the search is on

Tomorrow morning, we hop a flight to Manchester, NH and from there we'll drive up to the NEK (that's North East Kingdom, Vermont also known as BFE - and you'll have to figure that acronym out for yourselves.) The object? Find a place to live. And, also, attend some wedding in New Hampshire on Saturday. But mostly, I'm interested in the finding a place to live part.

We've got four places lined up to look at, and hopefully one of those will be both livable and within our budget. It doesn't have to be perfect; buying a house is on next year's agenda, so wherever we live, it will be more temporary than most places I've lived since college.

OH - and, yes, Jay's PhD defense was yesterday, and YES, he survived. Mostly. One of his committee members... well, some of his commentary afterwards seemed like a "mine is bigger than yours, so there" kind of thing. And generally, I think the man is just not a happy guy. But as one of the other students put it: critical is good, but there's no need to be an asshole. But Jay got enough signatures to pass, though he needs to do more revision work than he hoped. So it will still be another 2 to 6 months before the Doctor Jay is official. Fortunately, it doesn't affect the job in Vermont much. Minor salary difference is all.

In the meantime, I recently had an encounter with a person who reminded me of an important lesson I learned that had a rather large impact on my attitude toward life... or perhaps it was just representative of my pigheadedness at an early age. I don't have time to do the story justice tonight, but I'll post when I get back on the 4th. Anyone else have any formative experiences in the pre- "age of reason" years?