Since the day we moved to Santa Barbara two or twenty years ago, we've been talking about where we're going to move next. We decided on Chicago because Aaron had been following me around the west coast for almost five years now and he wanted to be closer to his friends and family. Great; I'd be close to my extended family and it works for both of our careers and where else do I have to be anyway? Nowhere, that's where.
We should have been there already. We should be finishing the unpacking right now, finding the best dog parks, beginning starter jobs (the jobs we take out of desperation to pay off the move and quit after a few months), but then something magical happened: we got out of debt, discovered we were making way more money than we thought, and figured out we could afford our current living arrangement without roommates.
All personal issues aside, I hate living with roommates. I always have since I had my first non-family roommate when I was 12 at boarding school. I hate sharing my space with someone else. I hate coming home to fnid someone else in my living space. I'm very territorial. We were watching Planet Earth last night--well, this morning at 4am to wind down from my bar shift--the Weedland or Great Marijuana ones, I don't know, it was late and Sigourney Weaver was obsessing about grass. Anyway, a fox was trying to steal a goose egg and the goose was FREAKING out, and that's me. I flap my wings, squak really loudly, and generally make it known that though the roommate has as much right to be there as me, it's MY space dammit and you will NOT encroach THANKYOUVERYMUCHGOODDAYSIR.
Aaron doesn't count as a roommate because I love him. Plus, he does all the laundry.
We have dogs so we need a house. You cannot find a liveable house in Santa Barbara for less than $1500 a month. I am not willing to commute from Carpenteria because I hate factoring traffic into my desperate run to get to wherever I need to be. So we lived in roommate scenarious of various degrees of disastrousness for about two years until we kicked the last roommates out upon making our final credit card payment and have been settled and satisfied since. It's amazing what a healthy home situation will do to improve one's outlook on one's town. We decided to stay in Santa Barbara for another year and take it easy, which for me means working three jobs and for Aaron means working two.
Unfortunately, we've both been in funks since then. Since I graduated from school, I was not actively working towards any specific goal. Aaron was getting frustrated with the lack of quality people to hang out with, and we fell into the now-common mid-twenties what-the-hell-am-I-doing-with-my-life depression.
Aaron decided he wanted to go to school and started looking at the culinary institute at the city college here. Even though he has been in the industry for ten years and has worked at really impressive places and has run really not-so-impressive dives, apparently experience isn't enough even for trades anymore and you need a degree to move onto the next level. Then he got a hair up his ass and decided he has to go to a good culinary school--the ones that cost anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 a year and don't qualify for government grants. After some quick thinking on my part, I put the kibosh to that, convincing him that it would take at least ten years to pay off that debt and he probably wouldn't even be working full-time at that point, since we plan to have kids by then and he's going to be a stay-at-home-daddy (see what I mean about meticulously planning every aspect of my life? I'm obsessed, but Aaron's on board so it's all good). After a few days of him thinking moving to Providence, RHODE ISLAND would be the best thing for us ("You could commute to Boston!" See: traffic), I started looking for culinary schools at other random cities: Austin, Chicago, and...oh, Seattle! I gently broached the topic with him, and all of a sudden, everything snapped back into place.
Here are the problems with moving to Chicago, or really, anywhere that's not the west coast: the weather. I guess that's just one problem. I grew up on the west coast, and save for the two years I went to boarding school outside of DC, haven't lived anywhere else. I like my climate mild. I like my winters green. I like my summers arid (i.e., non-humid). Unfortunately, so do a lot of other people; that's why the cost of living here is so ridiculously high.
Except, it's not that expensive in Seattle. We could get a bigger house for less rent than we're spending now . We already know we like the city; the reason we left initially was to get away from the bad memories (see the 2003 entries). There are actual seasons there, so it's not as monotonous as Santa Barbara. There's a bit of the publishing industry in Seattle, but there's also a lot of other industry (see: Microsoft. Starbucks. UW. WaMu. Etc. They need copywriters and editors).
So anyway, that's why we're moving to Seattle. We know we like it and we know we can afford it. There's a good music scene for the Aaron, a good outdoorsy scene for the dogs, and a good job scene for the Morgan.