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A part meant hunting
Threaded through all the business and busyness of the past few weeks has been another strand of concern: the question of where I'm going to live next year. The short version of the background is this: my girlfriend and I have been living 2 hours apart from one another this year; as even this has not slowed down our relationship, we decided we wanted to put less distance between us: for instance, none. To that end, we did some job hunting and eventually she took a job at a school outside of Boston. In this area, it seems fairly common for one partner in a relationship to work in Boston while another lives in Providence.
So, determined to become commuters, we began looking for a place to live. There are quite a lot of communities between Boston and Providence, most of which I suspect are just chock full of folks commuting to one or the other of our cities. I wouldn't be surprised if the main business of these towns is the commuter industry. We looked and looked and didn't find anything that was satisfactory to the both of us. As we prepared for a new round of looking, we hit upon a new idea. Given the price of gas, commuting can turn out to be pretty costly. My car is a Prius, which cuts down somewhat on fuel costs, but her car can go through the petrol like pie, so that it might make more sense either to give her the shorter commute or to live somewhere that she could take the train. Initially, we'd been looking basically along I-95, but for her to take the train, she'd have to go all the way into Boston and then back out on another line, upwards of 2 hours each way. To live along the trainline that's actually convenient for where she's going, it would be pretty much an hour's commute for me, no matter what.
So, in the midst of this, I suggested that we might also live along the other train ride, closer to Providence, and she could take my car while I either took the train or her car. This idea combined with another to offer what appears to be our solution. In passing, I commented that it would be great if, at some point in the future, she could get a job in Providence, because then we could move back into the city rather than living in a commuter town. I like Providence and from her visits to me ''she'' likes Providence. After I made this off-hand remark, she suggested "Well, why don't we live in Providence?"
Turns out, it makes a lot of sense. Living in Providence does several things. If we get an apartment near my school, I can walk to work every day while she commutes roughly an hour to her workplace. With only one of us commuting, we can sell her car, which will relieve us of the debt that car represents as well as its operational expenses--license plates, insurance, and of course gasoline and maintainence. She can then take my car to work, with its superior gas mileage, while I walk. The distance of the commute is off-set somewhat by two factors: since her job is essentially 3/4 time, she doesn't keep as long of hours, which will mean that her commute should largely happen at off-peak hours. Because she doesn't have any extracurricular responsibilities, she's done by around 2 four days a week; in the fall, even with her commuting an hour and me walking, she'll still get home before me because of my coaching responsibilities.
Now we just need to find a place to live here in Providence, but this is much easier to do. On the one hand, I live here, so it seems easier to find places through the local papers or just seeing signs up; on the other, Providence has a fairly vital rental scene because it's a city and because there are so many colleges not only in the city but specifically there are two on this side of town. There's a lot of housing available, and at the same time we are pretty desirable tenants since we're young professionals instead of college students. Even with a little dog, we fit the profile for inflicting rather less wear and tear on the house, to say nothing about being consistent with the rent. Still, it's taking some looking as we try to find the right combination of price, size, location, and extras. Ideally, we would probably have a 3-bedroom or large-ish 2-bedroom place with a good-sized kitchen, less than a mile from campus (the more emphasis on ''less'' the better) with a fenced-in yard (or at least some nearby grass) for the pooch, and the cheaper the better. I saw a place myself on Friday, we saw a couple yesterday, and we have scheduled visits to a couple more today. We shall see....