Of course, I would love to cut to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”… Yeah, I can’t get it out of my head either. It’s such a great song.

Sidenote: I got surprised about the $3M buyout of the “Where I’ve Been” by TripAdvisor. Yeap, turns out it’s nothing.

After 17… seventeen years in the states… these are the states I’ve touched (and one province from going over Niagara Falls). You know, I’ve done a huge circle.

For the 80th time, I am currently employed at MoCo, Inc. in sunny-right-now-but-it’ll-snow-soon-enough Minneapolis, Minnesota. Today concluded my first week of a full-time job. Tiring, but definitely something new.

Thankfully, I was able to find two nice roommates with a house about 4 miles north of my job. Let me take you back to some of the happenings that led up to this.

The Hunt

After finding out that there would be some kind of relocation assistance from the company, I left Amir’s place in Madison, Wisconsin for the second time and headed up.

The journey was yet another 6 hours of driving. There was a nice 6 hour drive from Champaign to get to Madison. Plus the 4 hours it took to get there from Cincinnati. If I ever wanted to go back home this route… it would take me a full day’s drive. At least, I’ll get to visit some people on the way back down.

There were a couple of places I found through Craigslist. I found a group of buildings that were owned by this lovely management group, but wasn’t in the best of neighborhoods. I wanted to live as close to the city as possible, probably because I had this really Romantic notion of the “city”. Of course, I don’t really do too much of that to begin with, so I don’t know why I was fooling myself.

Another place was about 30 minutes West of the city, lodged in between the millions of lakes here in Minnesota. Rent was cheap… but location wasn’t too good.

All throughout this time, I was getting situated in the city… soon finding out that the streets of Minneapolis is crazy. The numbering system for the streets are a little bit more sane than St. Paul (they tell me that city was designed by drunk Irishmen), but naming streets as numbers followed by a “Street” or “Avenue” which were also followed by a compass heading (1st Ave N & 1st St N… it doesn’t help that the abbreviation of street is the same as the “st” following the 1…) wasn’t too helpful either. I just went ahead and said screw it to the numbers, and went off of the streets that had names… like Hennepin and Washington.

Right. So I ended up ending the search at this very suburban city called Columbia Heights.

The Job

It’s a nice small company, just like how I like them. Quickly, I learned the names of all my coworkers in the web development department. Going out to lunch everyday with them really helped in this process. I think I’m going to keep doing that… even though previous budget would freak out.

The building has a great view of Minneapolis, even though I have to stand from my cubicle to see it. I’m growing to like cubicles, as long as they’re low like these: They definitely create pockets of productivity now and then.

I like what we’re working on, and that we’re developing things in the B2C side. I also like how I’m learning more and more of the stuff that I believe in.

Closing

Looks like this might be pretty good for a while. I don’t know for how long… it could be short, it could be long… but it’s fine the way things are.

Kinda. You’ll see what I mean in the next posts to come.