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12/20/2004: "a home on the range"
FedEx finally came through and delivered the documentation for Calgary that I was supposed to have on Friday. Contracts, company history, business and GST information, and of course some things to help me find accommodation during my 3-month limbo-esque status. So far, it looks like finding a job is easy, in comparision to figuring out short-term accommodations.
Where to start? Well, trying to figure out whether I should go for furnished (rare) accommodations or something bare is something I've yet to figure out. Thanks to an overabundance of furniture that my wife and I have, I could pretty easily take a futon, dresser, easy chair, table, kitchen chairs, and a few other odds-n-sods that would give me the bare necessities for a bachelor suite. Of course, I have no idea what the cost of such an undertaking would be, nor do I have a good idea of how long it would actually take, especially on short notice, and over the holidays.
Beyond that, I then have to figure out how I'm getting to work from wherever I end up. Initially I've assumed that I'll bike to work, as Calgary is pretty bike-friendly. However, there is a nice big river bisecting Calgary, which means crossing it is limited to a few bridges, some of which may not be bike-friendly. There's also an expressway paralleling the river, which is out of bounds for bikes. Crossing that might be a challenge too.
I DID find out that there is a bus route that stops directly in front of my future place of business, which is great. Following the bus route back to its source, I see that I could actually live downtown if I wanted to, and ride the bus to work. How long would that take? Who knows... I'd guess at 30 minutes at a bare minimum, probably closer to 45 minutes to an hour. I could try to find a place somewhere along the route, but more than half of it snakes its way through various industrial parks, making rental accommodations rather unlikley.
Maybe I'm just overwhelmed. I have 16 days to figure this all out, or bail out entirely. I suppose I could simply get a hotel for a week until I figured something out, but at $100+ a night, that's a month's rental somewhere else.
I've got my feelers out to everyone I know in Calgary (all two of them) and all the people I know that know someone in Calgary. Heck, I've even cold-contacted a church there that I'd like to visit, to see if they can be of assistance. Hopefully something will come out of that.
If all else fails, I suppose I could always buy a van, drive it out there, and live in it for 3 months... and pray for Chinooks.
