Settling In

New job, new apartment, new furniture, new town.

The blog’s a day late this week, but for good reason, there has been a lot going on. Here’s a brief update.

The New Job:

It was pretty humbling to have my appointment announced as a press release by my company. Of course, now I have to live up to the billing/hype, but it won’t take long given how steep the learning curve has been. It’s easy to get lulled into thinking that grad school is where you get your education, but it’s when you get to your new job that the learning really begins. It’s meant some early morning starts and some long evenings, but I am starting to feel like I am getting the hang of it. Which appears to be just in time, as the projects keep on rolling in.


The New Apartment:

In between getting used to the new role, this week also marked my move into my own place up here in Connecticut. I managed to get a nice little studio apartment in the town of Black Rock. In all truth the place is not much bigger than the bedroom in my last place in Dallas (where the walk in wardrobe was so large I put a desk in there and used it as my study), but then again when you don’t have that much stuff, you don’t need the space. What matters is that the water is hot, the air conditioning is cold, and the view is nice. Which the place achieves on all three counts. Oh and the internet is connected now.

The New Furniture:

Hooray for flatpack.

With a new apartment and so few possessions that I was able to FedEx my stuff from Dallas more cheaply than a removal company, the place was pretty bare. Thankfully, there’s an IKEA within an hour, so on Thursday night after work, I headed over and furnished the place in one hit.

Some advice. If you want to go to IKEA when it’s not crowded, go on a Tuesday night. It’s quiet. Actually, it’s too quiet. There were times where it felt so empty that I thought the place had closed, or that a zombie apocalypse had taken place. It was eerie stalking the rows of kitchen utensils, not another human being in sight. Eerie but oh so affordable and stylish in a minimalist European way. That being said, IKEA has been getting a lot of coverage for its creepy vibe this week. It must be going around.

In any case I pushed my two trolleys laden with furniture through the checkouts as the store closed, and then discovered that you can’t fit an apartment’s worth of furniture in a Volkswagen Jetta, forcing me to sheepishly return inside to have it put on a delivery truck.

The New Town:

Which leaves me to finish with Black Rock. By the time the weekend rolled around I was exhausted. But the furniture had been built, and there was just some unpacking left to do before going out to explore the local area. There’s a coffee bar and a pizza joint within five minutes’ walk of the apartment, and it’s ten minutes from a view over Long Island Sound.

But I seemed to have gotten lucky, as I discovered on Sunday morning that it was Black Rock Day, the annual celebration of the local community and its identity. Despite technically being a suburb of the city of Bridgeport, Black Rock was founded over a century prior, and remains to this day geographically isolated, separated from Fairfield on one side by Ash Creek, and from Bridgeport proper by the elevated parking lot that is I-95.

So in this space is a community of people young and old, from all walks of life, united by being fun-loving and slightly crazy. Which I found out when watching grown men and women strapping wheels to beds and boats and then pushing them at full speed down a closed off street (see photo above). This was followed by a loud parade through the streets, and a party in the park at the end of my street, where I got to meet some of the locals over a beer and some live music. It was a great way to be welcomed to my new home. 
 
I think I’ll like it here.