Honestly, if I had any feedback at all on my journals, they would probably be posted closer to the time that things actually happened in my life. But that doesn't change a thing about what has just happened in the past 3 weeks for me.

In that time, I interviewed at a couple job offers, quit a decent paying job, moved out of a studio apartment 60 miles into my parents house, applied to a handful of new apartments, moved another 60 odd miles into a 1 bedroom apartment, and started a new job. During the whole process, I've felt like a bastard, a traitor (tp my boss, not my country), and hauled large weights further than I have trained for more frequently than I care to count. I've also spent my entire life savings to get out of a situation that would have left me in debt with no way out if I had stayed.

That's the overview. More specifically, it's fair to start much earlier, and describe my situation leading up to this mess. Since August of 2017, I was living in an apartment in San Jose, California, which was asking for a rent equal to the mortgage payment for a large house in most other parts of America (there's a lot that can be done with $1200 a month, but not rent in San Jose). This was actually manageable with the job I had starting in February of this year, which seemed to be a good place for me. For a time, at least. Problems started to arise after my fiancée had her vaginoplasty, and getting full nights' sleep became more difficult to get, causing lapses in my concentration and ability to check my own work. Perhaps it is fair to say that they were asking me to use a method of AutoCAD that rubbed me the wrong way too, and the number of things I had to check myself on was enormous compared to other jobs. Maybe this was simply a difference between the cabinetry industry (where I learned my trade) and the windows & doors industry (the job I was in). Additional frustration came from my commute, which was over 45 minutes in the morning before rush-hour, and 1.5 to 2 hours in the evening if there weren't any accidents. Icing on the cake was that in the summer - before I had even lived in my apartment for a year, the landlord decided to up the rent a couple hundred dollars per month.

My dearest Nelly pressured me to leave that situation hard, and by August, even I got tired of constant stress at work where I could never seem to do a satisfactory job. So, I started looking for the second time this year for a new job, this time in a different region of California; the Central Valley. There were two problems I had to overcome however: there were fewer jobs in my field of work, and getting to an interview while working full-time and more was problematic. By using sick-days I was able to get to a couple interviews, and eventually land a job, but not until halfway through the month. that gave me just enough time to give my two weeks notice before the end of August, and start looking for a new place to live near the new job. Even before finding a place, we started packaging our thing so we could move out and hopefully not pay for rent for September. That didn't quite work out, but we still left anyway to stay at my parents which was closer to my new job while we searched for a new apartment. THE TUESDAY BEFORE STARTING MY NEW JOB we found a new place, a 1 bedroom unit for about $500 less than the studio we were at, and a fraction of the commute away. That didn't leave much time to move, but we managed it, again.

That was last week. This week, I've been starting my new job with a totally new CAD software for me - Cabinet Vision. Hopefully, both the job and the apartment are keepers, but only time will tell.