Moving

No, not right now. I just realized that I've lived in this town longer than any other since leaving home for college at 17. While at college, I had five different homes and every time I moved there were more boxes that remained unpacked. However, for me, moving has always remained a reliable method for purging unused and unwanted...stuff. I find that, really, it's the best way to clean. A little extreme maybe, but there you go.

Tom and I both spent most of our lives growing up in Washington. After college we decided it was time to live somewhere else, to get away and try something new. At the end of my senior year I had fulfilled my contract with the art department, all courses the college required and many more, and still came up 11 credits short. This was due to the credit system the art department used; one credit for every two class hours, instead of one for one like every other program. I decided to arrange an internship instead of paying for another quarter of school.

We chose San Luis Obispo, California as our new home. By coincidence, a speaker in Professional Practices class had just hired a magazine editor from there and offered to put me in touch with him. This man, I think his name was Bill, suggested I call the president of a large printing company in town to ask for an internship. I did so and managed to convince him to hire me. After waiting a week for the promised application, I called Human Resources directly and told them Dick had hired me, but I needed to fill out an application. They sent it out and we were on our way.

When we chose San Luis, it wasn't because we had been there or had family there; it just sounded nice. We packed up all our stuff, drove 18 hours and bought a newspaper. The house we found was in Pismo Beach about six blocks from the ocean. It had a big deck on the roof of the garage, quiet neighbors and a landlord who smoked pot and couldn't care less what we did to the place. The only down side was that the house was for sale. We used to play games with the real estate agents and would-be buyers such as asking them to tell us if they saw any fleas, because we were having such a problem with them. Another favorite was guiding them to the front door and letting them yank the door knob right off instead of explaining the trick of turning it a little before pulling. We managed to squeeze a year and a half out of that house.

On New Year's Eve 1997, our landlord called to let us know the house had been sold and we had 30 days to move. After about 15 minutes of panic we pulled out an atlas and chose three cities to research. Prescott, Arizona became our next destination and it was time to load up a U-Haul and move on to our next home.