Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Adventures in Getting Ready to Move

Yesterday we had two movers performing walkthroughs of our house, one at 10 a.m. and one at 1 p.m. This is so that they can make estimates and provide bids to my new employer. We sorted, cleaned, and organized like maniacs on Sunday and early Monday morning. We still need to go through the basement and all the closets in the rooms, but the house is otherwise fairly respectable.

Today I finally got the travel itinerary for our upcoming house hunting/medical exam trip to Oak Ridge. We leave tomorrow and they're flying us -- I'm just glad I'm not the one having to pay for it. They won't reimburse you for driving above 350 miles one way. Despite the fact that in this case, with the premium they've shelled out for last minute tickets, they'd save themselves a fortune if they paid for us to drive.

Anyhow, we leave tomorrow and we return the following Wednesday. Then I guess I'll be here for maybe another week before departing to begin work. I'm not completely sure on that because I don't have an official start date yet.

Also today, I was interviewed by a man doing an article for Access, which is a publication of the NCSA. Basically, they publish articles about what people are using NCSA supercomputing resources for. I think they sift through the allocation proposals, and when they come across something that seems interesting, they track down the project investigators and ask to do an article on it. Our proposal on "Inverse Problems in Magnetotelluric Geoprospecting" struck their fancy, so they contacted my advisor who then deferred to me. The guy came and interviewed me for nearly an hour. It was fun to be asked all these questions. It made me feel really important and special to be interviewed!

Tomorrow we leave for Tennessee. I will try to keep my fearless readers informed about exciting East Tennessee, but I make no promises. On Thursday morning I am scheduled to have a medical exam, including a drug test. The only thing I am mildly concerned about is the fact that on Sunday, we went to Barb and Glen's house for an early birthday celebration, and Barb had made poppyseed cake. But I don't think I ate enough poppyseeds for it to jeopardize my drug test so I should be okay. Then after that, we are free to explore the area. Jeff has already hooked us up with a realtor and we should get a chance to see a few houses while we're down there. We saw a few online that we liked, but seeing them in person will be a better test.

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