I’ve written one full post about Mexico, and a bunch of little stopgap ones, so I still want to write more, but for the moment this is more important.

As many of you (here I’m presuming that there are many of you—I never really know) are aware, I’m planning to move to Minneapolis. For a while the plan was pretty indefinite, but over the last week or so it’s taken shape a lot more.

There are two main elements to getting there: getting a job and finding a place to live. For the one, I’ve been in touch with a company that liked me enough to have a recruiter talk on the phone with me, and I’ve got a video-call interview with them sometime this week (not scheduled yet); I’d be working in a call center and starting May 19th. I hope I get this one, because besides a steady income it comes with a few nice perks, including four weeks of vacation per year and the freedom to work in casual clothes.

For the second thing, I asked everyone I knew in the area what they could tell me about places I might be able to happily live, and so far my first lead has turned out to be the best one: a friend of a friend of a friend, with an attic at a reasonable price, who’s willing to let me move in around the middle of the month and live there informally and provisionally while we figure out if I’m a good fit for his attic and whether there are any other places around that might interest me more—though he and his partner sound like really interesting people with a lot of the same interests as me, so it might stick. In any case, it sounds like as low-stress an option as I could reasonably hope for.

I haven’t planned any big going-away thing, and I don’t know exactly which day I’ll leave either; heck, I don’t even know yet if I’ll have a job when I land or if I’ll have to hit the ground running in the job search. But mid-May means it is getting down to crunch time for how long I’ll be in Ohio. I’m starting to get some emotions about this. I’ve been away from Cincinnati a lot, of course. But I’ve always had it as a sort of home base to mentally gravitate back to, and it’s always been “home” even if I was actually spending more time away from it. Now I’m getting ready to leave not just for a semester in college, not just for a year in Korea, not just for a few months of traveling, but for good. Obviously I’ll be allowed to come back, sometimes for a good long while if I’ve got that much vacation to play with, but it’s still a giant mental step. It’s going to be strange. It’s going to be hard. And I’ve only barely started preparing myself for it. But I can do it, and I want to do it. It’s just the actual doing it that’s the thing.