How did I get here? Chapter 1

I've decided to come back to blogging to track my new activities here in Blacksburg. John and I moved here in October of 2008.

First, a bit of background. We moved here to Blacksburg, VA (best known as the home of Virginia Tech) from Lawrenceville, GA (a suburb of Atlanta). So many reasons for the move... Most of all the two hours of my life that I lost each day to traffic there. My 16 mile commute between Lawrenceville and Alpharetta took between 45 minutes and an hour and a half each way --- that's a big chunk of life to give up. We lived about an hour from downtown, so we never really took advantage of all there was to see and do in downtown Atlanta, because it was too far to try to drive home after if we went out for drinks, things getting out at midnight meant we'd have to drive another hour to get home... etc. Another huge factor was that John had been fortunate enough to find a job that allows him to work from home. Since his job is completely portable, it made the idea of relocating much less worrisome.

When we started looking at moving, we thought about all kinds of places. We wanted a place that was more accepting of our semi-liberal viewpoint. We wanted a place where we could walk to places (or take public transportation) - libraries, restaurants, whatever -- we just didn't want to be so car-bound. We wanted to be able to get to things we could enjoy and get home without having to travel 2 hours round trip. Most importantly, we wanted someplace where the traffic and commute wouldn't eat up huge portions of our lives.

For the past 3 years (2009 will be our 4th), we've made an annual trip out to the west coast to see Dave Matthews Band at the Gorge Amphitheater over Labor Day weekend. We started seeking our new hometown by looking around on the west coast as add-ons to that trip. We checked out Portland, Seattle, Bend... Nothing seemed to be the right place, and we couldn't envision picking up and moving everything based on spending one or two days in a city.

I'm the type of person who could travel with the wind and not spend too much time looking back. John is a little more structured - less of a gambler, maybe, than I am. So, after our last unsuccessful hunt for a new city ended and I began thinking about how we could solve the problem of not knowing the options well enough, a solution came to me. Why not Blacksburg? It met the criteria we were looking for - small town, we could walk to the city center (a library, restaurants, coffee shops--all within walking distance!), no traffic to speak of (the town is six miles long, end to end). Best of all, John is already intimately familiar with the city, since he spent four years of his life going to college here! I suggested it, we thought it over, and the decision was made.

The next challenge was going to be finding a job for me. Blacksburg is pretty small, so work options are limited. I began applying at Virginia Tech for a variety of positions. Then I found an up and coming company that had just the right type of work for me. I don't need to show up on everyone's feed for activities around our company, so I'll just say it's a great company and I was excited to apply. I applied and did a phone interview, and then they asked if I could come in for a face-to-face. I took a Friday off and John and I traveled in, I did the interview. I followed up a couple of weeks later only to find that someone else had been selected for the job. At this point I'd basically given up on making the move. Between the beginning of 2008 when all this had started and the time that I'd gotten the rejection from this company, the economy had tanked. I figured it was best to just stop everything, batten down the hatches and just try to ride out the economic breakdown.