AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Yo, Plano's a nice place though, hope you like gigantic still-expanding suburbs (it's one of the few places all the rich/upper middle class folks like to live here in the Dallas area). There are a hell of a lot of tech-y businesses there too, so hopefully you can find a job. Close enough to all the neat Dallas stuff but far enough to have some elbow room. You'll also be pretty close to where I live, which is kinda cool.

Honestly if you ignore all the backwards small-town country-bumpkin people in Texas its a really nice place. And since you're living in a decent sized city it should be easy to avoid those folks (all the big metropolitan areas in Texas actually have a lot of not-Republicans, if that's your concern).


ALSO here have my university career center's webpage on writing resumes and shit:
http://www.smu.edu/StudentAffairs/Caree ... ls/Resumes

Honestly I'd just pick one of their examples and put your own stuff in there, then use the rest of the tools to edit and revise. Also maybe SMU is hiring IT people who knows????? I'd think just about any big company might have use for computer-minded people, but I don't know what kind of job you're looking for exactly.

EDIT: feel free to shoot me a message if you have any questions about the north Dallas area, since I've been here like 5 years now, plus Brock from Cockfighting Society's lived nearby all his life. I'm no expert but maybe I can give you advice on restaurants or something? idk lol.

Texas is a big place so I can't speak for most of it, but hill country's a nice area with nice people

I live around New Braunfels and San Antonio

Central Texas is pretty good, Austin's a bit all over the place, and I would stay off I35 in the middle of the night, but we don't get a lot of the problems that people think Texas has.

Except Buda, they're a weird shitty mix of awful christians and rich white people, driving out the few decent people in their general area.

i really just hate texas because it's so fucking hot i wanna die


houston's not bad, it's a modern enough city that it's pretty chill with gay/minorities/etc but the traffic is HORRENDOUS and we call the east side silent hill for a reason. the west is beautiful, the south is ...weird (never before have i seen thousand dollar apartments right next to cows), and the north is all rich white ppl UNTIL you get the kingwood/porter/woodlands/conroe line then suddenly you're surrounded by country bumpkins (i live in porter which is bodaciously a local meme yee haw.)

likely in a couple years after our house is paid off we're gonna end up moving to austin. which is slightly less awful of texas but still texas. my ideal i think would be washington state - mountains and the ocean, seasons and space. sounds good to me.

Washington is gorgeous, but you get a lot of people who are wannabe hicks, especially in the eastern part of the state. If you can tolerate less sun, go west side, because it's always so gorgeously green and it's easier to find anything you'd want to buy, due to proximity to port cities. If you need sunlight, but feel like you can handle fire season, go east side. It's equally pretty, but in a different way, and there's more space, but less availability of anything that isn't typical Walmart fare. Although you are more likely to find people who can make grits and dirty rice, since there was a shitload of people from the southeast who moved up here back between the 20s and 50s for the farmland.

Washington's starting to get expensive to live in even suburb/satellite cities though now, right?

Like I know getting anywhere near Seattle is getting to be a pain.

We've been getting a lot of Washington refugees recently that find living in Texas is cheaper than dealing with Washington. Austin can be pretty horrendously expensive as places to rent have been jumping 10-15% every other year, but there's so much land right now that going half an hour out nets you pretty affordable options.

Oh, yeah, right around Seattle is generally getting a bit more difficult, since there are so many high-end jobs with people who can afford it. Most merchants and landlords are trying to appeal and price to the 100k+ crowd (which again, there are so many people with that range of job), because why wouldn't they?

But generally, the farther you get from Puget Sound (and Mercer Island), things get steadily cheaper. The east side and the mountain border of the west side have similar pricing on things. Average 2-bed apartment is probably going to run you $550-$800, depending on usual standards of location, quality, and management, as well as whether or not it participates in a limited income program. In the more rural areas where houses are easier to find than apartments, you can probably find a 2-3 bed for about $750-$950 (although these are owned by individuals, so are subject to delusional pricing every now and then).
I only spend about $80 on groceries per month most of the time, but I would estimate a family of 4 could probably do like, $500 a month, including a couple nights out, depending on how much snack food they buy, and if they're smart about sales. But there are also slightly more expensive (but still reasonable) options for organic and fair-trade stores, particularly near Spokane.
Eastern Washington, particularly Chelan, Douglas, and Grant Counties have pretty much the cheapest electricity in the country, due to the fact that you can't throw a rock in any direction without hitting a hydropower dam (Like, parts of California, Oregon, and Idaho actually buy electricity from us). Gas pricing is fairly middle of the road outside of the Sound. (we're at about $1.90 right now). Also, our minimum wage is $9.47 across the state (so not including cities that have opted to make their local wage higher). I couldn't find any data from later than 2013, but I would guess that the most common (Mode, not Mean) household income is probably near the 50k range when there are at least two people working. Mean is probably going to be closer to 70k, just because of the coast.

So basically, as long as you're away from the coast, two people with no kids, working full-ish time at (or maybe slightly above) minimum wage can easily afford a 1-bed apartment, good food, heat/ac year round, the occasional night out, fast internet, decent phones, and moderate amounts of electronics/hobbies, as long as they haven't gotten into major debt that will be a bitch to pay back.

my goal is to live in bumfuck nowhere with like 100 acres and be relatively self-sufficient as far as food/power goes. i wanna be within proximity (like a couple hours' drive at most) to the ocean and mountains are a nice bonus for aesthetics. and not in california. because screw california. i'm not really attached to any particular state, i just want seasons and space and beaches, really.

oh and to be able to keep all the animal parts i already own because there's some states where my shit's illegal and i refuse to get rid of anything. i worked hard to get all this shit.

Then you'll probably want to be out on the western edge of the Cascade foothills, and probably closer to the southern part of the state (possibly between Hwy 12 and 504). Plus, you still get winter, but it's a bit milder, so snow isn't as much of a problem for travel danger. You'll have a pretty short route to three great, non-Seattle coast towns, and you'll only be an hour or less out from I-5, so getting to Seattle is going to be like, 2 hours, should you want to take a trip for a convention, or international stuff, or whatever.

Generally, non-exotic animal stuff is not illegal in Washington, although collecting roadkill off of major highways might be, simply due to safety/liability of getting hit by a car while doing so. I haven't looked that up, although I vaguely remember someone getting in trouble for trying to take a doe off Hwy 2 a few years back.

yeah there's actually a site that has concise lists of all us state animal parts laws. washington's is basically just 'no velvet antlers, bighorn sheep parts, shark fins, or these 8 exotic animals' which...the exotics and sheep is kind of a bummer but eh. roadkill is illegal but it is in texas too and i just kinda...deal with/work around that so eh.

no idea when we'll be able to make a move like that but i can Dream. more than likely we'll have a 2-4 acre place outside of austin in a couple years so kyle can work his tech job he wants and i can raise more livestock and have a separate structure to use as my kill shed.

I myself am kind of torn between living in small town city limits, and being on several acres like what I grew up in. It would be nice for any hypothetical kids to be able to walk places and have friends nearby, and I like the idea of being able to walk to work/school/shops, but at the same time, I greatly enjoyed having an orchard and canyon as my yard to run around in and climb and swim in. And I kind of want to make sure that there's someone to run the family orchard so it doesn't get sold off when my dad stops managing it and my uncle decides what to do with it (he has legal authority over the property, save for house lots, once my grandmother dies)

I made it to the apartment and I only got lost once.
My roommate is nice and rarely at home and sleeps with earplugs. There is no phone.
My bedroom is nice and there's ample space. Most importantly the window has opaque curtains and my first action once I had all my stuff moved in was to close them and they do their job wonderfully.
Living here will not be the end of me. It could even be nice. What a twist.

Dude people don't realize how important nice curtains can be. I used to have an apartment with a window facing a really busy street, I bodaciously couldn't sleep because of all the activity going on outside. Got some nice, dark, thick sound-blocking curtains and it was pure bliss.

But hey, congrats on the not-terrible apartment! Even if your roommate does turn out to be weird, it sounds like you at least have your own bedroom so you can pretty much just chill there.

My roommate is a friend's friend, I've hung out with them for three years now. They're the super nice people that invited me twice during the winter holidays. The guy is getting a bachelor's degree in physics, he's basically always in class or working in his faculty. He's a really good guy and he's honest and trustworthy, which is great since the last time I had roomates (in 2013, when I entered the same major as my current roommate in the same uni) they were ripping me off. We have a college degree in common (science) and he does a little bit of programming (my new field) so we have common interests. Everything is cool.

My bedroom is also next to a semi-busy one-way street and I can hear the cars but it's not too loud.

i gort more buns


boy



ladies


gotta neuter my lionhead (i won't breed him anyway) and he'll likely go live with the does. he and New Guy didn't fight but they just.......would not stop humping one another.