Post Stormy-Surgery Budgetary Discussion

Well, the good news is that Stormy's surgey has not cost me enough to make the move to Seattle impossible. It has however taken enough of a chunk out to make me wonder if a change to my planned timetable might be in order.

The original plan was that my job would end about a week before I fly up to Seattle with Stormy to visit. While up there I'd get to know Pat all over again, have some fun, and meet the TEKSystems recruiters. After 2 weeks of fun I'd fly back here and proceed to pack up my stuff for the move, selling off or trashing what I don't want. I figured on giving myself a few weeks for this, given the sheer amount of work it entails. Once everything was ready, I'd ship my stuff out via UPS, ship my car via auto-transport, and then fly up to await their arrival with Stormy.

This plan gives plenty of time for everything that needs to happen, and plenty of time to adapt if something goes wrong, but it also means spending a long time in between jobs (about a month and a half), and lengthening my stay in the apartment in FL for another month.

An alternative would be to get everything ready for the move before I visit, send everything off, then fly up for my visit and just stay there. This would eliminate a lot of the jobless time, eliminate a month of rent here in FL, eliminate me having to buy another plane ticket, etc. It would also mean I'd have just 1 week to pack everything up for the move, so anything I won't be taking with me will be left to David or trashed. This isn't too much of a change really, I'd planned on leaving anything valuable or useful to him anyway, to either use, sell, or trash as he sees fit, and he'd already promised to send me a share of the money he gets from any of it.

Financially, there's about a $1000 difference in cost between the two plans (minimum), and if you add in the fact that I could start work sooner you can add another $1000 in potential earnings that I'd have a chance to get. I think that in itself is a pretty strong argument in favor of the alternate plan.

However, it would mean having a lot less time to pack things up, I would have to make rather last-minute arrangements for the van, and in general it doesn't allow as much leeway for things to go wrong as the original plan. I'm fairly comfortable with all of that tho, especially given the trust factor that Pat and I have, I *know* that nothing major is going to go wrong... or, if Murphey really does decide to knock us a good one, I know that we'll be able to overcome it, whatever it is.

Additional benefits would be much less stress for Stormy, and truthfully less stress for me as well since it'll all be over so much sooner.

Pat should be back from Ellensburg sometime this evening, I'll definitly discuss things with him, see what other options we can come up with, and weigh the pluses and minuses of them. If we come up with anything definite I'll post again.