The fact is, since the wedding we've been extremely busy almost every day. So many things have happened and we've had so many tasks to take care of and just get done that we've barely had time to sit down, relax, and breathe -- let alone get any real quality sleep. Every day there has been something else to do, something important, or someplace else to be. Even on days where Daisy was working (she went back to work a few days after the wedding, and is now halfway through her second week of work after going back) we still have tasks to take care of. Married life, at least at the start, is a lot of work in order to get everything situated (so to speak).
Here's a brief list of things that we've done since the wedding (believe me, this isn't everything, just the highlights), some of which I will expand upon below said list:
- Used our gift cards for most places we had them for already, in order to get a lot of stuff we needed but didn't have the money for and/or didn't get off the registry
- Once we got our official copy of the marriage license in the mail from the courthouse, Daisy changed her last name on almost all documents/forms/accounts, and will be finishing that process soon (if she hasn't already done so)
- Opened up our joint checking account at the bank, and opened a savings account/ordered checks and debit cards/set up online banking for both of us at the same time
- Shaved off the beard and got a haircut; my hair is now really short, and I only have a stubbly goatee
- Deposited all (or almost all) of the checks into our new account
- I transferred my driver's license, car title/registration/plates to Nebraska (which was ungodly expensive for a car as old as the Monte Carlo is)
- Daisy got her new driver's license with her new name on it
- We've slowly been unpacking a bit more, me more than her for the moment since she works a lot and I'm not going to mess with her stuff
- Daisy signed us up for renters' insurance for this apartment
- I signed up for a Netflix account (finally), which we stream to my HDTV in the living room via our new wireless router and the Roku her parents gave us when they upgraded to a newer model
- I've paid all of my remaining bills for Newton either online or via check; no more expenses remain for my old place
- ...which is good because I'm officially a Nebraskan now
- I set up my car insurance here in Omaha and paid it through December -- since I moved and I'm driving a lot less, I had to redo the entire policy...and ended up having it cost $70 less than it did before
- I had two interviews with the company where Daisy works, one yesterday and one today
- Ordered and set up a memory foam mattress pad so that neither of us have back pain anymore and can sleep well
- Ordered a new bed frame to replace the wooden one that broke during the move; we'll set it up within the next few days.
Mind you, all of this has happened in less than two weeks. Again, every day there has been something new to do or someplace else to be. Tomorrow will be the first day since the wedding where I personally will have nothing to do but sleep, relax, get some breathing space, and attempt to finish watching the last few episodes of Breaking Bad since we now have Netflix. Finally, a day with no pressing tasks.
As an aside, I have no clue how I survived without Netflix and wireless streaming to the TV before. I spent so much money over the years on DVD sets of series I wanted to watch when 95% of them are all on Netflix. I set up the account to where both of us can stream something different at the same time if necessary, but I doubt we'll use that feature that often (if at all); we haven't used it yet. Netflix also guarantees that we'll never have to worry about finding something to watch -- whether that be a movie or a TV series -- basically ever again. Currently, as most other people in the nation are, we're working on the new season of Orange is the New Black together, though when she sleeps during the day or when she's at work in the evenings, I'm watching the rest of Breaking Bad (as mentioned above) so that I can finally finish it.
Anyway. Moving on.
We got the marriage license in the mail fairly quickly; within a week or so after the actual wedding. Until we got it, we couldn't go about changing Daisy's name (you need that official license copy to do that, apparently) or go about depositing almost any of the checks we got as wedding gifts from friends and family into our bank account -- the vast majority of the checks were not only made out to both of us, but they were made out to both of us with Daisy's new last name -- my last name. Daisy opened the account at a good, reliable bank here for us well before the wedding, so that meant that not only did she have to change her name on that account and get an all-new debit card issued, I had to be put on it as well, get my own card, order checks, etc. We did all of that on the same day, and as mentioned above, we opened a savings account there too -- we need to be able to save up some money for our "honeymoon" of sorts, as we plan to visit Canada next summer, and we want to be able to have some emergency money in case something happens (like when my car finally goddamned dies).
Speaking of the car, that was a pain in the ass. In Nebraska, transferring a license isn't that hard -- you just fill out the form at the DMV, show them two proofs of residency (I used my cable bill and a credit card bill, both with my new address on them) and they give you the eye test. Apparently I barely passed it, and the lady told me I should definitely plan a trip to the eye doctor sometime in the future. I know this, of course; as I get older, my eyesight is getting gradually worse -- and I've noticed it more in the past year than I did before. I desperately need to go back and have an eye exam, update my prescription, etc.
Anyway. That was fine, they took my picture (in which I look stoned and/or drunk because of the camera flash) and I paid them $26.50, the cost of a license. In Nebraska, they print you a temporary license on card stock -- like index card paper -- and it looks like a black-and-white Xerox copy. The real license gets mailed to you "in about twenty days." Until then, that paper license is your license. Kansas did the same thing, except they gave you a temporary license printed on heat-transfer cash-register paper. Daisy went through the same process I did, though all she was doing was renewing her license and updating it with her new last name and our new address here. She got a paper license as well, so both of us are waiting for our real ones to arrive.
The plates and registration/title transfer of the Monte Carlo was an entirely other matter. To bring an out-of-state car into Nebraska, it is quite similar to the way Kansas did it -- the car has to be inspected. As my Monte Carlo was originally a Missouri car and had a Missouri title, it had to be inspected in 2011 when I bought it before I was allowed to register it. In Kansas this consisted of them writing down the VIN, checking to make sure everything worked and was in functioning order, lifting the hood, looking under and around the vehicle, etc. In Nebraska, the inspections are apparently a joke and inspections in name only -- I drove the car over to a garage about three miles or so from the house, parked it, handed a guy the title, and he took the title over to a window where they printed up a reciept. He handed it back to me and said "that'll be $10."
No, seriously. That's all that they did. We sat in the car the whole time -- about five minutes, max. And then once I paid and got the certificate of inspection and the title back, we drove to the DMV.
That's not a vehicle inspection -- that's basically a $10 tax for bringing a new car into the state.
Anyway.
When I had my license redone, I did the title transfer and new registration with plates at the same time. The car is eighteen years old (well, probably nineteen now, as I assume the new 2015 models of vehicles are beginning to roll out) and has 233,000 miles, so they waived the mileage requirement and marked me exempt for it. Registration, plates, and title transfer was $92.10. Unlike when I was in Kansas, I actually have the title in my hand this time instead of a "certificate of title" -- Kansas is a digital title state, while apparently Nebraska is not. Whatever they do with the Kansas title is out of my hands; it's a Nebraska car now with pretty plates to match.
Yes, I said plates, plural. In Kansas you're not required to have a front license plate, and they only issue you one plate. In Nebraska it's law that you have both. So I paid all my fees and monies, brought everything home, and put the new plates on the car last night. My old Kansas plate I scrubbed all the road grime off of and hung it on the wall in the living room as wall art.
"I want to put a little banner that says 'know your roots' under it," I told Daisy.
She rolled her eyes.
"What? That plate means a lot to me," I said. "It's the first license plate off of the first car I've ever owned outright, paid off, with my name on the title -- and nobody can take that from me no matter what. That plate has a lot of sentimental value to me. It signifies my independence. It is a reminder of how much I love my babycar."
I could tell she wanted to say something about me hanging it on the wall, and I could tell she was internally twitching about it, but since she knew it meant so much to me, I assume that's why she chose to remain silent.
By the way? $92.10 is a huge amount of money to me right now when I don't have a job yet -- especially when that doesn't count the other $36.50 combined for the license and inspection -- and it's a lot more than it cost for me to register and renew my registration in Kansas every year. In Kansas it was $66, the same amount every year. I know this because when I put my new insurance card and registration in the car tonight, I took out the old stuff. And Kansas is terrible when it comes to taxes and when it comes to squeezing every nickel and dime they can out of their residents.
But. That's done. The car has pretty new Nebraska plates on it now.
As for my insurance, I couldn't renew it until I changed my address, as the registration info and address had changed. So, I had to do that last night. That entailed me basically redoing my entire policy with Geico, as Nebraska requires some things that Kansas didn't and vice-versa. In the process, I was able to update my mileage and use estimate for the car. Previously, I was making 50 mile round trips at least 3-4 days a week, and I had to document that as they base some of the rates on it. Now, unless I end up working outside of the city of Omaha, I'll never drive more than five miles to or from work, so I was able to update that. In doing so, and by updating everything else, my premium dropped by seventy dollars. But, because I pretty much redid my account, it was due then instead at the end of this month as it was before. So I paid it, and I'm insured/covered through basically the end of the year...though my Citi Card balance ballooned by a few hundred dollars. I paid $50 of that card's bill tonight in order to alleviate some of it.
Anyway.
As mentioned above, both of us also got haircuts shortly after the wedding, and I also shaved off the long, thick beard for the summer. As you folks know, I cut my hair about once a year and shave off the beard about twice a year, as both take forever to grow back. Doing it in the first week of June means that by the time the fall rolls around and it begins to get cold again, my hair may be long enough to actually keep my head warm again. The beard will grow back to its former glory by the end of August or so, which will give me enough time to shave it off again and have it thick and bushy for the winter. I shaved it now because, well, it's not comfortable to have a long, thick beard in the summer. Duh. Daisy did almost weep when I shaved it and when I cut my hair, as she loves both the beard and my long hair, but those aren't exactly conducive to not sweating a gallon a day when I'm outside in the summer, even the Nebraska summer.
"It'll grow back," I said. "It's just hair." And it will, and it is. But I did notice something now that I'm mostly hairless -- I no longer look younger when I have short hair and no beard...instead, I now look much older. Defeated. Hopeless. Balding. It used to be just the opposite -- without my long hair and beard, I used to look like I was fifteen despite being in my thirties; I would get carded when I picked up my cigarettes at Walmart if the cashier didn't know me. Now? I look like I'm forty or older. And that scares me. I found several gray hairs in my temples this morning. Not rogue or errant hairs, but seriously gray hairs, and they're quickly multiplying.
Look, I know this is part of getting older, as are the aches and pains and my inability to eat the foods I used to love without serious gastrointestinal distress -- but hell, it's the fact that all of it hit me less than two weeks after I got married (it'll be two weeks tomorrow) seems like it's almost my body's way of saying "fuck it, he's married, he's old now; it's time for us to just give up."
I did compromise with Daisy on the beard -- she wants it back sooner rather than later, so I just used my beard trimmers without a guard on them to take it down as far as I could go with them. This proved pointless, though, as I had to shave with an actual razor down to the skin everywhere (except my van dyke, which I kept) for my two interviews I had this week.
What?
Yes, I had two interviews this week. Well, one real interview, and another a questionnaire session. Let me explain.
I mentioned a few months ago that I had been applying for positions within Daisy's company -- a big corporation, and a rapidly expanding one at that -- because I knew that I would need work after the end of the semester and after the wedding. Duh. Because of that, I applied for a lot of jobs within the company that I could do, and set my start date for the second week of June (read: now) in those applications. Mind you, many of those applications were filed during March and early May, but for some of them they're still screening applicants.
Anyway, after applying for several positions way back then, I got an email from the company's recruiter, telling me that he wanted to interview me. I explained to him that I was working and living in Kansas from then until the end of May, but I would be relocating to Omaha then. He told me to get in contact with him when I was settled in and we'd set something up, and that was the end of communications for awhile.
Well, once we were settled in and we took care of all of the stuff mentioned above, last week I emailed him back, reminded him who I was, and requested that we set up that interview. I was in luck; they were doing a hiring fair on Wednesday this week, and he gave me the address to go to and the job number to apply to beforehand. The job fair was basically a "cattle call" interview thing, as they're known in some industries. Set up from 11:30-2:30, everyone who's applied as of late for a job there gets sent an email and are told that they're doing on-the-spot interviews and to bring a current resume.
Okay. So, I got dressed up nicely, printed an updated copy of my resume, and Daisy took me over to their corporate HQ here in town (a place I didn't know where/how to get to) so that I could do their interview process. Their "interview process" turned out to be "here, fill out this set of paperwork and answer this questionnaire, then give it back to us." So I did that. And I sat there for close to an hour afterwards, surrounded by probably fifty other people doing the exact same thing. After they've looked at the paperwork, they called us up one by one and said "you have a second interview on [day] at [time] in [building]." As the position I'd applied for was specifically for Daisy's department and in her building, they set up my second interview over there for Thursday morning at the same time.
So, Thursday morning I went through the entire getting dressed-up process again, and a sleep-deprived Daisy took me over to her building -- even though I probably could've made it there on my own just from memory (and I certainly can now, as I made sure to memorize the route). This one was an actual sit-down interview with an actual person.
I want to step back here for a moment and state that I haven't had an actual sit-down interview, with anyone, in well over five years. The last one I had was with the people at the newspaper in Newton when they hired me on there as a reporter in 2009. And after I left the newspaper, I was teaching at the university, with nothing else, up until around this time last month. The job I was interviewing for is, essentially, Daisy's old job before she got promoted -- the job she had when she started there a year and a half ago, roughly. Because of that, I had a rough knowledge of what the job entails, and it's nothing I couldn't do once I received the requisite training for it that everyone gets.
"It's not a hard job," my interviewer said, "but it is a detail-oriented job."
This doesn't mean that I'm not generally terrible overall in interviews.
Look, I think I did okay. But just okay. Not exemplary, not extraordinarily well, but good enough to get the job, in my opinion. These people know my wife works for them, they know my wife is the one who referred me, and they know that my wife knows her shit and got a promotion recently. They also know I was a professor and they know that not many former professors -- or even people with anything past a bachelor's degree -- apply for their positions. That being said, I tried to answer the questions asked of me in the most truthful way possible, the most detailed way possible, and tried to give off the best impression I could. I even asked some questions that I'm sure the interviewer wasn't prepared for ("where do you see this company in five years?" and stuff like that), because I could tell by the surprised look on his face that he'd either never been asked that question before, or he was impressed by it.
However, I did forget to ask the one big question that I should've asked: "So, when should I expect to hear back from you?" Yeah, I forgot that one. Daisy said they're still interviewing people and that I shouldn't expect anything until next week sometime, which is fine with me.
"So I have to ask," my interviewer said, "because if I don't it will be the dancing elephant in the room...but why did you stop teaching?"
Oof. That question was like a punch to the gut.
"I moved up here and got married," I said, shrugging.
"But do you like teaching? Do you still want to teach?"
"I'd love to," I said, "and I sincerely enjoy it and take pride in it, but the job market for English professors is terrible. It's something like ten jobs for every 1,000 job-seekers. And that's nationwide. I've tried to get into the colleges and universities up here -- I've tried them all. None of them are hiring English professors right now. You can have all the degrees and experience you want, but if a place isn't hiring for a position you can fill, well, you're out of luck. I made $12,000 as a professor last year -- that's it. Before taxes. I worked that job because I had to if I wanted to pay the bills and continue using my teaching skills/experience at all."
"Wow, that's awful," he said, or something to that effect.
I'm breaking down the myth of "the overpaid, over-privileged college professor" one person at a time, I suppose.
I would also like to add that those teaching position applications aren't the only applications I've filled out as of late, which should be pretty obvious as I was interviewing with Daisy's company. I've put in apps for anything administrative at all of those colleges as well (as long as it would pay a living wage), and I've applied at several other companies and corporations also, as some pretty big-name corporations have big-time headquarters here in Omaha. Yahoo! and LinkedIn are amongst those corporations. So, yeah, I've been searching for work in more than just academia and in Daisy's company -- Daisy's company is just the only one who, so far, wanted to interview me.
The entire interview lasted maybe twenty-five minutes. We went back home, where Daisy promptly passed out once more and I watched a few more episodes of Breaking Bad before she got up in the evening, we had dinner, and she went back to work. I did housework for the rest of the night until I was too tired to stay awake any longer, and then went to bed -- sleeping on our new memory-foam mattress pad. I will say it was the best sleep I've had in weeks, and sleep that I plan to emulate again tonight in an hour or so when I go to bed.
Things are slowly starting to wind down now and get back to normal. About the only big thing we have left to do at some point is to get me on Daisy's Sprint cell phone plan, and get me a new phone. While I've had T-Mobile since 2006, I get zero service or reception in 90% of the city of Omaha. As I need a phone for day-to-day stuff like, oh, getting phone calls about jobs, well, that's sort of important.
Stay tuned, however, over the next several days -- I'm sure there will be more to write about, and there's plenty I haven't covered yet anyhow...but this post is extremely long and I'm exhausted. It's time for me to sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment