We bought a House!
As previously mentioned, I’m moving! If you haven’t read that earlier post, that’s okay! It’s long, and some stuff has changed. This one has all the gorey details and currently accurate information. I’m moving to Georgia. We’ll be in the mountains. I’m pumped.
The Short Version
I’m moving to Georgia! We’ll be living in a sub 600 sqft home, on a couple of acres. Our expenses will be reduced dramatically, which means that if we can keep something close to our current income levels, we can pay this place off quickly. With that, we’re on track to be debt free with very low (sub $500) monthly expenses in 5-7 years.
We closed on the house yesterday, and we’ll move in March.
Moving
We live outside DC right now. Our new home is 600 miles away. That move is going to be rough. We have some plans to make it a little easier, but moving sucks no matter how you go about it.
To top things off, March to June we’ll each be traveling a bunch, both together and separately. Some of this will be related to the move, some of it will be work related. This is not the ideal situation to be in right after you move in to a house, but we’ll survive.
And at some point in the middle of all that, we have a vacation scheduled. The work travel and the moving travel will be stressful, even the travel part of the vacation will be stressful, but we’ll have a home to come home to in between traveling. I’m really pleased about that.
After June, we’ll be well settled in to our new home, and we won’t have to travel much for a good while. I am very much looking forward to that.
Some Details
Our new house is in the middle of absolute nowhere (or at least, as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get in the north GA mountains) which is going to be a very new and different experience for us. It’s the kind of place where the Postal Service won’t deliver, off of one of those roads that they make horror movies about, you know? I’m so terribly excited.
The closing proccess was an absolute mess, as I’ve been told it often is. If I was supposed to see you while we were in GA, I appologize! So many things happened so quickly that I was hardly able to keep up with all of them. (But that’s a story for another day! The story for today is that I have a house!) The good news is that we’ll be in town often over the next few weeks, and we’ll be sticking around for good very soon!
So, for all my Georgia friends, we’re probably going to be an hour or so from you. We’re about an hour and a half from everything, really. If you need more specifics, and you know me well enough to have a way to request them, reach out. I’ll fill you in on the details. Come hang out with us, or reach out and we can make plans to meet up further south.
Work
In my last post on the subject, I mentioned that it was possible that I wouldn’t have a job with my current employer after we move. Based on conversations I’ve had in the last week, it now seems very unlikely that they will continue to employ me, so I am actively looking for work.
I will post some more details on the job hunt in a subsequent post, but here are the high points:
- I’m looking for remote work, because I’ll be living in the mountains.
- I’m looking for work in Technical Support, Systems Administrator, Dev-Ops, or web development
- Until I find a full time remote position, I am also open to contract and freelance work as a web developer, web content manager, or writer.
- I’ve been at this for 10 years, and I’m good at it.
There’s a lot of other stuff to say about the job hunt, but it’ll all go in my job hunt post, which should go up today or tomorrow.
Free Time
This move should result in a dramatic uptick in my freetime, and in the amount of mental energy I have to devote to projects. I expect my output to increase pretty dramatically. You’ll see some of that on this blog, or on my neocities page, or on patreon. This means Podcasts, fiction, and even computer games , and I’m super thrilled about it.
I’ve built a new system for working with my teams (that’s taking too much credit. I researched a bunch of pieces of software that do the things I want, installed the top four options, tested them extensively , and picked my favorite.) I’ll be sharing the details of those things with all of our team members via email. IF I missed you, let me know!
Analog Revolution
Analog Revolution Records will reopen at some point in 2018, in a new location. The plan right now is still pretty nebulous, but the end result will be a retail outlet for our new and vintage vinyl and stereo equipment, as well as the CDs and casettes we produce in house, the books we publish, and the rest of the stuff we used to have for sale in our store.
The most likely scenario is that we’ll open a booth in an antique mall in the Woodstock/Kennesaw area, until an affordable standalone retail space becomes available in the same area. A less likely scenario is that we will open a booth in an antique mall somewhere in the North Georgia Mountains until an affordable standalone retail space becomes available in the same area. An even less likely scenario is that we’ll go straight in to an affordable retail space.
Regardless of which option we end up with, the upshot is that Analog Revolution is coming back, and you can’t imagine how excited I am for that. (This, too, will get it’s own post in the near future as more details resolve themselves. You’ll get sick of hearing about it, I’m sure.)
Blogging
Now that all of this has been taken care of, I’ll resume business as usual. That is to say, I’ll return my blogging to more tech, music, news, politics, open culture, etc. The only difference is that I’ll start mixing in more posts on sustainable and off-grid living, techniques for expense reduction, gardening, and remote work stuff.
Basically, I’m back on my bullshit, and I’m sure you’ll all be pleased to hear it.
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