Cool! I'm hoping to get my first place soon. Currently at home to save money... Not fun, but it's getting me ahead. My brother moved out today to go to New Orleans for a job.

What are you studying?

 

I love reading about all you kids leaving the nest. I moved out in 1978 when I was 17. I went into the Army back then. I went to basic and AIT then on 2 January 1979 I was on a plane flying to Germany for my first duty assignment. There are days I wish I could do it all over again.

Life as an adult is way different than life as a kid living with mom & pop. Good luck to all of you starting out on your own.

 

Then you might as well kind of add another one to that list. Got my first apartment last week or so.

 

I graduated in 1971. I figured any day I would get a letter from the President of the United States telling me to report to the induction center in Minneapolis Minnesota and be sent off to a beautiful tropical land where I would be allowed to kill people who were different than me and maybe be killed myself in a scenic rice paddy but, that didn't work out.

Instead I went to vocational school for mechanical drafting and machine design so I could draw working drawings of better guns and bombs to kill people with but that too didn't work out.

My older sister went to the class too.It didn't take long for us to figure out it would be much less expensive for us to get a place closer to the school.

We were driving just under 40 miles one way, when winter set in it was very challenging to get to school on time with the weather.

We were lucky and found a trailer house we could afford. If we had tried to get a place when school first started for the year there simply wouldn't have been anything we could have been able to afford, by waiting and being just plain lucky we did much better.

We lived there for the two years the course ran. After that I moved back in to the family home until I got a job. I spent the summer traveling around to interviews for drafting jobs. That didn't work out so well either.

Finally, a few months later I took a job at a casket factory. I worked through most of the winter while living at home then decided to get an apartment in the same town I was working in. I got a one room apartment with a shared bathroom down the hall above the tavern where my older sister was working.

My first place on my own was not truly great. The room was quite small and did not have a closet. There was a wardrobe a bed and a small chest of drawers and that was it. I built some tables to put my clock radio and TV on but there simply wasn't room for any other furniture.

I wasn't supposed to cook while I was living there but I got a toaster oven and a hot plate and made a lot of pretty icky meals there. Back then only the fairly well to do had microwave ovens. I'd buy most of my food supplies the same day I used them because I didn't think I could sneak even a small fridge up stairs without someone noticing.

A lot of my friends asked how I could sleep in my room. The bar didn't close until 2 am through the summer and 1am through the winter. The jukebox rarely stopped until closing. It was not a real problem for me to sleep through it, it was just something I got used to.

 

My first place was an apartment on the *interesting* side of Columbus Ohio..... We had trains ever 15 minutes, passenger jets every 10, or less.... and gun fire at random intervals throughout the day. The first few days I lived there, I didn't think anything of it, as I was used to living out in the country, and it just wasn't unusual to hear gunfire. Then I remembered I lived in the middle of a large city now, and discharge of firearms was patently illegal......

One day, walking out to get my mail, a man was walking down the sidewalk, with what was obviously a rifle, wrapped in a jacket..... He asked me: "Does this look like a gun to you?".... I laughed, and told him Yes, yes it does. His response was "damn", and he continued walking....

We had our own private arsonist for a few days. Three fires in just my building over the course of two days..... (mattresses and such in the storage room) Took 45 minutes for the police/firemen to show up.... Glad it wasn't any kind of emergency or anything....

On another occasion, our neighbors were beating the hell out of each other... so, we called the cops.... an hour later..... FOUR cop cars showed up. Each with two cops.... Talk about over-kill......

We had one man pissin' and moaning about the drug dealer that lived in a nearby building that had shot him in the butt..... and another guy that was pointing out that the last guy that tried to rip him off in a drug deal got a buttful of lead.......

I was VERY happy to move out of there.....

 

Back at the beach, Ocean City, Maryland this time.

 

First day of college tomorrow.

 

Last week of work comin up this week before im laid off... Not looking forward to job searching again.

 

View this morning.

Back in Fairfax now.

 

At work we have a Cummins backup generator for the building. It's fairly new, and it's being worked on at the moment. The guys from Cummins are driving Chevy 3500 trucks, probably with a Duramax engine. They should at least drive a Cummins!