I spent the whole of this morning and early afternoon eagerly awaiting some amount of solid news about what is happening at work. I’m pretty good at dealing with disasters but I am exceptionally poor at handling “pending decisions.” It is less of the unknown but more of the “known, but no one will fill me in.” If there is truly an unknown then there is good risk mitigation planning to be done. But when we are just waiting for someone with the information to give it to us then we are caught in a state of just treading water waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Today we simply play the waiting game. Not the best situation for getting a lot of sleep. Although getting in at two in the morning doesn’t allow for a lot of sleep anyway. It actually worked out well being my late night out in addition to being a night of getting poor sleep. I was not likely to have gone to bed and gotten any good sleep anyway. At least I made productive use of my awake time.
At two thirty this afternoon we finally got some additional information to help clarify the situation both in terms of what was definitely happening as well as what options there were and what was likely happening. There is a ton of stuff up in the air but at this point we have a pretty likely scenario that is going to play out and we know what our role is going to be in that scenario if it all comes to fruition.
So, this is the likely scenario going forward. Sometime no sooner than December and most likely in the first half of next year (2010) we will be relocating to Texas instead of New York. The job options and future potential look to be far better in Texas than they do in New York and the work environment looks to be better there as well before we even take into account any tax and pay advantages or housing cost benefits.
Most likely we are going to be living in Austin, not Irving. Our plan is to buy a house in Austin after we have rented just long enough to learn our way around and to figure out where in town in makes the most sense for us to be living. We are not looking to buy in Austin as a short term plan like we did in Geneseo or in Peekskill but this is a long term, strategic plan where we intend to keep this house for a very long time. This will be the location that we call “home” for the foreseeable future. We have never bought with that intention previously so we are hopeful that this will pan out. This in no way implies our intention to live and work solidly in Texas for forever but simply that we are finally in a position to have a “base of operations” from which to reach out and live the rest of our lives. We need at least a certain amount of space and stuff in our lives to be unmoving instead of having everything that we own traveling with us from house to apartment to house, etc.
We do not know too much else at this point and none of this is official. The office has not officially posted any job positions which means that there is nothing officially to which I can apply and there is nothing into which I can be accepted. All of the other key people who need to be doing similar things have not yet committed to anything yet either. So there is still a lot that can go wrong but mostly it appears that we have a pretty solid path and plan and chances are pretty good that it will pan out exactly as described.
We definitely feel much better now that we have some semblance of a plan and that we know, basically, what is going to happen. The biggest problem is going to be selling our house here in Peekskill. We are allowed to rent it as of mid-October and that is one option if we can find some people interested in renting a furnished house. That would make our lives a whole lot easier. Ideally we will want to sell it as early as possible but we know that the market is not good now and we probably want to stall on that as long as we can. Ideally we probably do not want to go to Texas until as late as possible which, could be, late next year or possibly even 2011 at a stretch. Although now that we know that we are moving we kind of feel like we would like to just move on and get the moving started. There is something about knowing that you are in a long term location rather than a temporary place. Now that we know this house is really short term we don’t want to keep putting physical and mental energy into it. It’s just an apartment to us now.
Overall this should all work out well. Selling the house is the one challenge. Other than that everything really works out well. We had decided a few weeks ago, without having even the remotest clue that the office might decide to relocate me, that we wanted to move to Austin to call that our home base. Dominica’s parents had already decided that they, some time down the road, were going to move to Austin. My father had already decided that he would likely be okay with coming down and spending some time in Texas during the worst cold and snow months. Dominica’s sister is already nearby and we just moved her brother a few weeks ago. Ramona is already considering Austin for nursing grad school which will likely take about four years and she is not planning to start for another year – so we could overlap in Austin by four years just during her school time and possibly more if she decides to stay in the area. The Ralstons had already decided that they were going to “move in with us” in Texas to make that their official American home rather than Art’s mother’s house in New York. Calling Texas home is a major advantage for them in several ways. And then, it turns out, that Andy and Miranda have been talking about Austin for some time and are very seriously considering it as a place to which to move as the market there is so much better than almost anywhere else for Andy to work! Talk about serendipity! Everyone we know is in or moving to Austin – a city to which almost no one that I know has ever been including Dominica or, I think, her parents. Of course it looks like most everyone from my team at work will move down to Texas as well so we will all have each other too.
So the bottom line is… it sure looks like we are moving to Texas and doing so quite soon. I will have a more definite answer on that in about two weeks and the final answer is likely to come in about eight. But until then we are operating under the assumption that we are moving to Texas. And very likely, we think, doing so as part of the vanguard to go prepare the site for others as we know Texas more and are more mobile than most everyone else. So we are guessing that as early as December or January we are very likely to be down there in some capacity.