Good news on all fronts!
Last night, Athena returned to Mandy's parent's place. A portion of tuna fish was left on their doorstep while her dad looked on from the windows. She came back around 3:30 in the morning and he snatched her up and locked her in a safe in the basement. Crazy thanks go out to the Sterk parents for an entire day of hunting for the little bugger. Good job, and thanks again!
With Athena back in custody, we were able to turn our thoughts to other things. Namely: How, what, and where we're planning to spend the next two years.
We flew out of Cincinnati this morning on an express United Skywest flight. The flight was mostly crap. There are bands of storms raging across the planes states and flew through all of them. Anticipating my hatred of flying in a tiny Canadair 700 and its tendency to be tossed about like so much salad, I popped a zanax prescribed my doctor a year or so ago. It worked like a charm. It really is a bizarre drug. When I sat down to fly, I felt tense, fidgety, and keyed up. About 10 minutes after taking it, the plane could've smashed into a mountain and I doubt I would've noticed. It's especially strange because it didn't really do anything to deal my mental side, just the physical. I still had my paranoid thoughts, its just there was no physical reaction to them. For about 45 minutes, I let the plane's constant buffeting turbulence lull me to sleep. Very strange.
We arrived about 10:30AM (MDT) and proceeded to check out a house and an apartment. The house was sub-ghetto. Complete with low-hung ceilings and a neighborhood of houses beset with all manner of gates, bars, and alarm systems. The landlady seemed nice, but the cost, house, and neighborhood just didn't add up to anything promising.
The apartment we checked out was in really cool neighborhood. Near a huge park, lots of little shops, bars, and restaurants. We could fully flex our hipster legs in such a place... if it weren't so friggen small. It was about 600 sq/ft and only one bedroom. We are planning to downsize our belongings and go back to in-college mode for a while, but I'm not sure how we could happily pare down to this size. We'll see.
Tomorrow we have an appointment to check out a property at 10:00AM MDT (that's 8:00AM EST), another at 3:30PM and a couple that we can show up to look at anytime we please. We're hoping to see either a neighborhood or apartment/house that we can concentrate on on Thursday, leaving us Friday to drive out to Rocky Mountains or some such.
I'm writing from a business-center PC, so I'll have to post pics tomorrow when I can get my laptop connected to another network.
From Denver, with much love.
