As some of you regulars here know, I have been unemployed for several months. Now its time to get off my duff and look for a real job. Blogging is a blast, but it doesn’t pay the bills. It doesn’t even pay for itself! In my chosen profession (after 24 years and with a family to support, its pretty hard to choose a new one) I will have to relocate to find gainful employment. But where? The answer is “where someone will hire me,” but I won’t get a job in places I don’t apply for one. So I’ve been doing some research on various locations. Let me share some of those research tools with you today. You might even be amused!

How would you like to live in Fart, or Dong? Here’s a gallery of some really strange place names, with signs. (via Arbroath)

Weird City Names.

More Weird City Names.

Talk about checking a place out before you move! Neighboroo uses Google maps to give you statistics about your hometown.
You can look up housing prices, cost of living, income, racial breakdown, commute times, crime rates, and political affiliation. For example, the median price of a home in Brooklyn is $493,000 (twice the national average) and the average household has 2.8 people with an income of $64,000.

The Salary Calculator will let you figure out how much money you’ll need in a different location to support the lifestyle to which you have become accustomed. (Thanks, Carl!)

Why do people live in cities? Is it the sex? A lot of folks think so, according to the comments at this article! (via Megite)

Take a virtual road trip from Los Angeles to New York City with a guy who really did it.

You Are New York

Cosmopolitan and sophisticated, you enjoy the newest in food, art, and culture. You also appreciate a good amount of grit - and very little shocks you. You're competitive, driven, and very likely to succeed. Famous people from New York: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Tupac Shakur, Woody Allen

I don’t know about that, I probably couldn’t afford to eat in New York.

Danny and Nina are moving away from New York City... sometime. They didn’t know where they wanted to go, so they  asked perfect strangers on the internet to select a town from the 250 they like. Denver, Colorado came out on top, so they are preparing to move there for a at least a year. Plano, TX came in second, which is weird, because I know a guy who lived in both places.

Moving from the city to the country may mean adjusting your grasp of English. No matter where I go, the opposite will have to occur.

Moving Day

The perfect T-shirt for moving day.

This award-winning essay is called Relocation to Hell.

Design your own city with the game Cityscape.

THIS TOWN IS SO SMALL

The City Jail is called amoeba, because it only has one cell.
Main Street - one block long - dead ends in both directions.
McDonalds only has one Golden Arch.
The phone book has only one page.
The 7-11 is a 3&1/2 - 5&1/2.
The New Year's baby was born in October.
The ZIP code is a fraction.
The city limits signs are both on the same post.
Second Street is in the next town over.
There's no place to go that you shouldn't.
A "Night on the Town" takes only 11 minutes.
The mayor had to annex property to eat a foot-long hot dog.

CITY SLICKER

A man who moved out from the city is plowing his field and gets his tractor stuck in the wet ground.

A farmer driving by stops his truck and walks to the fence to call over the city feller. "You need a mule to plow such wet ground," he says.

"Where can I buy one?" he is asked.

"Well, I just happened to have one for 100 dollars," the farmer says.

"I'll take him," says the other man as he counts out the money.

"I can't bring him over today. I don't work on Sunday morrow OK?"

"Sure."

The next day the truck pulls up and the old farmer gets out. He says, "sorry, bad news. I went out after breakfeast and the mule was dead."

The city feller says just give me my money back then.

"Can't, spent it already!"

 "Well... unload the mule then."

"What ya gonna do with him?"

"Raffle him off!"

"Naw, ya cant raffle off a dead mule!"

"Just watch me us! City fellers know a few tricks."

 One month goes by and the city feller and farmer run into each other at the barber shop.

"What did ya do with that dead mule?"

"Raffled him off, sold 100 tickets at two dollars each and made 198 dollars profit."

"Didn't anyone complain?"

"Just one guy so I gave him his two dollars back!"

The best cities for single people, from Forbes Magazine. Denver is, as expected, number one. (Thanks, Ed!)

The smartest cities in America, according to the percentage of college graduates. I’m pleasantly surprised that a Kentucky city made the top ten! Seattle is number one, followed by a tie between Raleigh and San Francisco. (Thanks, Ed!)

Which states have the longest lifespan? Find out here. Click on a stat to find its statistiocs and ranking. But don’t think the state causes the lifespan! Often, its just the result of the type of people who choose to live there.

Before you move anywhere, you need to know how many haunted houses and alien sightings your potential new hometown has registered. Find out with Strange USA. (Thanks, Bill!) I had no idea there was a haunted hospital in my hometown. I wonder if it was haunted when I worked there 30 years ago?

In choosing a new city to call home, you must take available consumables into account. Here’s a list of America’s Drunkest Cities.

Mental Floss has more weird rankings to tell you which cities to avoid.

NEW FURNITURE

When you move, your head fills with idiotic dreams. You get rid of perfectly good furniture, thinking that when you arrive in your new home you will magically acquire the good taste and cash needed to redecorate. Har.

Last week my husband and I, tired of standing up in front of the TV, found ourselves in a hip, modern furniture store called Design Within Reach. This is a place that sells $3,000 sofas rather than the $10,000 sofas that professional interior designers will reach for. I fell for a three-seater in maroon leather. I motioned to Ed, who was submerged in a chair that resembled the bottom half of a terrifying orange bivalve.

"It's only $3,000," I called. Ed stretched his arm out in the direction of the $3,000 sofa. "I can't reach." As we left, the woman handed me a swatch of the leather, as though perhaps it were possible to grow a sofa from a small cutting. Ed and I realized that before we could argue about whether we could afford the sofa, we needed to spend some time arguing about how big it should be and where it was going to go. Ed wanted to line the sofa up alongside an armchair against one wall. This is a distinctly male school of thought as regards living room décor: All large seating items are to be placed against a wall, facing the television. This way, if the lights go out while you are returning from the refrigerator, you need only place one hand upon a wall and begin walking. Eventually you'll hit a place to sit down and nap until the power is back on and the TV is working again.

I pointed out that if three or four people wanted to have a conversation in these seats, they would need to constantly lean forward or back to see around one another's heads.

I explained the concept of the "conversation pit," wherein you arrange the sofa and chairs at right angles, so that you can easily see each other while talking. Ed said some disparaging things about women and their endless need to talk, and I replied with an unflattering statement about men and TV-watching. We were in a different kind of conversation pit, the kind the Romans would toss poorly muscled, verbally inclined gladiators into and then watch to see who remained standing. A few days later, a friend gave us some home décor magazines. These consist of hundreds of pictures of imaginative, tastefully decorated interiors. The pictures are meant to give you ideas for your own home, but mostly they make you feel really, really bad about it. Also, though it isn't written down anywhere, the magazines imply that you will need to clear out all personal belongings except bowls of lemons and vases of artfully arranged twigs. Who are these strange, monk-like lemon-eaters? Where are their piles of bills, their overdue videos, their newspapers from last March?

One article suggested cutting out pieces of paper in the dimensions of the furniture we were considering. We could then move these around the floor in different configurations. Ed cut out a sofa, two armchairs, a coffee table. Then he set to work on two more large, square paper cutouts. "Ottomans," explained Ed. "I mean ottomen."

This is a longstanding disagreement between us. I'm a leg-curler-under. Ed is a leg-stretcher-outer. Ed would put an ottoman in front of the toilet if he could. His idea of a winning business venture is to open a store that sells only ottomans and call it The Ottoman Empire.

Two weeks passed. Still we had no furniture. Ed sat down on the paper sofa and patted the space beside him. We lit a fire in the fireplace. In the spirit of compromise, Ed crumpled up a paper ottoman and threw it on the flames. I moved a paper armchair over against the wall. Tomorrow we'd buy some twigs. It was beginning to feel like home.

***** 

Relocating is scary. Everything is uncertain and unfamiliar. But no matter where I move, it can’t be as scary as what so many people went through to follow a dream far from their homeland.

Thought for today: The only thing worse than moving is standing still.

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