Lubbock it is!

So we officially said yes to Texas Tech this week, which means that this summer we are moving from this:


To this:


A side by side comparison, for those who don't know much about either town:

	Lubbock, Texas	Athens, Ohio
Population:	212,169 (+35,000 students)	21,342 (+20,400 students)
Land size	114.9 sq. miles	8.3 sq. Miles
Average temperature summer/winter	93 degrees / 25 degrees	85 degrees / 18.3 degrees
Annual Average rainfall	16.5	38.6
% Republican/ % Democrat	74% / 25%	36% / 63%
Football Team BCS ranking in 2008	7th	na
Approximate number of Mormons	Aprox. 1900 (.77%)	Aprox 183(.44%)
Distance from University to LDS temple	8.9 miles	82.6 miles
Distance to Grandma and Grandpa’s house	902 miles	2082 miles
Distance to Nana and Papa’s house	888 miles	1813 miles
Median home value	$110,000	$153,000
Citizens of Note	Buddy Holly	Johnny Appleseed

So, all-in-all Lubbock doesn't look like such a bad place. I'm sure it has its problems (they don't do curbside recycle, for one, which makes my Oregonian hurt), but like Melissa said recently, after a year in Japan we can live anywhere in the states. In fact, we are getting excited about the prospect of living in a house with a yard and room for a garden and the possibility of staying in one place for four or five years. We've been married for six and a half years and, if you include our initial drive to Utah after our wedding, we've moved six times, including once over seas and once across the country.

Now the biggest question we're facing is when to actually pack up the moving truck and leave Athens. I graduate in the middle of June, but we'd like to stick around a little longer and earn some money here before we go, and since I don't have to be in Lubbock until the middle of August, we'll try to get a summer teaching gig here that will keep us busy until the end of July.

Side note: teaching "gig"--that's a silly expression that I have heard often and used often. The OED doesn't know where the expression came from, but it does know that it refers specifically to jazz or dance music and implies a one-time, or limited engagement for a band, as in this 1934 usage in All about Jazz:

"Jack runs numerous bands which play ‘gig’ worki.e. private engagements or public work. In his office, he has a file in which some hundreds of ‘gig’ musicians are listed."

Now, I initially started this side note with the intention of pointing out my own cliched use of a bad idiom, but now that I know what it really means, it feels like a good fit for the adjunct professor world. Adjuncts are a lot like aspiring musicians looking for a steady gig, and making ends meet by playing where ever they can. And just like gig musicians or starving actors in New York, or minor league baseball players, adjuncts live like second-class citizens in their professional world, doing all of the same work as the Pros for a fraction of the pay, and many of them burn out and move on to something else.

The QB has only made me promise that we won't move over her birthday and our anniversary, which means we have to move no later than the end of July.