Leaving San Diego

So here is a brief rundown of my last few weeks leaving one assignment for another. The plan was to move from San Diego to Sacramento but the timing was lousy as I had hoped for a little bit of time to allow getting set up and find a place to live. Instead, I finish working four nights in a row, sleep for a few hours on Wednesday morning, and take off for the 500 mile drive in order to get to Sacramento for an orientation that Saturday and start work Monday.

Bothersome emails kept arriving from the agency for such requirements as TB mask fitting verification. “Where am I supposed to find that?” I ask.
“Perhaps you can ask your current hospital for one”, I am told.

Now when am I supposed to include this in my schedule of work, sleep, and driving 500 miles I wonder, but decide it is worth the time stopping by the human resource office as I am driving out of town just in case. They had it! What luck was that?

After faxing a copy to the agency clerk, she then informs me that the chest x-ray I had taken three years ago is no longer valid and must be retaken prior to starting orientation, so if I could just swing by my local physician that would be great.

“Oh, yeah, my local physician is 1,000 miles away; I’ll just give him a ring” I scream at my email while embarking on the drive north. I call the clerk and using the most polite and professional voice I can muster explain my ordeal, and she agrees to email suggestions for clinics in Sacramento for when I arrive; which doesn’t happen until around 1:00 AM after an eleven hour drive. Mary has the room already taken care of as she flew up ahead of me.

The next day I locate a clinic which agrees to take the x-ray and we spend the next two days locating our new home, except I also have over 12 hours of online orientation to fit in while using the slowest internet connection since the old phone dialup I used over ten years ago, lesson I learned here is that hotel wi-fi does not mean high speed; the online orientation took more like 16 hours.

Locating proved to be more difficult in Sacramento than our previous experiences, but we ended up with a nice two bedroom, two bath apartment that was exactly within the price range we were looking for. Craigslist was again our best tool, but patience was needed this time round. During the interim we stayed at a location that offered small one bedroom cottages that could be rented by the week and offered significant savings over a hotel.

Ten days after the moving adventure began, things are back to normal again, or as much as normal gets to be in our life, and we are ready to explore our new location.