Oh Deer

Good evening everyone.  I haven't written very often lately as I was deciding what to do next in my adventurous life, but I made my decision.  While in Las Vegas, I basically had a "stop loss point" in mind where I'd have to get a job if my money dropped to a certain level.  When my money reached that point, I made what turned out to be a bad decision due in part to misinformation (although I'll shoulder my share of the blame too).  There will be more written about this in the future as I filet Enterprise and speak about lodging options in Reno.  In the interest of keeping things a little bit shorter now however, I'll move on...

I had pretty much decided by Monday morning that I wanted to move back to Texas, and bright and early I put in a call to my former boss.  He told me to check back in a little while later, and when I did, I was told that my paperwork was already being processed.  :)  Now I had to make arrangements to get back to Austin.  Unfortunately (as I recalled once I went to the Avis site and started pricing vehicles), renting from Austin to Las Vegas was cheaper than Vegas to Austin back in July (yes, I priced it both ways).  On top of having to drive from Reno to Austin (which takes about seven more hours than driving from Vegas), the rental costs more because of the extra distance.  Also, it's not possible to make that trip in less than 24 hours if you adhere to the speed limit, adding even more money to the cost of the rental.  Regardless, I had made my decision and had to focus on getting back to Austin - I'd have to figure out the money problems later.  When I talked about my stop loss point, that included enough money to rent a vehicle to get home, gas for the trip, application fee/administration fee/deposit and first month's rent for an apartment, money to pay my phone bill, and maybe even a little food money in there til my first paycheck.  That's a laundry list of things that got OBLITERATED by the Reno fiasco and the extra money that I had to spend returning to Austin.

All of that aside, I was having a pretty good return trip here on Wednesday and Thursday.  I had a lot of sleep on Tuesday, and I had my Sirius radio to keep me occupied and motivated as I made my journey through several miles of desert and nothingness.  I skated by Las Vegas Wednesday night, and through Phoenix and Tucson early Thursday morning, cheating rush hours and traffic.  In El Paso I encountered the only real traffic that I'd meet during the trip.  I was about fifteen minutes from Austin, FIFTEEN MINUTES away from my destination, approaching Austin from the east on Highway 290 at about 9:00 p.m., when a big deer jumped out of the woods and the darkness and into my lane of the 4-lane highway, and STOPPED ("Deer in the headlights" anyone?), and BAM!!!...  I had tried to turn at the last minute (a fact that I didn't even remember until afterward when I was looking at the front end of the vehicle with the police, noticing how one side took more damage than the other).  So yeah, BAM!!!  The airbag deployed and hit the inside of my forearms as I discovered exactly how fast a deer can decelerate a vehicle.  When I came out of my brief moment of shock, I realized that my rental was still operable, and I looked for a safe place to pull over.  The area that I was in was unlit, surrounded by woods, and the speed limit was 70.  For those of you familiar with the Austin area, I ended up stalling out at the red light across from the Nutty Brown Cafe on 290.  Anyway, I wasn't happy at all when I had to wait over two hours for the tow truck and my replacement vehicle to show up from the airport, but I finally calmed down, realizing how lucky I was that I wasn't injured...

Fast forward to right now, and once again I'm incredibly fortunate to have some good friends.  The friends that I'm with right now are housing me and my stuff, and I received a facebook message from another friend yesterday offering to put me up at his place while I'm in this transition period.  I'm really, really fortunate...

As I get settled back in Austin over the next few months, you'll still get to read plenty from my adventures in Las Vegas and Reno.  Don't feel bad for me.  I had told several people that if I had to get a job, I'd rather work in Austin than in Vegas - it's just a nicer place to live.  I was honestly excited to be returning once I had made my decision.

So to Gabby, I obviously learned that San Diego was too expensive (I still didn't make it to the ocean this trip).  And to Kyleigh, I won't be in Reno when you get there, but I hope that you enjoy visiting downtown and going back in time.  And Jason, sorry that I'm not still there, but enjoy your visit to the desert.  And to all of you who have supported me and enjoy following the blog, I'll bounce back again... ;)  And yes Valerie and Yvonne, you can tell people that the real reason cameI came back is so y'all could make Spam for me...  :)

I'm going to stop now because we have a Mississippi/LSU matchup in addition to a World Series Game 4 that are about to start, but I'll be back pretty soon.  Thanks again for your support and have a great football weekend...  :)