It seems nearly every night I’ve been here I’ve been going to bed way early, like 9-10pm, which without my Milwaukee time adjustment yet is like going to bed between 8-9. The first few mornings I slept many hours to recover from the long, arduous move. This morning I was ready to roll at 5AM. I wanted to leave the house sooner, but between trying to get out of the house while it was still dark, and still finding myself a few times a day rifling through boxes to find something I finally managed to find coffee shortly before 8AM.

A week ago today I woke up for the last time with a normal Milwaukee day facing me, and my favorite day of all; trivia day! I didn’t want to treat that day any different. Same ol’get up and get coffee at Whole Foods, shuffle some questions, and make a stellar playlist. Once that was done I did have a few last minute things to accomplish that afternoon before the show which in turn actually rushed me to get to Vintage to meet my replacement host. Once she arrived I knew things were becoming more realistic. The the balloons showed up, and then my biggest crowd ever arrived. Vintage was stacked with 80+ people. Some had to leave because it was standing room only.

The show went on without a hitch except for my crappy mic. Nearer to the end shots began arriving and a few goodbyes starting rolling out as players left and a few friends left. Cake was even served, and I received some gifts. There were some t-shirts and a few other goodies, but the thing that jerked the tears from my soul was a big card that they passed around and have everyone sign. That card meant so much to me.

I continued to play music throughout the night and before I knew it 2AM rolled around and I got to hang out with the Becky & the bar staff for a couple of hours despite knowing that the task of moving had to get started right away the next morning. I got home at 4AM and couldn’t sleep, I cried instead till like 6AM when I finally found the comfort to sleep. (See previous post)

I woke up a bit after 8AM, made breakfast, and finally made my way to pick up the truck. From there, even though I packed and threw away a lot of stuff I felt like I hadn’t even started at that point. I didn’t publicly ask for help because one it was weekday, and second I’m so damn independent I don’t want to involve anyone really to disassemble my mess. I did recruit my hero for the day, Wally, to at least give me a hand getting my big stuff out. After an hour or two battling that I was left alone with a mountain in front of me I’d seen the last when I moved into the place. Now, with shortness of sleep and no sense of direction it seemed impossible.

I moved what I had packed and began packing the rest little by little. The biggest delay was I had to move everything twice because since I was delayed by getting up late, the carpets were due to be cleaned before I could get everything out. Then the carpet guy forgot something and was delayed another hour. I had everything packed into my kitchen and could barely navigate nor make progress. Guh.

I was waning by then, and at around 7pm when I had planned to everything moved and cleaned, I was in deep. I was unmotivated, tired, and felt pretty helpless. Moral support was all I really needed. I took a break, called my mom, and found the strength to keep picking away. At this point I figured even if I finished by midnight, how was I going to drive?

After a post I made on Facebook, Wally came back from class and delivered one of those bottles of Starbucks lattes and I was never so happy to have Starbucks. Just his visit and that drink was enough to get me focused again. Between that and Wally helping stage and load more things I concentrated on the cleaning as well. STILL, IT WAS 2AM WHEN I CLOSED THE DOOR BEHIND ME! To meet my brother by mid-afternoon in Cincinnati I had no choice but to leave. If I slept at Becky’s like I had planned I would have never woke up and my whole plan would have been busted. So, after a quick stop at Jimmy Johns with Wally for some white bread and Coke energy I finally pulled out of Milwaukee at 3AM.

With 2 hours sleep in nearly 48 hours I had to be cautious obviously. I knew I could afford some power naps along the way, but crashing a truck of course was not an option. Leaving Milwaukee I found myself going 45-50 down 94. Then I remembered I only had $3 cash after paying the carpet guy, and the tolls had gone up in Illinois. So, instead of making a silly stop for cash, I jumped off on 41 when I got to the border. Besides, I was only going 50mph anyhow. I was a moving accident out there on the interstate. I wanted to get through Chicago before resting, but my body wouldn’t have it. I stopped about 3/4 of the way to Chicago and tested my power nap skills. “15 minutes I told myself” since I wanted to get through Chicago before rush hour. Boom! 15 minutes later I awoke, grabbed a Coke, and I was ready to roll. I went through Chicago about 5AM and was a 9 on a 10 scale in alertness.

The nods finally returned about halfway between Chicago and Lafayette, IN. I took another 20 minute nap and gave my cat some food. She was a trooper. She was pretty upset for the first hour or so, but was pretty quiet throughout till the last hour or so of the journey. She never made a mess the whole way! I kept going with a short stop for some fresh air around Lebanon, IN and a final stop in Fairland, IN. There after a solid 30 minute nap I was renewed and said at the point “it’s time to take it home”. Three naps and 10 1/2 hours later I arrived in Cincinnati. By time I turned in that night I had gotten a total of maybe 3 hours sleep in 60 hours. Before I went to sleep though my brother, Greg, came to meet me get my big stuff out of the truck and by my surprise brought his wife and kids. We went to Dewey’s Pizza down the block and I took this picture of my niece, Amelia.

After unloading and taking the truck back I had another night of much needed rest. The next morning my parents made their way to visit. A trip to breakfast, Costco (for the all important best smelling laundry detergent, ever), and a walk around the neighborhood for some Aglamesis Bros. sundaes. Finally after their visit I put my place mostly back together and finally felt at home.

Of course biking is an all important element of my being and I had to venture out a bit. My first four miles were on Saturday evening and the traffic was horrid. No dedicated bike lanes and some very bad drivers made me feel like I was in the wrong place. Fortunately, paired with some unseasonably warm weather, I had to drum up my courage and research my maps a bit better and get myself back out there. Tuesday I had a fabulous ride to downtown mostly along the river. Then I had to find my way back up the river bluff to stop hopefully at Eden Park. Eden Park is seriously my most favorite place on the planet. Every time as a kid when we went on field trips to Cincinnati (zoo, museums, etc.) we had lunch and/or went to the Krohn Conservatory in Eden Park. The point overlooking the river towards Kentucky never ceases to make me happy. So yesterday I climbed the hill and found the park and the lookout and stopped for a bit. I was beaming to say the least. The ride to and from, about 15 miles, was trouble free and made me feel secure again biking in the city. Twas a good day.

Yesterday I spent the day looking for jobs and even had a couple of informal interviews. I have another today at the aforementioned pizza place too. I hope to have the job thing secured in the upcoming week so I can finally have the freedom to really indulge in what the city has to offer.

If you gotten this far in my TLDR blog post today, thanks. It wasn’t easy leaving Milwaukee, but already this week I feel inter-connected with a place spiritually. I feel like I know everyone here, and they understand where I come from and where we all want to be. The bottom line is, like I told my parents Sunday, I have some nieces and nephews to spoil. I have to get to work now to begin making that happen.

Thanks for being a part of making my experiment of living out of my comfort zone for four years to help me appreciate this place again a reality.

It’s not easy physically or mentally to wrap my head around this at the moment. Physically, it’s down the stairs, into the truck, boxes and bags of memories of the past, especially those of the past four years. Bikes, audio equipment, and even a few food items that are truly Milwaukee.

But mentally? Wow. I cried tonight. More about who was there tonight, and less for who was not. Love brings you back, and by that I mean I’ll be back to visit. Part of me didn’t think I’d have nothing to come back to. Boy was I wrong.

In essence I moved to Milwaukee to test the love of my family and love is inevitably bring me back towards Cincinnati. But  love was tested tonight and I have ties here I had no idea that were so strong. Damn I feel kinda foolish right now for leaving some things behind here.

I tend to always do what’s best in the short-term. This move today is a long-term decision. I guess growing up is hard to do.

I’ll miss you MKE. :’(

After decades of the bamboo industry depleting nearly every last acre of bamboo in China for the needs of cheap crafty homemakers, and the like, the panda’s demise is almost certain without the help of scientists and volunteers to meet the growing needs of keeping America’s need for cute alive.

Despite tireless hours of practice of ‘grooming children’at a state budget strapped school, and wearing scrubs nightly for low paying fashion shows, Milwaukeean Amanda Walker still finds time to travel to her socialist, ‘commie’, run panda farm in China to mostly smuggle bamboo from local Michael’s stores in the area back to where it belongs, in the mouths of hungry China-men, er, pandas.

“I tried to convince them (the pandas) that discarded christmas trees are a delicacy, but them bears are pretty damn smart”, Walker notes. “Turns out that anything that tinsel has come in contact with makes their eyes turn black”. It’s kinda cute, but I found that burning the trees much more favorable than transporting all those trees by a slow boat to China.

She attributes most of her financing as ‘confidential’, though it’s rumored that she made out big before the Nigerian bank account bubble burst. “The economy is really bad out there” she claims “but I’ll keep the fire burning here and carry a big bamboo stick!”

Currently the panda farm has three young pandas (give or take a screw) that has playground equipment and a deal with several internet stock photo sites for the desktop wallpaper industry to assure it’s financing.

Yuengling becomes largest U.S.-owned brewery.

Ok, so I’m not a super fan of the beer, but I’m excited for their achievement since they’ve been around longer than anyone else. I read about Yuengling long before I ever had it since it wasn’t available here anywhere in the midwest. Much to my excitement a few years ago my brother-in-law got a few cases delivered to him via a friend and shared a few with me. Eh, pretty typical American style lager, but certainly I appreciated the novelty aspect of how it was acquired and that here was a beer that was older than any other in the States.

My most exciting experience was when I took a flight from Chicago to Cincinnati last Spring on a small Pennsylvania “vacation” airline called USA3000 (which I just read will serve their last flight this month). I never had a beer on the plane before because it’s always mega-crap that’s available, but low and behold they offered only Yuengling and Yuengling Light! For $5 I had to have one. That was a long day, but that is one of my favorite stories having a Yuengling a mile up from where I had it the first time.

It’s much easier to acquire now that Ohio distributes the brew as of last fall. My sister actually went to seek a keg while I was home over Christmas. If I do move to Cincinnati in the upcoming weeks it will be readily available all the time. It’s a minor win given all the loss of access I’ll have to the many Wisconsin beers now. Maybe I can start a New Glarus/Yuengling exchange program.

Counties by state I’ve biked in:

INDIANA
Franklin
Decatur
Marion
Hamilton
Boone
Shelby
Johnson
Hancock
Brown
Madison
Delaware
Rush
Ripley
Dearborn
Fayette

WISCONSIN
Milwaukee
Ozaukee
Waukesha
Racine
Kenosha
Washington
Sheboygan
Marinette
Dodge
Walworth
La Crosse
Crawford
Vernon
Jefferson
Manitowoc
Kewaunee
Door

ILLINOIS
Lake

MICHIGAN
Menominee

MINNESOTA
Houston
Winona
Rice
Goodhue
Dakota
Scott
La Sueur
Sibley

IOWA
Allamakee

OHIO
Hamilton

KENTUCKY
Boone
Kenton
Campbell

Other COUNTRIES I’ve biked in:

GERMANY

Bavaria (Munich, Rothenberg de Tauber)

*2012

Proposed counties in 2012:
OH- Clermont, Butler

2012 Goal – None
2012 running total – 102
Best one day total – 104.6 (6/20/09)

Past annual totals

2011 – 2,300**
2010 – 5,280
2009 – 4,022
2008 – 1,080
2007 – 1,418
2006 – 2,520
2005 – 1,876
2004 – ~1,000

** 2,280 recorded miles + ~20 miles in Germany.

(1/5/2012) I’m within 500 miles of 20,000 miles!

The Kitten Covers

Driving has lost its cool for young Americans

In 2008, just 31 percent of American 16-year-olds had their driver’s licenses, down from 46 percent in 1983, according to a new study in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention. The numbers were down for 18-year-olds too, from 80 percent in 1983 to 65 percent in 2008, and the percentage of twenty- and thirtysomethings with driver’s licenses fell as well. And even those with driver’s licenses are trying to drive less; a new survey by car-sharing company Zipcar found that more than half of drivers under the age of 44 are making efforts to reduce the time they spend packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes.

This is mostly about the $8,500.

You can buy a lot of gadgets for just a fraction of the $8,500 the average American spends each year to maintain a car, not to mention the average cost of buying the car in the first place – more than $29,000 for a new car, or more than $18,000for a used one.

Fucking suburbs aren’t even good enough for people these days. I had to look up exurb. What, there is even an exurb magazine?! Exurb Google search.

Millennials want to live in walkable urban cores instead of suburbs and exurbs that require residents to drive everywhere.

I’m going to continue biking.

Call me unrealistic but I’m not one that wants to work to death by continually being sleep deprived and deprived of the things that mean so much to me. The past year was an eye opener to what I’ve missed and what is important in regards to life. Knowing that it wasn’t impossible to go to Germany was enlightening. It’s not been money that has stopped me in the past, but this system that the workforce culture in the US of vacation days.  We need those vacation days so bad to reset or do short term travel for holidays and such that we really have no way of saving them up (if we even get them) that we are held prisoner (slaves) to our employers.

Fortunately I’m only working for me, not for a significant other, not for a family. I’d prefer to keep it that way and do what I can to find flexibility in my next employers. Why can’t I build a schedule to fit my to my life instead of adapting to yours? For example, one of the jobs I was seeking (which is part-time) would likely not hire me because I don’t want to start at 8 because I prefer to put my health before a “standard”. Is that work you’re behind on different if it’s done at 8AM than it is at 10AM? How many times in my last job did I have nothing to do but be “available from 8-5″? In my last job I was a bit more in an indispensable position and something I want to get away from. Our work culture is so messed up and I hope to find a way to buck the system, but of course, most of us put ourselves in the position of being desperate and we are in desperate times. I do hope to work like a dog in the upcoming months, but as I look forward and settle down in Cincinnati I do hope I can find jobs that I love that allows me to save money for travel and just whisk myself away from this so called life to see our world outside of this country.

I never want to own a house, car, or other material possessions that require me to have to live and die at the hands of a corporation that only cares about the top’s bottom line. I want to live, travel, and be happy.

The days ahead are looking a bit grim for me, but I must remember my mission. I will do what it takes to survive, but I don’t need much more beyond that.

Today my only motivation to go out (after my workout) was just to go have coffee. Usually when I go out to get coffee I have a multitude of things I need to do while sipping away at my cup ‘ joe; job search, tax course homework, trivia show, among other things. This morning, I’m just kinda surfing the net and not much else but reflecting a bit more (oh dear) while having my coffee.

Yesterday I took my final for the tax course I’ve been taking over the past few months. It was open book, but I didn’t use it; I didn’t need to. Though I made a few minor errors I hunkered down and did my best impersonation of a tax preparer and it went really well; five painstaking hours of parsing imaginary tax information into the right forms. Done. At the end I signed my I-9 and other employment forms for the first time in a long time. I start in January. Accomplishment is good.

This morning I don’t have much else rattling around in my brain except some stupid shit planted in my head by marketers. This mostly comes in the form of the commercials I have to endure while watching TV while working out. I try to run away from them but when you’re jogging in one place I unknowingly step up my pace. This morning I actually hit the maximum speed and had to up my resistance. Anywho.. here is a small part of my summary about the commercials:

- Evidently my generation thinks it’s still cool to have a(n) (expensive) watch like we did in school (long before cell phones). I spend enough on my phone and it has the time. Why do I need a watch?

- The 1% watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Because why else would they have several car commercials about giving a car to somebody else?

- Radio Shack sucks. Well, we knew that already.

- Evidently people who need a celebrity spokesperson to buy something are the same suckers who still think they need a credit card. Suckers.

- Having a really bad Britney Spears lookalike (with matching bad music) is how we motivate viewers to go (back) to school.

- The elliptical machine obviously needs a mute button.

In regards to Christmas, and all of the advertising spent on the importance of it, I hope everyone gets the electronic/car of their choice. Me, all I hope for is to get home and back without much drama, to hug my family, watch Rudolph with my nieces and nephews, have some egg nog, and fall asleep by the glow of the christmas tree. I don’t ask for much. I’ll await to wish you a Merry/Happy Holiday whichever when the day comes around. Seems to me christmas day is the day we’re all glad it’s over. Chew on that.