Finding our feet

The first day we were here was thankfully low stress. Ray Summers had offered to drive over from Oklahoma to chauffeur us around and help get us adjusted, but got delayed arriving with an issue with his car, so we spent a real quiet morning recuperating, and once he arrived just did a little initial scouting.

Friday was productive, tho - I got social security application underway (you can't do hardly anything in the USA without a social security numer), and opened a bank account, then joined Ray & Cat in starting the house-hunting, which consumed pretty much the rest of Friday & all Saturday. Ray & Cat had already looked at a couple of places when I joined them, and one looked quite feasible: but to widen the search, we got a listing from a rental agency.

We started by looking at the cheapest places (well, the cheapest we would consider) - my mistake, they were mostly dreadful, or at least rough, and located in some pretty shocking areas: quite a few we didn't even bother getting out of the car to examine, after counting the boarded-up windows & security notices. Once we worked our way up the list, we started having more lucky, and Saturday evening we saw 4 places in a row that were all very promising, so set up an interior viewing for each for Monday.

Sunday we had a look at a couple of the more expensive places (ones that didn't seem too far out of the city), but none of them looked worth the extra - one was pretty shoddily built & right beside a burnt out house, and another just looked a bit ... haphazard I guess, and didn't inspire any curiosity or positive feelings. After that we went to look at a car yard waaaaay out in North Little Rock, mostly because it was offering a BMW 325 at a decent price. Car yards being closed on Sundays here, all we could do was an external inspection, but it looked pretty good.

Ray left to drive the long haul home, around 5, and we just vegetated the rest of the day. I'm still amazed at his generosity and hlepfulness: I've known him for 9 or 10 years on the 'net, but never actually met before - that was somewhat of a surprise too, I thought he'd look like the typical geeky gamer, overweight & glasses, but he was actually quite Jimmy-Stewart like, both in appearance and in his manner - courteous & gentlemanly, and incredibly helpful.