Well. It’s been a year and a half since my last entry. Back then, I was in Staunton, in the apartment in the back of the old house. Then I felt like I was at last ready for a move. A friend of a friend of friend needed someone to take over a lease at their two-bedroom apartment in one of the few apartment complexes in town. It was a little over $200 more per month, but it was a two bedroom and had all the mod cons, even — most coveted – an in-unit washer and dryer. The month I planned to move, December 2024, was one of the coldest and most miserable winters I had yet experienced, and I got some miserable virus that clapped me in bed. I didn’t get into the place until the middle of January. Then about a month or two later we got the news at work: the company had decided to close the warehouse down. We were being kicked out. I was going to be out of a job.
But! There was the change I could get transferred to another facility in another town. A few other people transferred various places. But I didn’t want to move to Indiana or some place like that. A position had come up as a CSR in Portsmouth, Virginia. I would be out of the mountains at last, and near the ocean once more, something I’d been dreaming about, as well as being on flat land once again. And the weather in the Tidewater is warmer that up in the Shenandoah Valley. (Can you hear the Elder Gods laughing? I couldn’t.) Anyway, I got the position. Fortunately everything was timed when the lease was going to be up at my current place, which turned out not to be so great for reasons. (Mostly my depression.) Anyway, I found a place. I moved.
Portsmouth is… a mixed bag. It has its charms. It’s flat. The local is laid-back, a little raffish. My neighborhood is pretty, what they call a “bedroom community” — not lots of shopping or urban stuff, mostly homes and apartment buildings. But there are tons of trees. The trees here are spectacular. They are huge, shooting up a hundred feet or more in places, especially the pines, or so it looks to me. The new office is shiny. I’m not going to be there much longer though, hopefully. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
Of course life on Chesapeake Bay has its dangers, but there haven’t been any hurricanes so far, and people tell me this particular neighborhood doesn’t seem to flood. Yay. The river is like, right over there almost. I am terrified of the bridges and tunnels and getting around them is… problematic. But I don’t have to unless I am going far afield. Work is less than ten minutes away and I need to cross no bridges. The weather is usually mild and in fact has been pretty cool up until today. Last summer thought, when I had been here only a little while, one of Virginia’s heat wave’s hit. It went up to 110 F. I felt like I was in a toaster whenever I had to step outside. It was quite something. Then winter came, and it was one of the coldest they had here in ages. 20 degrees or so lower than average. There was fortunately not a lot of snow. But my apartment had a draft I was unable to source.
The apartment. I actually signed a leave for a second year. I had gone back and forth wondering if I should move. It is very expensive here. At the last moment I decided that the price differences between here and less expensive places wasn’t worth moving, and I have a washer/dryer hookup here. (I rent the machines.) And even though it’s a dark little cave (it has a balcony with a door with a full length glass inset, a large window, and another large window in the bedroom, but all three face a wood that is right behind the apartment) I have experienced almost none of the depression I had associated with Virginia’s dark winters here. So maybe that wasn’t it.
As for the job… I had been here a month or so, when they announced that our company had sold the entire department to another company. Some sort of weird thing where we still worked at the warehouse office but now were employees of this *other* global company. I’ve not been having an entirely easy time of it at work for reasons that I won’t get into now but they told us that at some point we are going to be working from home so I decided to stick with them. It’s already past the time they said we’d start that though, they are cagey about why. (They are trying to blame us, but I have heard there is a phone app that they are having issues with. Who knows.) Anyway, that is the situation.
The cats have adjusted to the new place. There are some outside strays which send Nikki into a rage if she sees them but she calms down faster these days. I think it’s actually good that there aren’t ask many windows here, so they (especially Nikki) can’t get overstimulated, which I think was happening at the old apartment in Staunton. The newer apartment I stayed in for six months did have a lot of windows, especially sunny front ones which I do miss for the cats, I kept a coffee table under that set and they would lie there and bake like muffins. But it was upstairs, so no evil outdoor cats could be seen. They love going out on the little patio, which is walled, but it’s dirty right now and I need to clean up the spider webs (the cats will try to eat them) and I want to get a screen or something or maybe a catio but that’s when/if I ever have money.
I do like the apartment. I may go more into depth about it in another post. It was build in the late 80s/early 90s, Obviously it was renovated at least once since then, but nothing is brand new. Beige paint, part carpet (terrible beige shag that the cats are slowly destroying) with vinyl floor covering in a wood plank pattern for the rest of the place. It’s okay. I’d like the doors to seal better — cigarette and weed smoke smells get in, as well as the occasional large bug or confused spider. Coastal life, haha. Anyway, that’s all for now. I’m in a new town, in a new part of the country, though still in Virginia. And no, I haven’t been to the beach yet since I moved here.