Granted, Mr. McCandless's adventurous spirit eventually was his own demise. I read a book written about him once, and while I enjoyed it greatly I did not recall this passage until Bunny sent it to me along with some words of encouragement. It joins the likes Thoreau and and Jack London which has provided inspiration thus far. I even found some inspiration from the Helen Keller Quote "Life is a grand adventure - or it is nothing" although I heard that she never actually said this (she was a mute, lol). I also fancied a high school yearbook quote by one of my good friend; "don't lose the dreams inside your head, they'll only be there until you're dead." Later I realized that it was lifted from a Dave Matthews Band song and it lost some, but not much meaning.
The song I listened to on my road trip out to WA 4 years ago
I've been working the past few weeks on my trip back to Ann Arbor. My plan is to drive back to AA stopping along the way to visit with friends and family and camping at national parks along the way. I'm planning to leave on May 25th and arrive in Ann Arbor on June 7th. This map should detail my route.
You probably need to zoom out.
Some highlights of the trip:
Hiking in Glacier National Park
Visiting TJ in Montana
Camping at Yellowstone and driving through the Grand Tetons
A wedding in San Francisco
Camping at Sequoia National Park
Seeing some old friends in Phoenix
Catching up with a college buddy in Kansas
Chicago (enough said)
Back home to Ann Arbor
It’s a quick 4,900 mile, 76 hour jaunt. I'm planning to mix in the camping with staying with friends. It should be a good trip. But we’ll see how much I can fit in the camaro with all my camping gear, I might have to put together another post on how I'm going to pack for all this. I'm afraid I won't have room for my framed Conan the Barbarian Poster.
Deciding to take a few months off work takes some planning, and some foresight. Which means before I resigned I probably should have ran some numbers to see if I had the funds to pull it off. Better late than never, I suppose. My objective is to determine my allowable discretionary cash burn rate.
·I know how much I’m going to have to pay for my cell phone and car insurance.
·My parents say I have to get health insurance so I've gotten pricing just for some basic high-deductible catastrophic insurance.
·I've roughly mapped out road trips so I can calculate my gas.
·I've gotten a sublet in Ann Arbor which will be $320 a month, and I’m going to pay my roommate here $50 a month to store my stuff. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do for September and October. Since I’ll be in Europe for a portion of September I might bum around that month. Hopefully by October I’ll be starting a new job, but right now it is kind of a guess.
·I've factored in lodging for campgrounds and $1,500 for a trip to Europe. That would be more but I’m getting free flights to and from the continent.
So I subtracted all that from my starting funds, and found out how much is left and then divided that evenly over the 6months to determine how much I discretionary spending I will have. It worked out to $900 a month or $30 a day for food, drink and necessities. Luckily from my college days I’ve found out that $20 split between Taco Bell and Malt Liquor can go a long way, leaving $10 a day for toilet paper from all that Taco Bell and Malt Liquor.
I know what you’re thinking. What happens at the end of October when you have no money? The story there is that my starting amount is just what I budgeted for this endeavor. I have a reserve fund that could last me another 6 months without a job, but by that point I would probably find something to do even if it was menial. Otherwise I can use my reserve fund to set up in a new city once I figure out what I want to do.
It's true. I formally resigned my job last Friday. It is the biggest life event to happen to me since I started my job. After almost 4 years with my organization I hit the ceiling for growth and was just treading water. There were no opportunities for advancement, and even so the only promotions I could get would be jobs that would make me miserable. At the same time with the budget reductions I had very little work and was staring down a furlough that was going to cut my pay anyways. It was a good time to leave.
Even so, I'll look back on my first job with a since of thankfulness I really did cherish the work I did and the people I've worked with. I'm very grateful for the opportunity but I'm also looking forward to doing something different.
The other reason I chose to leave my job is that ever since moving out here I've always dreamed of going back to Ann Arbor for at least a summer. I've decided to spend the summer living in Ann Arbor and travelling around the country visiting friends and family. I'm going to road trip from Seattle to Ann Arbor at the beginning of June, and then planning an east coast road trip for July or August. Then I'm looking at going to Europe in September for Oktoberfest. So if you live in the US, or want to go to Oktoberfest and would like to see me, let me know. I will drive to your house and sleep on your floor.
Eventually I'll need to go back to work. Probably after I return from Oktoberfest. Which also means I'll be looking for a job starting this summer. I've also been thinking about staring an enterprise, which I think would be fulfilling and challenging.
As always, I tell myself that I'm going to blog more. I'm really hoping this is true. To inspire me, I've changed the banner name.
I spent the last few days thinking about what I would post if Michigan won the National Championship. By the time Michigan was up 1 at halftime I had a pretty good outline of what I was going to write.
I was planning to start with my own history with Michigan BBall during my college years and talk about how I suffered through the Amaker era. I wanted to touch on how during the 2007 season I could just show up to games, flash my MCard and walk down into Maize Rage without a ticket.
I'd tell some of the stories too. About how in 2008 I bet my best friend that we wouldn't be a top 4 seed in the NCAA tournament for the next two years (a bet which I won by the way). How in 2009 Penn State filed a formal complaint with the Big Ten regarding my behavior at one of the games. I wanted to write about how I went down to Crisler in 2009 to watch Michigan get a 10 seed in the selection show and then skipped two days of class to go watch the opening round of the tournament it Kansas City because "who knows the next time Michigan will make the tourney"? It wouldn't all be fun though, I wouldn't overlook having to watch Michigan get bounced out in the first round of the 2012 tourney in Nashville (which I didn't blog about because it was also a bachelor party).
I really wanted wax poetic about the journey the program made between 2008 and now. I wanted to write about Manny Harris, DeShawn Sims and how much hope we had for Zack Novak and Stu Douglass. Then I would transition into how Zack and Stu would have Vogrich type roles with the talent we had on this year's team.
My big gamble would be the centerpiece of the story. About how I was so sure this would be a special team with Trey Burke back that I bet $40 Michigan would win it all before the season began. Yeah, it would be hard not to brag about "calling it" and collecting my $1,000 at the 25:1 odds I got back in September. I'd probably also brag about how my Yahoo bracket of Michigan beating Louisville in the finals put me in the top tenth of the 99th percentile instead of sitting at 88th percentile. I'd ensure the reader that I was never off the bandwagon.
Instead I'm left thinking of all these things, but surprisingly not being that upset (except about all the stupid things I could have spent that grand on). I'm still really proud of how far this team has come since I started going to games in 2007, and I'm even more proud of where this team is going. I'm more excited for the future than nostalgic for the past which has become an ever increasing rarity for me.
In what has turned into a very sad yearly exercise for the blog I now present my annual gripe about the number of birthday Facebook posts I receive. I've updated the chart from the 2011 post to now reflect the last two years worth of data.
Birthday Facebook Wall Posts by Year
So I'm back up to my historical averages, and I've officially attributed 2011's pathetic haul to a fluke that hid my birthday on Facebook. But that does provide insightful data that only about 6 people remember my birthday without the help of Facebook In addition to the wall posts, I got 3 emails, 1 Google chat status, 4 text messages, 2 phone calls and 1 card. The winner of best text message goes to my sister Laura who sent me "Birthday Boy!!" continually throughout the day at perfect 2 hour intervals.
This post title is from the hands-down most common facebook post I received although a younger me would have gone with the exceptional "Happy Birthday Fart Face" from my friend Beth.
Last Thursday night I finished moving for the 9th time in the last 8 years. My favorite move was when I moved from State and Arbor to State and Hoover in college. The entire move was only about 200 yards, and I took most of my stuff to the new house via my childhood wagon. An amusing aside, while moving my clothes a cop pulled over my wagon and searched it thinking I was hiding a keg underneath the clothes.
The new house with the Jeep
I lived in my last residence for 2 and a half years, the longest I’ve lived in the same place since I moved out of my parents house when I was 18. It was a perfect townhouse for someone coming out of college and wanting more space than an apartment, but not ready for a house. My roommate on the other hand is 4 years older than me and ready for the house. After much procrastinating he bought a house a few miles away from where we lived. It has a lot more space, an acre of land and a garage. It's not the house I would have bought, but he seems happy with the purchase. It means that I can no longer walk downtown or to the post office. It also means that I had to move from a large bedroom with its own bathroom and walk-in closet to a much smaller room with a shared bathroom and no walk in closet. But the rent I’ll be paying to my roommate is such a good deal, that it wasn’t worth it to move somewhere else or pay rent in the townhouse by myself.
I spent the last two weeks slowly moving things from one house to the other. I went up to Mt. Baker last weekend so I had to do most of the moving during the weeknights. It really made me think about the things I need vs. the things I have. It went from things I needed for the next 2 weeks, to things I needed for the next few days, to the next night, to the next couple hours. I eventually went full opium den with just a mattress, computer, change of clothes and a towel.
I’m not sure how long I’ll be living in this house. It’s not exactly where I envisioned myself spending my middle 20s. I realized just how much stuff I have that I don’t need and I’m considering just keeping some of that stuff packed away unless I need it. On one hand, it’s nice accumulating the stuff that you always wanted but on the other it’s relieving being able to live with just what you need and little more. In college I only owned what I could fit into a bedroom and moving was easy. Those days are gone and every move I make from now on is going to be a pain in the buns.
