Last Post Before the Wedding.

Well, that time has finally arrived. I have reached the point where Diana and I have gotten so busy working on wedding and moving stuff that I'm going to have to abandon posting for a while.

But there's more for people who want to here my slightly helpful thoughts or figure out what Diana and I are up to. Because I'm such a sucker for new media, you can follow are exploits between now and the end of the New York City leg of our honeymoon on Twitter.   Just do a search for John C. Hodges, and you'll get my pictures, maps, and other interesting bits of the wedding.  

After the wedding I'll try to do a few posts about the actual event.  I'll also post information about pictures, etc. up here.  

Look forward to you reading more in the future and thanks for sharing this important event in my life with me!

Finding a Cell Phone

Now we get into the nitty gritty of getting married. Top on the list of all of those little things that we have to do is to get a new cell phone plan for the two of us. After talking to people at the church about their telephone culture and after realizing that we are younger than 75, we realized that there is no good reason for a landline at this point in our lives. As such, we needed to find a cell phone plan that covered all of our phone needs.

This meant that we had to go into cell phone stores. These stores are always very strange; open behemoths of bright lights, shiny technology, always irate customers and service people both friendly and confused. I really am glad that I only have to go into these places about once every two years.

So we did a little shopping and I think we found what we liked. We’ll be making purchases on some internet capable phones in the next few weeks and look forward to using them on our honeymoon to New York City.

Finding a Place to Live Part III: A Decision

After some of the more ridiculous places that I talked about in the last post, we decided that it would be best to check out some apartments that we knew would at least be clean and free of (alleged) bullet holes. We went to two of the larger apartment complexes in the area. We also saw a really cute apartment historic in another historic part of town that we really liked.

We found the rent to be reasonable and liked them, but still kind of had our hearts set on a house. After talking with some of the people at Diana’s future church about the ability to get furniture, we decided to go with the house that we initially thought was too large. After the apartment that we liked the most was rented out from under us, we decided that this was our best choice.

But we still had some things to worry about. First, we had to negotiate the price down and see about getting a two-year lease. When we decided to call our realtor with our decision, she was unfortunately busy with other clients so we had to wait on pins and needles until we could hear back from her. Fortunately she came back with the affirmative. We signed an application the next morning at the McDonald’s down the street from our new house and left town fulfilled.

The best thing about this whole experience was that there was never a whole lot of drama between Diana and me. We fretted a lot about finding a place, figuring out a budget, etc. but we worked as a functional team in order to accomplish it. The outcome makes me feel like we have a positive future ahead of us.

Finding a Place to Live Part II: The Worst

So we began our second day of house hunting with a couple of townhouses that we had seen online. They were a decent price and from our drive through the neighborhood seemed to be pretty nice. We decided to make an appointment for them first thing in the morning and placed a lot of stake in them.

Were we disappointed. To say the least, they were disgusting. In the first one the carpet was destroyed, the toilets had not been cleaned (or even flushed) for a long time, it had dead roaches (which I guess was better than live ones) and the bathtubs in the house needed to be replaced because of all of the mildew. And this was just in the first house. To be polite, we decided to go to the other house the guy had across the street thinking it couldn’t be worse. It was. It was obviously in a state of being remodeled. There was no flooring, or refrigerator in the bottom portion of the house. The appliances were also very old and we had an interesting conversation about the dirty microwave with dials.

Me: “This looks pretty old. Does it still work?

Realtor: “As far as I know.”

Me: “Are you going to check before someone moves in?”

Realtor: “If it doesn’t work, someone could just tell me later.”

That’s great. I definitely want to move in somewhere and find a bunch of broken appliances in them. We then went upstairs to see the bathrooms and somehow they actually were worse than the ones in other townhouse: all the sinks had what looked like a pussy wound in the bottom that defies any explanation. However, one had what looked like recently added tile flooring. I followed Diana into the bathroom and noticed that there was a loud cracking noise. As she sat there shuffling her feet on the tile.

Me: “Is that the tile.”

Diana: “Yup.”

Me: “I’ve seen enough.”

So we quickly left the house. I asked Diana if we should cross the townhouses off our list of places to consider. In one of her more frank moments, she simply replied “Hell yes.”

Later on in the day we went to a house that we had driven by the day before and decided to give the realtor a call. This house wasn’t in much better condition. It had a deteriorated screened patio on the back, a terrible kitchen, and a bathroom with a broken toilet. The previous tenets also had painted one of the bedrooms an awful yellow color and had never heard of drop cloths or masking tape. The worst part of the house was discovered by Diana as we were leaving. She decided to bring it up with the realtor.

Diana: “It looks like there are a bunch small holes in the front door.”

Realtor: “Yeah the guys before didn’t take good care of the house.”

The holes were irregularly spaced, and splintered on one side. Unless they were breathing holes there was only explanation in our minds. I don’t know how (alleged) bullet holes could be considered “the guys before didn’t take good care of the house.”

So those were the worst. House-hunting can be quite difficult.

Finding a Place to Live Part I

An unavoidable part of getting married is finding a place to live. (Well, I guess you could continue to live apart, but that kind of defeats the purpose of marriage in my mind and sounds expensive.) As Diana has recently been accepted to a pastoral residency in Montgomery, Alabama, we went there this weekend to look for a place to live. So we had two days to drive down, find a house, and make back to a friend’s wedding in Cullman, Alabama.

A little bit about myself might be necessary for this story to make sense. I moved around a lot when I was younger. Although I now am quite willing to move around to experience all that life has to office. Montgomery will be the eleventh city that I’ve lived in on top of the two times I spent a considerable amount of time overseas. What I learned from these experiences is that finding a place to live is a long, often hellish, experience that requires a lot of patience.

Diana, as usual, was very well organized and had called a head to a number of different places to set up appointments. We had decided that we wanted to focus on seeing houses for rent, rather than apartments. We wanted to begin our lives in a place that we could make feel like our home in a quaint neighborhood. The first house we went to had beautiful tile walls and hardwood floors and a fenced backyard. Unfortunatley, it was too small. The second house we went to was a refurbished beautiful house in a historical neighborhood. It also had beautiful building materials and we could really see ourselves living there. However, it seemed a little too big.

Feeling a little bit like Goldilocks, we went on to our third place, an attached house in another neighborhood. We weren’t very impressed by this house. It had a very open floor plan, but didn’t have a refrigerator (who rents a place without a fridge?), and because it was attached, got absolutely no natural light. After not liking this place, we drove around a bunch of other houses that we had seen online to see if we could call someone for an appointment on our second day. Between the house down the street from the house flying the Confederate Battle flag, the house basically in the woods in the back of the subdivision, and the house that was dilapidated, we were a little discouraged for the day’s work. I’ll tell you how the house hunt ended up soon.