Saturday, July 11, 2009

'Bama Update

Hey friends! We're getting settled here in Birmingham finally.

Well, I should say that I am getting settled, as Jason is still in Greenville waiting (for the 3rd week now), to hear about whether he is going to get the job with Verizon here. Ugh! Every few days they find someone else he needs to interview with, then it's a holiday, then someone's out of town, then it's Yom Kippur or some craziness.

Anyway, we (me and Chloe the Super Chihuahua) are here and gettin' our learn on... Who knew there was this much stuff to know?? Yikes! Thankfully, I am in "fellow kindergarten" this month, just doing some clinic, looking at slides (Ummm, is that a white blood cell? It is? Yay me!), getting some lectures, and trying to figure out where things are. First off, UAB is... um, GINORMOUS - compared to Greenville. Thankfully the medicine is pretty similar, just a lot more of it. But I'm diggin' the blood stuff and the faculty here is wonderful.

My mom came and visited for 2 1/2 weeks right after we moved, which was wonderful because she helped unpack, cook, clean, put stuff away... It was AWESOME. We're talking about warm banana bread waiting for me after I came home from work. Clean bathrooms. Folded and ironed clothes. She even scraped, refinished and painted an old bedside table that we've been hauling around for years. I do not remember her doing all this stuff when I was a kid. Why did I ever leave home?? Well, she went back to Idaho yesterday, so I'm on my own again. It's probably best though, because now I can just focus on studying and reading as much as I can before I start on the BMT and inpatient services in August. And after all the craziness with the move, it's wonderful to have some (relative) downtime.

For those who didn't hear, the move to Birmingham was atrocious.

  • First off, it was hot. Seriously hot. Like a sauna on the surface of the Sun.

  • The air conditioning went out in my car the day before the move. So we were stuck driving Jason's beater around, complete with the ear-piercing-fan-belt-squeal and convenient, overheat-at-every-stoplight features.

  • The movers couldn't fit everything in the Uhaul, so ~ 1/4 of our stuff is still in our garage in Greenville.

  • By the grace of God, we finally got the truck loaded, and then... Jason's car wouldn't start. But somehow it did, and off we went.

  • After getting to Birmingham, the A/C in the house was on the fritz and it was 80 degrees inside, but only in the master bedroom and bath, then only two rooms not filled to the brim with stuff.

  • The movers (not sure if it was loaders or unloaders) demolished my bookshelves and wounded every piece of my new grown-up bedroom furniture.

  • Two days after arriving, I got to spend my birthday in Orientation, only to arrive back at our house to hear that Jason's grandmother had just died.

  • Before we left Greenville, we weren't able to get my car fixed because of time constraints. It was also going to cost $900. We found a mechanic here, who was recommended by one of the doctors at the hospital. The mechanic apparently thought that $1700 was a better asking price for an A/C compressor. But they were conveniently located next to Enterprise, where we rented a car for the next 5 days. But at least we had air conditioning. And a tin of cookies from the mechanic afterwards. Seriously. They had them shipped to the house. I've never seen cookies that cost roughly $200 each. They were good.

  • The installer for DirecTV blatantly lied to us when he came to do the install, saying that he didn't have all the parts he needed, and he didn't have the right ladder, and on and on... I guess satellite installation is a hot commodity, because they couldn't reschedule it for 5 days. So no TV for 5 days. Already without it for 3 days because our TV was in the box. I was starting to twitch from withdrawl. Then had to reschedule installation again because of the funeral, which pushed it back to the next week (!), which was completely unacceptable. Pitched a fit and they came the next morning.

  • Verizon has continued to string Jason along throughout all of this, so he's spent the last two weeks in Zack and Jessica's guest room in Greenville.

All that aside, things are looking up. We have started visiting a church that we really like so far. All our neighbors are little old ladies, ranging from ages 50-something to 70-something, which I love because everything is quiet and they take care of their stuff. Our townhouse is close to everything, and now thanks to Mom it looks more like a house and less like a storage unit.