Serendipity
I had a flat tire yesterday, one big blowout of a flat where the tire literally comes apart. The flat in itself is not remarkable considering the tires on the Rodeo are ancient and need to be replaced. I was waiting until we closed on the house to do that, but the left rear tire decided it didn't want to wait and had to give up the ghost last night. But what was remarkable was how and where it happened. It did not happen while I was driving 60 MPH down Hwy 290. Instead, it popped while I was stopped at a traffic light. Yes, I was completely stopped and not moving and therefore I avoided the risk of rolling the car over on it's roof which sometimes happens with Rodeos when they blow a tire. And it also just happened to occur right next to a very wide median that I could hop on which would provide a perfectly safe place to change a tire. Except that I had no spare tire with me. It was in the carport at Garden Villa and as far as I knew, it was not a usable tire. And all the tire stores I knew of closed at 5:30 or 6:00 pm and here it was already 5:45 pm and I was a long way from any of them. So I called Rob (who was still in North Austin) and asked him to swing by the house and pick up the old spare and bring it to me because maybe, just maybe, we had pulled it off due to a slow leak and it might at least get me to the house. In the meantime, I figured I'd walk over to Wal-Mart and wander around in the air conditioning because damn, it was hot yesterday. On my walk to Wal-mart I looked up and saw that there a tire place in the same shopping center. I figured they were either closed or closing soon, but I might be able to at least find out how much a new tire was going to cost. So I walked over there and discovered they were open until 7:00 pm! That meant I had time for Rob to get there with the spare and I could just get a new tire put on that rim. One small problem though - we had no money for a new tire. However, the tire store just happened to be close enough to my parent's house that my dad could get there in time and front me the money for the new tire. Which is exactly what happened. Rob brought the rim, dad paid for the tire and then Rob, bless him, changed the flat for me. If that tire had gone flat at any other place at any other time, there's no way I could have had a new tire on the car and been back on the road the same night. Simply amazing.

Plodding along
I've been spending about 1/2 my time at the trailer and the other half at the house. There is much stuff that Rob and I need to go through, but we have not made much progress on that yet. We also did not close on the house on Friday as planned and that's put a bit of a wrench in things, but hopefully it will get worked out next week. There's only a month left to get everything out of the house, but we have to wait on the money from closing before we can get a storage space so it's gonna be one hell of a crazy ride to get everything done once we do finally close.

The new job has been going well. Right now it is very easy work, but it will get a little more challenging in the next week or so as I take on more duties. I work with a great bunch of people and that's really the most important part of it. Monday and Tuesday are very, very busy days and I've learned it's not a good idea to plan any evening activities for those days - best to just drive home and collapse on the couch. Things do slow down the rest of the week and it doesn't seem like this is going to be one of those call center jobs where I'm left incapable of doing anything in the evenings all week long. And well, you can just imagine how excited I am that I don't have to work weekends!

I have learned a thing or two this week about living in an RV trailer. For one, no matter how long I spray the top of my head with the shower, I cannot get my brand of cream rinse out of my hair. There's just not enough water pressure. And I've learned that if you have an RV propane stove, you really need a good set of pots and pans because you can't get a good big flame and the cheap ones just won't distribute the heat. But I'll be buying an electric skillet instead of expensive pots and pans because electricity is included in my lot rent, but propane I have to pay for out of my pocket. The less I use the stove, the more money I save.

In other news, the old hot-rod crowd I used to run with over 20 years ago now meets up in a parking lot on Saturday nights very close to where my RV trailer is parked. I wandered over there this weekend and saw some folks I haven't seen in a very long time. I haven't sat around and talked about engines and camshafts and nitrous and rear end gears in ages and it was fun to dip my toes into that again. I can't say that I'll be building a race car again any time soon, but the thought did cross my mind. Who knows what my future will bring from this point?

Lots of changes
There has been much going on that Rob and I have not blogged about, but the basics are that we are splitting up and going off in different directions. It wasn't my choice, but that's the way it is and I will just have to make the best of it.

The house has been sold and in five weeks, I will officially no longer live in South Austin for the first time in my entire life. I had an impossible time finding a rental since I've only had part-time income for the last year, plus I have dogs. Finding a new place to live wasn't working out very well and I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I mentioned to my parents at one point that I thought I might have to just buy a used RV to live in and what a crazy idea that was! Well, my parents owned an RV for many, many years and it turns out that they didn't think it was such a crazy idea at all. In fact, they liked the idea so much that they went out looking for one. I didn't know they were doing this until they called me to say they had found a great deal on a gently used RV and asked me to come take a look at it, which I did.

Now Rob and I had talked about doing this same thing one day, selling the house and buying an RV, but for me that dream had always been in the context of our relationship. I'd never really considered it in any other way (or so I thought at the time, more on that in a later post.) So there I was on the sales lot with only a couple of hours to make a decision about this crazy idea. I puttered around the trailer a bit - stood in the shower, laid on the bed, pretended to cook in the kitchen, etc. and started weighing the pros and the cons. But there was just too much to sort out in such a short period of time so I stopped trying to do that and instead, I took a look at how my gut instincts felt about the whole idea. I was surprised to discover that I didn't have any strong feelings one way or the other. This was real different from how I'd felt when looking at the few rentals where I might have been able to get approved. That was always a "No, don't do it," feeling. But while there wasn't a "No" feeling, there also wasn't a feeling of "Yes, this is the way to go." either. It felt more like... well, like I was deciding what to have for breakfast or what to wear to work. How odd. I considered this to be a major, life changing decision and yet it didn't "feel" anything like that at all. And I thought to myself, "If it doesn't matter one way or the other, why not go for it?" So I did and became the owner of a 2001 Sunnybrook Mobile Scout FSK 27 foot travel trailer.

WHAT A LONG , STRANGE TRIP IT'S BEEN

I know I haven't posted here in a very long time (damn you facebook!) and I will not be a contributor to depthmarker from this day forward.
If you wanna you can find me at FullMetalJackass
If you don't wanna , then so long.
it's been fun.

Full-time employment, here I come
I have a new job, but it's not just any job. There's a business that I've had my eye on since about 2006 and when I saw the job opening posted on craigslist, I jumped at the chance to apply and wrote the longest cover letter I've ever written in my life in the hope of at least landing an interview. It worked. I got the first interview and then made it to the second interview and now I'm hired. Although I'm only hired as a temporary seasonal employee, there is a possibility to stay on full-time since one of the temps will be moved into a permanent position in October. That person might be me, or it might someone else, but either way, I'm thrilled to work there even if it's just for a short time.

I love my other part-time job, but unfortunately it has to go. I can't do both due to commute time involved with the new job and given that the part-time job is currently only paying about $50/week with no guarantee of an increase in income any time soon... well, time to resign. It was fun and I lost a lot of weight doing it, but I can't live on $50/week.