Home! (Less?)

Well, we got home yesterday from a wonderful trip to Hawaii. Hope's wedding was a huge success, and Michael and I had a great time in Volcanoes National Park. I'll write more about that later, but I wanted to post a few thoughts about our homecoming before I get to the vacation, because the homecoming was far more traumatic than the fun vacation.

Let's start with the disappointment on the job front. I should have heard from the interview committee while I was in Hawaii. Of course, no one called or emailed, and finally, on last Friday, convinced I wasn't part of the final interview group, I called the school to ask. It turned out that they hadn't selected the final interview group, and I was assured that the decision would be announced on Monday. Monday has come and gone, and now it's Tuesday morning, without so much as a hint of an announcement. I'm starting to wonder if I'm not in the final interview group. Would they tell me? I'd like to hope that they would. A couple people on the committee are people whom I consider friends, and all of them have been my colleagues for the past two years. I'd hope that they would let me know, and explain their decision. It would be simple professional courtesy. And basic communication. It's starting to feel like that might be too much to ask for. We'll see. I've stopped holding my breath, at any rate.

Now, on to the home front. Firstly, we'd requested that our landlords hold any packages that might be delivered for us while we were gone. I'd ordered a book and a movie from Amazon for Michael, and they should have been delivered while we were gone. We requested this because the mailboxes in this building are ridiculously small, and there was no way our mailbox would hold a book and a movie and a few day's worth of junk mail. Unfortunately, our mailman apparently decided to cram as much into the box as he could--including the movie, which Amazon's tracking department assures me was delivered on the 17th. By cramming the movie into the mailbox instead of taking it to the landlords as he should have, he rendered the mailbox incapable of closing. He just left it there, unlocked. When we returned, it had naturally been cleaned out by our less than scrupulous neighbors, and now one of the nasty thieving creeps we live with has the movie I ordered for Michael, and who knows what else of our mail. All of our financial information comes to us electronically, so there's not a major concern that the mail thieves took anything more than junk mail and the movie, but there's no real way of knowing what we lost. More importantly, there's no way of knowing which of our neighbors is a thief. I suspect the lunatic right down the hall from us, but it could be just about anyone. It's disconcerting to be living with mail thieves. We knew before that there was someone low enough to steal mail in the building when our Netflix movies started to disappear... Some days really make me hate people!

After discovering the mail theft, we were told by our landlords that because of the construction going on in our building, we're going to have to move. They're going to need to rip our apartment apart to fix all of the problems. They've offered to help us to move to another apartment in a different building of the complex. Naturally, I'm less than thrilled about this. I don't know if I'm going to need to be job searching in the next few weeks. I certainly wasn't planning to spend the last couple weeks of summer packing up and moving, even if it's just to a different building. Our landlords seem to think they're being nice by offering to let some of the scuzzy construction workers they've got working on the project help us move.
These are not exactly the sort of people I'd want to let know that we have nice computers and TVs. Besides, this apartment has been our home for the past two years, and I had thought it would continue to be our home for at least the next two years, while Michael is finishing school. I find it very disgusting of our landlords to expect us to be okay with just packing up and moving away from an apartment we've called home for the past two years. The sentimental value of the apartment alone is enough to make me really sad when I think about leaving. It's the first home Michael and I have shared. While I know that there will be many other homes in our future (not that we're planning to be nomatic--moving is just a part of life), this one will always be special because it was the first. I'm not sure I want to stay in this apartment complex, but I'm also feeling a little bit trapped, because we certainly don't have the time to put into a big hunt for a new place. I think we're stuck here, and we're going to have to make the best of it. Sigh.

And so, this has been the homecoming. I could potentially be unemployed and homeless by the end of the month. Okay, so that's a large exaggeration (I still have my teaching job and we've been offered a new apartment), but it doesn't feel so exaggerated right now, when I'm tired and upset about it!