Thanks to my friend Mark for showing me this awesome Wilco cover. Unlike the original, this works really well for good news.

I’ve been looking for a job in San Francisco very hard for the last couple months since I got up here. I’ve had nibbles, I’ve had bites.

And then, I had the events of the last week.

A few weeks ago, I’d applied for what sounded like a really ideal job at The Nerdery, a great, developer-driven, Minnesota-based company that’s aggressively expanding its Chicago office. Their website did an excellent job of making it sound like an absolutely ideal place to work. I had a first interview that I thought went very well, and I turned in a code sample I was pretty happy with.

I hadn’t heard from them before I left for Chicago, so I was a little disappointed, because the idea of moving back to Chicago to take such a great job had just seemed so perfect. I hadn’t realized how badly I wanted to move back until I was presented with the realistic possibility of doing so.

And then, after I dropped a check-in email to HR on Sunday, the chaos began.

I had my second interview with the Nerdery Monday morning, and loved it. They told me everything I wanted to hear, including that this page of raves from their employees was, in the experience of my interviewers, true. I left very, very excited about that prospect.

Apparently, that excitement set off some sort of alarm that only HR people can hear, because by the time Tuesday afternoon rolled around, I had booked three interviews with SF companies, had two, gotten a second rounder with one of those two and pulled a code sample out of my ass for that one, too.

Between the interviews, conversations with friends and family, and assorted negotiations I’ve done over the last few days (and maybe some yelling at the terrible Northwestern secondary Saturday night), my voice is completely shot. I slept about 10 hours out of 72.

Then the Nerdery’s offer hit my inbox.

I am very happy to announce that this morning I accepted a position as an Interactive Developer with the Nerdery’s Chicago office. I’ll be starting the week after Thanksgiving (when I’ll have to do a week of orientation at HQ in Minnesota).

I’ll be sad to leave San Francisco – This town has been exceptionally good to me in my short time here, and I’ve very much enjoyed my time in the city. I’m so glad I moved up here, even if it was for a short time, because it accelerated my learning in a way that I don’t believe would have been possible if I’d stayed in LA.

Moving up here absolutely put me in the mind frame and gave me the impetus to bring up my skill set far and fast enough that I was able to get this job, and for that, I can never thank San Francisco enough.

But Chicago is home. I may have grown up in DC, but I have never felt as home anywhere as I have in Chicago. The fact that I am jumping for joy to move there in the goddamn dead of winter after 8 years in California probably says something about how much I missed the place.

[By the way, Chicago folk: I will preemptively warn you that I will be whining about the cold this year. Next year, I'll have my tolerance for the cold back and I'll shut the fuck up, but please, spot me a winter.]

The logistics of all this are kind of nuts. The current plan is to leave SF on November 12, with my car towing a trailer full of my crap minus about 90% of my furniture, and my dad (who VERY generously offered to help with the driving so long as I didn’t make him miss his 75th birthday party, a concession I thought was entirely fair) and Chaplin keeping me company in the car.

We’re shooting to arrive in Chicago on November 16th, though that will change if the weather gets bad along the drive. Trying to find an apartment is already in motion — god, rent in Chicago is so delightfully cheap — and hopefully I’ll have that squared away before I show up.

I am exhausted. I am emotionally wrung out after the rollercoaster I’ve been on for the last week or so. I have so much insanity ahead of me.

But I am so, so happy about this job and this move.

I can’t just post a video for Via Chicago, because that would be way too easy. So instead, a fond audio farewell to California with an enjoyably random video.

Since I clearly don’t already have enough outlets for my one-liners on the internet between this creaky old blog and Facebook, I broke down and started posting on Twitter.

Like most internet things I eventually get into, I resisted for quite a while, not quite seeing the point of it until some of my friends who seemed to get it faster really got into it.

But I think after following a few people for a bit, I see where a fun space for it lies between a blog and Facebook and a direct line from my brain to the internet.

Plus, I’ve been functionally unemployed since March. There’s really only so long you can resist a complete time-killer like Twitter when you’re unemployed for months at a time.

We’ll see how I get the hang of it over the next few weeks, but the good news is that the limits of the format dictate that even when what I post is not amusing, it’ll at least be short.

Oh, Blogger. You make me crazy with your refusals to publish and your half-assed FTP impementation.

But oh, WordPress, trying to switch to you is making me EVEN FUCKING CRAZIER.

Why didn’t I learn something useful in school, like PHP programming? Then I could figure out what the fucking problem is.

More to come, possibly over here when I’m done tearing my hair out. In the meantime, feel free to tell me how fugly that design is.

Posting’s going to be pretty light this week, as I’m trying to keep up the exercise even as we ramp up towards the first day of shooting on the pilot Friday.

At this point, I’m spending maybe half an hour each day at home that is not a) doing physical therapy or b) getting ready for work or c) sleeping.

So y’all may just have to entertain yourselves for a while.

A year ago this weekend, I got on the scale, and the number I saw almost made my eyes bug out of my head.

I’d had to greatly reduce my gym time because of my ongoing foot problems, and I hit a number I’d sworn I’d never let myself hit. I saw that number, and said, goddamn it, that’s it.

I am doing something about my weight, and I’m getting this shit off for good. I am losing the eighty pounds it will take me to get back to where I was my junior year of high school, when I was swimming a kilometer a day, five days a week.

I am not eating obscene amounts of food anymore, I am drawing a line in the fucking sand, and saying this is the end of being dangerously overweight and horribly out of shape.

Of course, I didn’t actually say anything about it at the time, because I’ve tried to draw these lines before. I’ve dieted and dieted and dieted and taken the occasional stab at exercise. It has always come back with a vengeance.

This time, it’s different. This time exercise is the primary objective, with portion control following. I didn’t go on a diet, I changed the way I live my life. And I’ll be goddamned: It actually worked.

One calendar year later, nine months of working out until I practically fell over at the gym later (plus three months off for foot surgery and related follies), I have dropped 42 pounds. More than halfway to my eventual goal, and a very encouraging distance from where I started.

Two jeans sizes (and close to a third) smaller. Wearing shit I haven’t worn in years. Weighing what I weighed my sophomore year of college, a ridiculous seven years ago.

If I sound like I’m proud of myself, I damn well am. I’ll be honest, I did not know if I could do this. But when I started keeping an eye on calories and actually working out at the gym, instead of just going to the gym, it started coming off.

I can almost leg press my own body weight now. I’m doing bicep curls with 85 lbs, and chest-pressing 90 (after being almost killed by 40 lbs on each at the beginning). And the difference both the weight loss and the strength training I’m doing have made with my bad leg are huge.

When I first tried to switch from the recumbent bike to the elliptical in October, I could barely do 5 minutes without feeling like my leg was going to fall off. Now I can do 25 minutes AFTER doing a strenuous half hour on the bike.

I just feel so much better physically, it’s hard to describe without using a corny and overly literal phrase like “a weight off my shoulders.”

There’s a whole section of my life that’s been throw into ridiculous turmoil lately, but for this to finally, FINALLY, start to go right, it gives me so much more confidence that I can overcome the other nonsense that I’ve stressed so much less about the turmoil than I would have a year ago.

I will now give myself public motivation to finish the job: My goal, and it is a pretty big one, is to lose the remaining 38 pounds by Halloween. That puts me at losing about five pounds a month, which is roughly the speed I’ve been going.

It has to be done, and for once in my life, I can finally say with confidence: It will.

Since I have had several queries: Unlike much of the rest of Southern California, I am not on fire. The closest of the fires to me is the one in Malibu, which is several miles up the coast.

I’m slightly more concerned about next weekend, since I’m supposed to go to San Diego to visit my mom, who’s going to be there for a conference.

At the rate that town is burning, I’m just hoping Interstate 15 doesn’t melt.