Move Complete, Job Acquired, K Week in Progress

It’s been a busy week.  So forgive me if the title of this blog is a bit uncreative.  I’ll have another cartoon up tomorrow or the day after, but this entry will be basically explaining what I’ve been doing for the last 8 days or so.

As I mentioned last time, I moved on the 13th, about 200 miles from Columbus, OH to Lexington, KY.  Not exactly across the country but still a big deal for me.  Fortunately I had Kyle and my family helping me so it was quite manageable.

It didn’t look like things would go as well as they did, however.  I have heard that renting a moving truck isn’t always easy.  Nonetheless, I called the company over a week in advanced and booked it, gave them all my credit card information, etc, to make darn sure I would have a truck.  If that weren’t enough, I called the actual rental facility I would be picking up from to make sure they had the reservation and the truck the night before.  They said they did.

They didn’t.  I got there at 9:00 am the next day and they told me they didn’t have any trucks.  Naturally I was a bit irked.  I called all the surrounding truck rental areas to see if I could get something last-minute but they were booked.  What ended up happening is that we waited about 3 hours until some nice guy turned in his 15’ truck rental in early, which they gave to us for the same price as the 10’ one I’d booked.

Let me tell you:  Driving a 15 foot truck is a lot different from driving a 10 foot truck.  I really only needed a cargo van, but they don’t do those for one-way trips, so the 10’ one was the smallest they went.  I don’t have enough stuff to even fill that up, so you can imagine what the 15’ one looked like.  Actually, you don’t have to imagine—see yourself below.

We had to put everything in a one-box-high layer to
keep it from sliding everywhere.  Those moving trucks
don't exactly handle like my little Nissan Sentra.

Anyway, I managed not to kill anyone on the way down and we got moved in right on time, so it all worked out fine, but I have no problem telling you I won’t be renting from Budget again.  From what I’ve heard, this situation is fairly commonplace.

Moving on:  I am done with most of the general orientation at the hospital I will be working at and I take my first all-nighter on Tuesday, so I’m pretty excited about that.  So far everyone there has been ridiculously friendly and helpful.  I get a feeling I will enjoy working there a lot.  Working and going to school can be tough, but it’ll happen somehow or other.

Lastly, I may have mentioned at some point that I am a student (technically a transfer student) at the University of Kentucky (UK), and their orientation for incoming students is called K Week.  It’s basically a week of learning about college life in general, UK specifically, and depending on which events you attend you can learn about athletics, your specific major, student activities, fraternities/sororities, you name it.  It’s full of free food, free T-shirts, and other free items, and I’ll be honest—I’m all about the free stuff.  In an effort to make this blog more visually appealing I’ve included a picture of the opening event, called Play Fair, below.

Play Fair, the kickoff event of K Week.

I come from the Ohio State University, where we have 65,000 students, so UK’s 25,000 seems small in comparison on paper.  But as you can see, in real life, it’s nothing to sneeze at.  These are just incoming students and I suspect there were many more who didn’t bother to come, so that gives you some idea.

It is a bit weird to be a newbie again, especially since the group I was put in are mostly people who are partially done with their undergraduate degrees, not seeking a second one.  One person in my group is going after the second-degree BSN program just like I am, so it will be good to know someone in it (provided we both are accepted).  It’s kind of nice to be new again, though, because it’s an opportunity to sort of have a fresh start, to do things differently from the get-go, even though degree #2 is going to be a lot different than degree #1.  Either way, I’m looking forward to it.

And I sure can’t wait until football season starts.