Moving angst

Oh foreign exchange rate... why do you hate me so? When I had to convert the USD from the sale of Jason's company to Canadian, the Canadian dollar went from being worth $0.70 to being worth $0.90, while I sat waiting for the fall I thought was inevitable. Now that I have to convert my Canadian dollars to US their currency has finally rallied. In two weeks I have effectively lost 5% of my down payment money. I'm not converting yet, just keeping an eye on it. I'm hoping that it's some sort of Olympic blip and that the gold medals are increasing consumer and investor confidence and two weeks after the Olympics are over we'll be back to business as usual and closer to being on par. With my luck each USD I have to buy will probably be worth $1.20 when I finally run out of time to watch and am forced to convert. Oh the difficulties and intricacies of an international move.

Jason's current boss comes back from vacation today so the negotiations around his transfer date will begin. Jason suggested a move date of early October (there's an internal milestone in September and then he'll have a bit of downtime to train up his replacement) but Damion didn't seem thrilled with that suggestion, so it looks like he might go earlier. We'll see what Preston has to say. And on an unrelated note... generally speaking there is a handful of really common guy's names, which make up the vast majority of names given to boys... so why does Jason always end up working for bosses with those rare, wild and exotic names?

I finally looked up the distance from Edmonton to Austin and compared it to other drives we've done.

Edmonton AB to Austin TX: 3,737 km
Edmonton AB to London ON: 3,212 km
Spokane WA to Windsor ON: 3,328 km

Jason did the first London to Edmonton on his own. I was with him but I was VERY sick, so I was unconscious the whole time and helped with neither company nor driving duties. We managed that first trip really easily. Somehow we managed to arrive in Edmonton some time in the mid to late afternoon on the third day. I'm still not sure how we did that since we have never managed to make that good time again. I think it might have something to do with the beagles. Subsequent trips have all involved a pair of hounds for which you have to stop and walk every few hours.

Spokane to Windsor was a bad trip. First of all we did Edmonton to Spokane a few days before, arriving at the site in Spokane at some ungodly hour like 4 or 5 in the morning. We slept in our car that first night. I can't remember if we slept in the tent one or two nights, but I remember I was up and on the road by about 10am on the last morning. However, having done a hard drive a bit earlier and then following it up with several nights of poor sleep and a morning of packing up a camp, I was probably not as bright and bushy as I could have been. That drive home was one of my worst. I was alone with the beagles. We didn't make it to my goal city on any of the nights, staying in hotels miles and hours short of my intended destination. I often stopped and pulled over at the side of the road to catch a few winks when I felt myself falling asleep at the wheel, and those naps happened at any time from about 11am to 9pm. We finally made it in to Windsor at about 2am on the third day.

That makes Austin about 400km than my longest car trip to date. I'll be doing it solo after packing my house, and cleaning the apartment, so I can't count on being well-rested. I also have to arrange for the inspection and key return before I can leave that last morning, so I can't count on an early start. Though I could probably do the inspection the day before my planned departure and stay either in Ashlie's place or in Calgary with friends that first night. Calgary would probably be best as it would shave 300 km off the front end of the trip, but I think everyone I know in Calgary has kitties, so starting out with allergies and asthma is probably not ideal. The added complication is that if I stay behind after Jason, I might be going in Winter. I'm traveling through places like Montana, Wyoming and Colorado; places where there are mountains and blizzards and occasionally people get stuck at the side of the road and just die of exposure. On the bright side, there's no set time-line. I have no job to get to and no vacation time I'm eating up and wasting in the car, so I can make it as leisurely a trip as I like and if the weather looks bad I can stay put wherever I am. On the downside, Jason's company might balk at paying all the bills if I stay too many nights in hotels and it's not the time of year I can camp.

Ashlie has offered to go with me and help out with the driving and/or just keeping me awake. I'm not sure she'll really be up for it though when she finds out a)how long it takes and b)that I'm just going to be painting and unpacking when we get to the other end, so it's not going to be fun and games. Also, if I bring Ashlie, we actually have to make some effort to stick to a time-line. If I go by myself I can delay a week or more if the weather looks terrible. If she comes with, we've got to work around the vacation time she's booked.

With all this difficulty, why exactly am I insisting on driving? If we fly, beagles have to go cargo. Even tiny little Anna is just a bit too big for the carriers that you can take as carry-on. And frankly, I don't trust the airlines with putting my doggies in cargo. Sometimes they lose things. Sometimes they forget to turn on the climate controls. And there's no direct flight, which just increases the chances of something going horribly wrong. I'd never forgive myself if something happened to my girls because I was too lazy to drive.

I could also leave at the same time as Jason, but this means breaking the lease sooner, losing my income sooner, and possibly having to rent something in Austin while we wait for a house sale to close and paying both extra rent for us and either storage costs for our stuff or having to move twice (yuck). Clearly, the easier option is keeping the place in Edmonton until the last minute and me staying up there with our stuff until the house closes, making money at my job, but it's only easier if the weather co-operates, and I can't count on mother nature as she has a way of letting me down.

So here's the options:
1. Jason and I fly down when he starts and house-hunt. We put in an offer, hopefully get a place all lined up, I fly back to Edmonton and drive down either by myself or with Ashlie with the intention of arriving on or just after the closing date.
2. Jason and I drive down together for his start date.
3. Jason flies down and starts work while the beagles and I drive a few days behind him.

I'm not making any kinds of decisions until we have an idea what Jason's start date will be, but there's a lot to think about.

Musings

Google Maps lets you fiddle with the route when you click "find directions". When I first search Edmonton to Austin it says: 3,737km 1 day 11 hours (going down to the border through Calgary). When I fiddle (going across on a diagonal to Regina) I can get the mileage down to 3,492km, but the time jumps to 1 day 14 hours. How is it that I can reduce my trip by 245 km but manage to increase the time it will take by 3 hours ?!?!?

The average driving speed on the first trip is 106 km/h with the second route it drops to 92 km/h. Are those roads really that slow??? Is there any way to find out what the posted speed limit along a route is other than by trusting Google maps' estimates?

So here's some interesting analysis of speeding... Edmonton to Calgary is 298km. The speed limit is 110 km/h for most of the trip. That makes the trip 2hrs 42 min. Increase your speed to 124, the same increase as the difference between the trips above, and you get to Calgary in 2 hours 24 minutes. A savings of only 18 minutes. If you speed on a short trip in the city your time saved generally goes down to less than it takes to get a coffee in Tim Horton's, if you save any time at all, which lights generally prevent you from doing. But you speed by 14 km/h over a distance like Edmonton to Austin (taking that second route but at the speed of the first) and you can save 5 hours on the shorter trip!!! That's like an extra half-day on the road! From that, one could conclude that speeding on a short trip isn't worth it, but the longer the trip, the better the pay-off you can get by speeding, thus making it worth the risk. Of course if you look at 5 hours in the grand scheme of your life it all becomes pointless again. I will probably always speed, no matter how many tickets I get, it's just interesting to look at the behaviour that drives it and how I try to rationalize a decision that is entirely based on emotion.

Also, being a permanent employee when you're not actually is teh sux. I just got my first permanent paycheque and have discovered that I am paying 54.49 towards a long term disability plan that I am never going to use, and in exchange I get an extra week of vacation a year, which works out to 19% of a day each pay period or 1.3 hours. I'd rather have the $55 than 1.3 hours more of vacation time since the vacation works out to worth less. Also, they are taking $118.51 towards a pension that I will never need or use. I can get the money back when I leave, but that's a pain in the bum. All told, I am taking home less after my raise than I did before - boo.

Other things that are a pain in the bum... little shits who steal stuff from your car when your husband leaves it unlocked. I asked Jason to bring in the last of the camping stuff from the car on Thursday night so on Friday I could vacuum and clean the car for picking up my parents from the airport. He brought the stuff in but forgot to lock it. He didn't even bring the stuff in until like midnight, so God knows what time those kids were out stealing stuff. They took a bunch of CDs without cases (worthless to anyone but me as pawn shops and used CD stores won't take them), my ipod adapter (but not the ipod, which lives in my purse, thank god) and my collection of lip balms - ????? Seriously, who steals someone else's lip balm - yuck!!!

I now have to purchase a new ipod car adapter and replace a bunch of relatively rare CDs which are probably at the bottom of a dumpster right now - sigh. When crap like this happens it reminds me why I am so glad to be leaving this place. I'm sure most of Edmonton isn't crappy like this, but not having a private garage and living in a sketchy neighbourhood because it's all we can afford is CRAPPY!!!