Neo-Academics at Home

Neko relaxing in the front seat at a gas stop...

Our back seat, taken over by Neko's riding space

Day 2 has concluded, and fortunately with much less drama than the first time.  Although I am still not a fan of moving.

We set out from Bloomington, IL around 2PM and arrived in Charleston, WV around 10PM, without much craziness.  The cat has been surprisingly calm, even when his diazepam should theoretically no longer have an effect.  That’s notable because every time we’ve taken him to the vet has been a nightmare.  Perhaps he is adjusting to us moving him randomly.

We did get one unfortunate piece of news today – apparently the grass is so high at our house that the city put a notice on the front door.  Our real estate agent, Ronnie Hooks, called us, herself having been called by one of our neighbors, to tell us this fantastic news.  So that we didn’t arrive immediately needing to mow the lawn, she was also kind enough to set up someone to mow the lawn before we get there, which is especially nice considering she’s already been paid and has no financial reason to help us anymore.  I suppose she’s just that awesome.

We do arrive in VA Beach tomorrow, although we won’t be staying in the house.  The electricity won’t be turned on until Wednesday morning, so we thought sleeping on an air mattress without air conditioning in the dark our first night wasn’t as pleasant a way to break the house in as we’d like.  We will be visiting the house, though – my wife keeps wondering what terrible things have gone wrong with it in the three months since we saw it last.  I don’t think it will be much different, but she doesn’t seem to believe me.  Fingers crossed…

About two weeks ago, we bought several bulk bundles of boxes, a few hundred feet of bubble wrap, and assorted packing materials from our local Minneapolis U-Line distributor.  We spent those two weeks packing.  This was a substantial step up from the last time we moved – that packing process started about two days before we were supposed to move and ended about two days afterward.

This time, we thought, we’ll be proactive.  We’re moving across the country (hiring professional movers and everything!), so we should do things right.  Virtually everything small we owned was in a box of some sort.  Anything larger (like our bookcases, although they were disassembled), we left out.  Apparently, that was an incorrect course of action.  When the movers arrived, they came in, looked at our pile of stuff, and sighed.

I didn’t take that to be a good sign, and it wasn’t.  Evidently – and I wish someone, such as, for example, the moving company, had told us this – movers can only take objects wrapped in blankets and packing tape or packed in a corrugated cardboard box.  So the movers set to wrapping every single object we owned in blankets and miles of packing tape.  At one point, I even drove to the Container Store to buy extra boxes into which we could put the smaller non-cardboard boxes.  The movers arrived around 6PM (they described this as “in the afternoon”) and left at 5:30AM.  Oh yes – they spent nearly 12 hours packing our one-bedroom apartment into their truck.  Admittedly, we have quite a bit of stuff.  But 12 hours?  We moved nearly the same amount ourselves in a U-Haul to this apartment two years ago in less than 5 hours.

And it cost us too.  The $1800 estimate we were given was of course based on too little information – an extra $800 in space from the estimate was needed, plus $600 in extra packing materials (including nearly $100 in packing tape!).  We ended up with around a $3000 bill for moving, which I think is a little steep.

The scheduling also put a dent in our plans.  Originally, we assumed the movers would be arriving around 2PM Saturday and spend maybe 6-7 hours loading.  After they left, we were planning to clean the apartment, set up the inflatable bed for our last night, and have a nice relaxing transition to our 24 hours worth of driving.  We had even made an appointment for Comcast to come between 8 and 10AM to pick up their equipment, and we told our landlady that we’d be out by 10.

At 6AM, I went to sleep for a nice 5-hour nap while my wife started cleaning (as one of us needed to be rested in order to drive the 8 hours later that day).  At 11AM, I woke to find my wife still cleaning, although she’d called our landlady to delay our move-out until 1PM and had napped next to me for an hour (although I didn’t notice it happen).  Comcast still hadn’t arrived.  I ran the excess 60 lbs. of clothes that we weren’t taking with us to Goodwill and got back to help with the final cleaning and loading the car.  Our landlady knocks at the door at 1:15PM with her carpet cleaner and basically shoved us out the door.  She promised she’d deliver the Comcast box to the company.  And I don’t think we’ll be getting our security deposit back.

So finally, we are able to pack the car in earnest.  That would be fine except that we never had time to test-load the car and have way too much stuff.  Add that to the fact that we decided to buy a N2N 36″ soft-sided pet crate for our cat to live in during the trip.  Now, this crate is pretty awesome, but it is huge.  It takes up about 75% of the back seat, and I can’t see out the back window.  On the bright side, the cat’s litter box, food, bed, and a cardboard piece for scratching all fit in it simultaneously.  The cat has even taken to standing on top of the litter box inside the crate.  Which is really amusing when we take a corner a little too fast.

As I think I mentioned before, our stuff is being held by the movers for about a month while we install new flooring, new paint, and new drywall in our new house in Virginia Beach.  So we needed to pack enough items to live for a month in our little Saturn sedan, which came down to an inflatable queen bed, clothes, tools, assorted pots and pans, and the cat.  It’s stuffed.  When I open the trunk, various bags literally pop out.

But it does fit.  We stuff everything in, fed the cat some diazepam, and set off.  That’s when the meowing started.  Apparently, preventing the cat from feeling anxiety enables him to express anger instead.  Fortunately, we found the secret to stopping the meowing – my wife let the cat out of his gigantic crate and simply let him sleep in her lap.  Problem solved.

As I told my wife earlier today, I consider this first day of the move not my first act as a new professor but my final act as a graduate student (even though my defense was several weeks ago, the school officially graduates people at the end of the month – in this case, 5/31).  This of course means that if it had gone smoothly and as expected, it just wouldn’t have felt right.

So now, 30 hours into this adventure, we are in Bloomington, IL at an Extended Stay America.  And surprisingly enough, in terms of the overall trip, we are on time.  I can only hope that tomorrow will be a little smoother…

Several major changes have occurred at Thoughts of a Neo-Academic.

1. We have moved from neoacademic.wordpress.com to neoacademic.com.
   The migration allows us to use custom features not possible at wordpress.com.
   If you are currently accessing the blog via an RSS feed (e.g. Google Reader, Feedburner), you should change the feed to this new address: http://neoacademic.com/feed/
2. We have separated professional posts from personal news.  Professional posts now appears in the center column (as they always have), while snippets of personal news appear in the right sidebar (click the More links to access the full text).  If you read via an RSS feed, you’ll no longer receive personal posts.  I’m looking into ways to address this.
3. You might have noticed that I am using the term “We.”  That’s because my wife has promised that she is going to start posting in the Personal section.  We will likely have many updates there as we move across the country and begin working on our new house in Virginia Beach starting this coming weekend.

I’ve heard from many people that meat from animals raised in pastures (free-range, grass-eating, no hormone injections, etc) purchased straight from the farmer is not only much cheaper than supermarket meat, but also tastes much better too.  In Minneapolis, we did take advantage of CSA programs (which I highly recommend, for the same reasons), but we were never able to get pastured meat, primarily because we never had the freezer space.

You see, when you buy meat from the farmer, it’s only really economical for them to sell it to you in large quantities – for example, 1/8 cow (one of the smallest units of beef) is about 55 pounds.  Some places only sell units as small as 1/4 or 1/2 cows.  So you really need a dedicated freezer to house all the meat once you buy it.

Now that we’re moving to a real house in Virginia Beach, we have room for a chest freezer, which means 1/4 cow won’t be hard to store.  So I went to eatwild.com (highly recommended) to find the closest pasture, only to find a huge list without any easy way to figure out where in the state they were actually located and what they had.  Thus, I spent half an hour producing the following…

BEHOLD!  A Google custom map displaying all locations to buy pastured meat in Virginia!

By the look of it, the best places for us in Virginia Beach will be Holly Grove Farm (beef and raw milk) and Full Quiver Farm (chicken, turkey, eggs, beef and pork).  Lovers Retreat Farm (beef, goat cheese, duck eggs, goose eggs, guinea eggs) is a little further, but I bet will be worth it.  There are a few places that have lamb as well, but it looks like they’ll be a longer drive…

Not us, but sometimes it feels like it... image courtesy somedaynurse.wordpress.com

We’re now only about a week out from our last day in Minneapolis before moving to Virginia Beach.    We’ve been packing for about four days, trying to figure out what we’re taking with us and what we’re not.  Of the things that we aren’t, we sold 72 books at used book stores and are in the process of getting rid of about 50 items on Craigslist, only about 4 of which have been sold so far.  We considered a yard sale, but we don’t really have enough inventory to justify it, on top of the fact that we’re in an apartment building, which makes the whole thing logistically tricky.

Of the things that we are taking, we’ve got 7 small boxes, 7 medium boxes, and 3 large boxes now full of things from our living room, which includes two desktop computers.  I’ve also disassembled 5 bookcases (so far), as it’s less expensive to have movers take several planks of wood than an assembled bookcase.  Plus IKEA bookcases tend to disintegrate if you try to move them whole.

In further preparation, we took our cat, Neko, to the vet in order to get his teeth cleaned.  He has several chipped teeth, and more surprising to us, several missing teeth.  Evidently his pre-shelter life was a little worse than we thought.  We’ve also been trying to connect with a vet on the phone in order to talk about some anti-anxiety medication for him.

Oh yes.  You read that correctly.  We’re going to drug our cat.  You see, he’s a little anxious, probably due to that aforementioned pre-shelter life.  Any time he’s in the car, he curls up into a corner of his carrier, stops purring, and moans very loadly every couple of minutes.  So the thought of him in a 22-hour, 1361-mile drive to Virginia with him moaning for all 22 of those hours seemed a little more than we could take.

We’re splitting the drive over 3 days, which means we have to find cat-friendly hotels in three cities: Bloomington, IL, Charleston, WV, and Virginia Beach.  You may wonder why we have to find a hotel in Virginia Beach – well, there’s no power in our new house at the moment, and Dominion Power refuses to turn it on unless the circuit breaker inside the house is off.  Of course, we could have them send a tech out anyway.  But if the tech discovers that the breaker is on, then he won’t turn on the power anyway, and also won’t call or notify us in any way that he couldn’t do so.  Then, we’d show up, find the breaker was on, and have to reschedule the tech, which for some reason takes 2 days.  So instead of sending him out there anyway and risking an extra day without power, we’re taking the safer route, and scheduling him for the day after we should arrive in town.  And yes, I anticipate great customer service from this company.

Anyway, this will be quite a drive.  Here’s the route.  It’s technically about an hour faster through Chicago, but the thought of delays in Chicago traffic were quite unpleasant, we we’re swinging south instead.  Here’s the list of the moderate-sized and the interesting cities that we’ll pass through:

1. Minneapolis, MN (start)
2. St. Paul, MN
3. Eau Claire, WI (brief stop)
4. Madison, WI
5. Rockford, IL
6. Bloomington, IL (overnight)
7. Urbana-Champaign, IL
8. Indianapolis, IN
9. Dayton, OH
10. Chillicothe, OH
11. Charleston, WV (overnight, crossing the Smokys in the morning)
12. Charlottesville, VA
13. Richmond, VA
14. Williamsburg, VA
15. Virginia Beach, VA (arrival!)

That’s right – about 3:30PM today, I passed my dissertation defense and am semi-officially a Ph.D.  I say semi-officially because there is some paperwork in the way, but for the most part… it’s done.  It’s an odd feeling.

The defense went well.  As I mentioned last time, the dissertation technically involves two sections: the public presentation and the private examination.  No one showed up to the presentation, so it all got sort of smushed together in my case.  My chair, John Campbell, sent me out of the room before things started so that the committee could meet in private.  I was brought back in a couple of minutes later, and gave my presentation in just over an hour, punctuated by questions throughout.  I was sent outside again, during which the faculty passed ballots around and presumably chatted a bit about my performance, after which my advisor walked out and greeted me with a “Congratulations, Dr. Landers.”

I went through what I’ll call the Four Stages of Ph.D. Achievement, similar to the Seven (correction: Five) Stages of Grief, but slightly less depressing:

1. Shock:  For about 10 minutes, I just shook hands and said “thank you” to my committee members.  It just wasn’t real yet.
2. Giddiness:  After all, this was the conclusion of 21 years of education.  I am, for the first time in recent memory, not a student, and that kind of closure is a little overwhelming.  Everything seemed just a little funny.  And I couldn’t stop smiling.
3. Eerie Calm:  This meant browsing the Internet and reading on Facebook as if nothing had changed from three hours earlier.
4. Acceptance:  Oh right.  I still have a ton of work.

There are only 25 days until we move, and I have many loose ends to tie up, so there’s actually a ton left to do.  When it comes down to it, the dissertation is just another study, only with higher stakes attached to it, and I still have other studies, grant proposals, and projects to worry about.  Plus packing.

A bright point in the storm: after I dropped off my “final oral dissertation defense” form with the signatures of my committee on it, I decided to drop by my Intro to I/O class currently-in-progress.  My teaching assistant, Stacy, had graciously volunteered to run the final class/review session if I didn’t get done with my defense in time to attend.  When I got there, Stacy was going over one of the worksheets with her back to the door.  As I sat down in a chair at the front behind her, a group started clapping over her talking which quite quickly transformed into a full classroom full of applause.  Which, I have to admit, felt pretty good.

Our new house!

It’s done; we own a house!  And it all came down to a last-minute 1.5-mile bike ride through suburban Minneapolis.

Oh yes – I’m serious.  It’s been nearly a month since my last post on home buying, but that’s because not much happened until yesterday.  In the three weeks until yesterday, all we’d been doing was randomly stopping in Home Depots and Lowe’s to check out carpet, laminate, paint colors and types, and so on; we picked a carpet and a brand of laminate.  We also found homeowner’s insurance, which is surprisingly difficult when you live anywhere vaguely close to coastal area.  We are technically 1500 feet from a bay that attaches to the Atlantic and about 8 miles from the beach, which apparently makes us a “hurricane risk.”  One insurer outright told us that they were unwilling to insure us.  But we eventually found one, and everything related to the loan and closing was taken care of on our end over a week ago.

After doing that, as there wasn’t much left for us to do, we just waited.  So by yesterday, we started to wonder if we were really going to close on this house on time.  The sellers were supposed to do repairs, which it didn’t look like they had done.  We also had never been given instructions on where to send our down payment, so no money had changed hands.

Then yesterday, our loan officer e-mails us our settlement statement – the final summary of our loan – with the April 30 closing date.  Surprise!  I also learned a little more detail on where closing costs go; the statement lists around 15 distinct parties receiving money as a result of this sale.  It was also a bit of a surprise to learn that our closing costs were $1000 greater than our good faith estimate had indicated they would be.

Of course, at this point, it was too late to send a check – we got the statement at 11PM the day before closing, so we obviously couldn’t mail a check that would arrive in time.  No problem – we’ll just do a wire transfer tomorrow.

I wake up this morning to find my wife telling me that I have to initiate the wire transfer as soon as possible, only minutes before she walks out the door to head to work.  She’d just received a call that the closing was scheduled 3 hours later, and wire transfers, according to the company handling our title, take up to 2 hours to go through.  Annoying, but no problem, I think.  I’ll just call the bank and initiate the transfer.   I sit on hold for 20 minutes and finally get a bank representative.  “I’d like to initiate a wire transfer,” I say.

To which the representative replies, “You can only initiate wire transfers at a branch office.”  The problem is that at this point, it’s 2.5 hours until closing, the transfer will take 2 hours, and my wife has the car at work, where she is actively lecturing for at least an hour.  My scooter is also non-functional; we are missing a bolt/nut combo that apparently allows the entire thing to turn on.  So what option did I have left?  That’s right – the bike.

Not having biked since last fall (it’s still cold in Minneapolis in April), I hunted down the bike pump in a closet, pulled the bike from where it was stored, filled the tires to 70PSI, and 2 hours and 10 minutes before closing, took off down suburban Minneapolis streets for the local branch office 1.5 miles away.  7 minutes later (averaging 13 mph over 18 blocks, including several stop lights and signs!), I arrive panting at the branch office.  I sit down with the manager, hand her my ID, give her the routing and account numbers for the title company, and initiate the transfer.  Crisis averted, and only a minute or two late.

After a much deserved break at D’Amico & Sons, I bike back more slowly and arrive home about an hour after I initiated the transfer.  And look – in my e-mail, a message from the loan officer that the wire transfer had been received 15 minutes ago and all was well.  Fantastic.  Nothing like an unnecessary sense of urgency to get the adrenaline moving.

And finally, after all of this, it was quiet.  No messages, no phone calls.  Nothing.  Two hours of silence after our closing supposedly occurred, I receive an e-mail with the subject “Congratulations are in order.”  Finally, we are homeowners.  And it is a process that I hope I never have to go through again!

After four rounds of revisions with my advisor, I have sent my 141-page, 24,821-word dissertation to my committee, and have begun the process of scheduling my oral dissertation defense for the first or second week of May.

Yes, it’s happening.

Frankly, it feels a bit unreal.  If all goes well, I will have a new title within a month.  21 years of education will have finally concluded.  And then we’ll be moving into a new house.  That we bought.

I’ve also been in contact with the powers-that-be at Old Dominion (my new job) to get my lab equipment purchased.  It’s looking pretty good.  When all is said and done, I’ll have 1) my office, 2) a miniature film studio, complete with green screen, 3) a graduate student working lab, 4) a presentation area, complete with projector and 100″ screen, and 5) a 20-system configurable computer lab with a master control system/server.  Let the research begin!

As for the unexpected trouble last time, it turns out that there’s not much to worry about.  The flooring allowance can be dealt with by moving it into an addendum, the agreement we need to sign has probably already been signed and I am the victim of a form letter, and considering our cash reserves, a sizable student loan payment doesn’t really matter – it’s just bank policy to source any non-payroll deposit larger than $500.  So there’s not really anything to worry about.

But these things are always so much clearer in hindsight, aren’t they?

Courtesy organichealthblog.com

Problems with the house.  Apparently, there are several “issues” with our mortgage application that the bank only decided to let us know about two weeks before closing.  Well, technically they sent the letter April 8, but it only arrived April 14.  The problem is that they gave us a deadline of April 18 (four days!) for them to have received everything they asked for, which unfortunately is a fairly tall order.

#1) They don’t like our flooring allowance.  We had it written into the contract that the sellers would provide us several thousand dollars in cash in order to replace the floors in the entire house, which are all quite old and/or badly installed.  Because of this, the bank wants us to decrease the sales price of the house by that same amount, which effectively saddles the sellers with double the cost – not only are they giving us that amount, but they will receive that amount less for the sale of the house.  Which doesn’t make any sense to me at all.  Doesn’t that mean that our flooring allowance would cost the sellers double?  Our real estate agent is trying to figure out what to do about this.

#2) An agreement must be signed by the seller, buyer, and selling agent.  They don’t specify what this agreement is or how to get it.  I don’t think this would be that much of a concern except for the four day time limit.

#3) I received a student loan payment in February of a fairly substantial sum.  We don’t need this money for the down payment, but since it’s on my income history, the bank wants documentation of where it came from, as when you have an FHA loan, you can’t use another loan to pay the mortgage loan.  Why not just ignore it?  Why harass me about it!?

Anyway, I’m a little stressed, since all of this comes in the middle of a daily back-and-forth with my advisor on drafts of my completed dissertation, which I am basically working on from the moment I get up to the moment I go to sleep, every day, with short gaps to deal with the class I’m teaching, writing this blog post, and mundane wastes of time like showering or eating.  I called our loan officer, but she has not returned my call.

…

Update 4/15: Apparently mortgage companies use form letters.  Concern #1 can be dealt by moving the verbiage to an addendum.  Apparently if the wording is in the contact itself, it has to be considered part of the sale, but if it’s an addendum, it doesn’t.  It’s times like these that I wish I had a background in law.  Concern #2 was apparently dealt with on the original contract we signed, not that anyone told me that before.  Concern #3 is legitimate, but just involves me sending a fax to prove that the money was from a student loan and not from some other unspecified, nefarious source.  I’m not sure why it matters, but apparently it does!  In any case: situation resolved.  I just wish it could have occurred a week later!

Courtesy iit.edu/~parkjef

Today, I got a haircut.  And not just any haircut – it was likely the last haircut that I will ever get in Minneapolis.  Now, that wouldn’t be so odd except that I have a regular stylist.  Yes, a stylist.  It’s not like a sought out this stylist; I just came in one day and she gave me a haircut.  And then, almost every time I dropped in for two years after that, she happened to be working that day.

So because I’ve seen her so many times, we struck up conversation randomly as one often does during a haircut.  I’m not sure if such idle chitchat is for my or my stylist’s sake, but it just always seems appropriate – much less awkward than sitting in silence, anyway.

As a result of this, when I came in today, the first thing she said was “Oh, I thought you’d already moved!”  Yes, this is the kind of familiarity I have with someone who takes scissors to my head.  We chatted amiably as usual – about moving, about movies, about the weather – and then as I was paying came to an awkward moment.  I cunningly said, “So I suppose this is the last time I’ll be coming in,” to which she replied with equal enthusiasm, “Yeah, I guess so.”

Awkward.  It almost felt like a break-up, except that neither of us actually cared that we’d never see each other again.  And as I walked out, I wondered just how many of these little interactions I’m going to have in the next two months.  We close on the house April 30 and are out of our apartment May 31, so there’s not much time left.  Most of the people I know are academics in I/O, so I’ll be seeing many of them at least once a year for… well, a long time.  But the others, I may be leaving behind forever.  Should I be sad?  Pensive?  Indifferent?  Does it matter at all?