape Canaveral and Coco Beach! Maybe I should detour and have a fun beach drive!
12:30 PM: I wasn't as close as I thought I was to the beach. It is very stop/go/stop/go. I eventually pulled over and went and looked at the beach. It has waves! This is dramatically different from all of South Florida, in which the 'waves' at those beaches are smaller than what you can create by tossing a toothpick in a bathtub. I snap a picture, sigh, and go back to the car.
1:15 PM: I'm in Cape Canaveral! I wonder if I will see any spare space shuttles!
1:17 PM: And I'm done. The freeway takes you swiftly away from anything interesting in Cape Canaveral.
1:40 PM: And I'm back on I-95.
2:40 PM: I make it to Jacksonville. My brother on the phone tells me to pull over and shop. What he doesn't know is that I'm at this point miserably car sick and the only thing keeping me from losing my $5.00 Wendy's lunch from earlier is the steady hum of the AC and the very dramatic reading of the BOM by the audio book guy, who really gets into it, especially when the Zoramites have anything to say.
3:30 PM: The guy I'm replacing at my new job calls me to go over all our transition stuff for the hand-off. Apparently he has scheduled a meeting with me for this time. I tell him I am driving and we make plans for Thurday/Friday in the office. Nice guy. But somewhere in this phone call I crossed over into Georgia, which is something I wanted to document or at least notice. Oh well.
4:30 PM: Georgia is exactly like a 'brown Florida' but with 2 billion times more Waffle Houses.
4:31 PM: By 'brown Florida' I mean all the grass is dead and brown, whereas everything in Florida is deep green. Thought I'd clear that up.
5:30 PM: I get to Savannah and at this point desperately need to use a restroom, having not realized that I've been drinking non-stop since Cape Canaveral. Unfortunately, I find that there are NO GAS STATIONS AND NO BUSINESSES OF ANY KIND ANYWHERE NEAR SAVANNAH, GA. The entire city is really old buildings, most of which appear to be museums or parking garages. There is no parking available anywhere in the city - it's all in garages. I drive for literally 1 hour before I finally find a gas station that doesn't look horrifying. It is literally the first business I come across that seems safe to enter. I've never seen anything like it.
6:30 PM: I decide to stay in a hotel about 14 miles back towards Florida, in the wrong direction, as the hotels in downtown Savannah are extremely pricey. Unfortunately, at this point I am totally done, so I scrapped my plans to wander around cool/spooky Savannah and take pictures and go on ghost tours and instead treat myself to an $8 club sandwich at Perkins - an East Coast version of Marie Calendars. I stumble back to my hotel, type this blog, and drift off to ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz84222222222228288888884f89phf9p9258h87f90hy)T$!$Y!

Sweet Carolina, bah bah bah

And we're back! And moving again. This time, though, it's different: we intend to stay.

Readers of the blog may remember that I almost got a job in South Carolina a few years ago. Things didn't work out and I wasn't able to accept the job offer, but those same people stayed in touch and, when the person I would have reported to in 2012 resigned last week, they called me and asked if I would be interested in his job - which happens to be the exact job I have today in Miami.

General reaction has ranged from supportive (5%) to the kind of reaction one would give if you found out your friend announced they were going to invest their life savings into getting plastic surgery to look like Clint Howard (95%). Why leave Miami when I have such a great job and great boss, who has been so good to me? It's a tough call, to be sure, but I'll try to explain.

First up, crime. Let's look at the crime rates in both areas really quick. Here's Miami:

OK, seems straightforward. 4800 violent crimes a year, and about 3x the national average. Now let's look at Greenville:

48 violent crimes, and almost half the national average? Ok, so maybe Greenville has a slight edge. But that's just one factor. What about economy? Florida is a tourist's dream! There's got to be a great economy there!

Oh. Well, Greenville can't be any better, though, right?

Well, alright, so that's another factor. But, OK, housing has to be the most important, though, right? How far can your dollar go? A major metropolis like Miami has to beat out a hole in the wall nowhere like Greenville. Let's see what $190,000 buys in each place. First up, Greenville:

OK, so for $186,990, you get 4 beds, 3 bath, 3500 square feet, and the lot is about 2/3rd of an acre. 3500 square feet!? Who wants to clean that much house? Not me! The house is also literally 15 minutes from my work. Let's see what that money buys in Miami!

For just $3,000 more, you can enjoy this palatial dream home on 'Dildo avenue,' a mere 90 minute drive from my work, and bask in its luxurious 1,489 square feet. The home is only about 50 years old, whereas the Greenville house was built in 2014. Anyone can tell you that they don't make em like they used to! This Miami house has withstood the test of time, with only minor mold damage to show for it. For the adventurous homeowner who likes to 'spice things up' a little, it also features a see-through bathroom!

Closed in-bathrooms are for prudes.

OK, but these homes probably have much different schools. Miami has millionaires everywhere-that tax base has got to be worth something! Let's see what the Greenville home's schools are like!

OK, so maybe they got lucky. How are Miami's schools?

Oh.

OK, how about politics? Political alignment is important, and affects what your quality of life is like. 

Miami:

Greenville:

OK, but people. People are important! What kind of people do you find in South Florida?

And what about South Carolina? What kind of people do you find there?

Weather! How about weather?

OK this is just getting silly. Everyone knows that South Florida is a natural wonder. People flock from all over to experience its beauty!

But South Carolina is a back-woods redneck haven! You'd have to be inbred and stupid to go there!

Aarrgh! This isn't fair! You're just cheating now, and picking out things that are great about South Carolina with all the things that are bad about South Florida!

Noooooooo!

OK FINE! YOU WIN! WE'LL MOVE TO GREENVILLE!

Look, I know my boss is great and this company has been excellent to me, but take it from me: there are some major drawbacks to living here. We can't live here forever. Our best housing option is to go nearly broke renting a $2100 a month town home. No yard, still a really long commute, etc. I love my boss but there are great bosses in many places, and my new boss requested me by name. We feel like this is the right thing to do, and we feel like this is the place in which we can finally settle down.

Fingers crossed!

Book Review: Miss Peregrine's School for Gifted Children, by Ransom Riggs

This one had some potential; it definitely started out pretty good. Confused boy...Jeff? Larry? James? Something like that...we'll call him Jeff. (I probably should remember his name, since I just finished this book not 5 minutes ago.) Anyway, Jeff has a seemingly crazy Grandpa who says he grew up with a bunch of 'peculiar' kids with a bunch of special powers. No one believes crazy Grandpa, but one day Grandpa gets killed by a scary monster. Maybe he wasn't so crazy after all!

Spoiler: he wasn't crazy. He really did live with a bunch of peculiar kids with special powers...in a big secret mansion...cared for by a time-traveling shape shifting headmistress...in a plot that was absolutely nothing like X-Men whatsoever.

The X-Peculiars befriend Jeff and together they must defeat the monster things that killed Jeff's Grandpa. Along the way, they will:

• Swear a lot. PG-13 language, but a lot of it. 
• Travel to distant lands using very flimsy excuses
• Play on a dangerous island with the permission of Jeff's dad, who is really very cool with his son playing on a dangerous like Scottish island that they've never been to and that the locals warn is very dangerous. 
• Try their darnedest to not re-create the nearly exact plot to all of the X Men movies

Unfortunately, they fail in their endeavor of the last bullet. It's almost exactly like most of the X Men movies. All-powerful headmistress with super powers who gets conveniently knocked out of commission at the end, forcing the heroes to face the bad guys on their own, mutant powers, feeling different, being discriminated against, having characters survive the holocaust, and so on.

The good news is, if you like the X Men movies and have a terrible memory, you will not mind this book. It's kind of a Hunger Games for teenage guys, I guess, since there is some light romance but it's all very guy perspective-y. So there's that. 

The author leaves the ending wide open for a sequel, and in fact I've already checked it out from the library. Even though this book was derivative and not technically that good, it was interspersed with some interesting creepy authentic old-timey photos throughout. The author tried to weave them into the story, and hilariously failed, but they're still cool pictures and they help the story move along. 

I recommend this book to people who would prefer to read words rather than stare at their open palms. This book was significantly better than trying to read my hands, which have no words on them whatsoever, unless I'm trying to remember someone's name or other important data, in which case, my hands say 'Tuesday, 7:30.' Again: the book would win. Marginally.

Book Review: Before I Go To Sleep, by SJ Watson

So this was an interesting book, made even more so by the fact that I have absolutely no idea how I came to decide to read it. I must have read about it on some blog, only I can't find it on any of the regular blogs I read. At some point I put it in my library queue and that was that.

I got the audio CD version, and found that it was the first book on CD that I've ever heard that was narrated by a woman. So that was a change of pace, and one that took a lot of getting used to as it was a British woman no less. 

The book itself is kindof a bit of Memento where the lead character has amnesia and can only remember things for a short period of time. For this woman, she retains memories until she goes to sleep at night. The next day, she's forgotten everything that's happened in the last 20 years.

There are a number of twists and turns, but almost none of them turn out to be quite as interesting as the book suggests they could be. In the end, the 'real' story is really pretty safe and straightforward. With a premise like this, it could have gone a lot further but never did. It's kind of like Inception, which is a great movie but, let's face it, no one really dreams of anything all that creative at all in it. Tom Hardy says, "Don't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling," and he's dreamed up a larger gun, but why doesn't he dream up like a rainbow-colored space rabbit that has laser beam eyeballs instead? That would have been perfectly within the acceptable world of Inception. I guess a slightly larger gun costs less? 

The prose is written extremely girly. I was 100% positive the author was a woman. It turns out it's a dude. Somehow. So I guess that's good, sort of? I definitely believed that the author had the female perspective down pat. Hope you like about 300 pages of worrying about wrinkles and stretch marks because the character is sad that she's older now!

Anyhoo, I'd say to skip this one. There's a bit of language here and there and the back story you eventually discover will just frustrate you that it's not cooler. Rent Inception instead, and watch it with 3-D glasses, even if you didn't get the 3-D version.

JOBS: The Ongoing Series

5th Job: Detailing Cars for My Dad's Friends, St. George, UT

Let's see, where were we? 

When last we discussed jobs, I had just finished up talking about my job cleaning up The Boulders building project for my Dad. The sequel to that job was in detailing cars for my Dad's somewhat well-to-do-friends.

I started off on my own on this little entrepreneurial endeavor, but added my sister, Hillary. We both needed the money, which if I recall was $20 a car - a pretty decent deal by today's standards, plus I think Dad's friends let us clean their cars every 2 weeks or so. So there was a pretty significant amount of charity going on here.

Still, that put gas in the tank, and we got to drive around in a Mercedes Benz and whatever the 1992 version of Escalades were. We would drive them to our house and wash and wax them and then pretty thoroughly detail them inside. Today I want to say that each car took about 3 hours? Possibly? 

Our biggest ever 'score' came from one of the guys let us detail his ski-doos. That was a big money job, although I found it nearly impossible to clean ski-doos. They were already clean-they lived in the water, after all. So washing them just felt like I was being too ironic for my own good. But we washed them and then tried to wax them, but the was didn't really do anything. They seemed to be made out of an odd plasticy material. At the time I guessed fiberglass, but I strongly suspect it was closer to 'completely normal plastic.'

Today I would absolutely clean those ski-doos with some kind of hard water remover, and I would try to find a special wax that would actually do something other than just make them all slightly slipperier ski doos that nonetheless look identical to how they looked 10 minutes ago. There's got to be a special product for that. I would also probably advertise, so I could get more clients than 2 of my Dad's friends. It was around this time in my life that others probably realized I was not exactly destined for greatness.