The first thing I did to plan the move was to make a comprehensive To Do List below.


ASAP (ongoing)
- Buy boxes – wardrobe, large, medium, small, heavy duty small, mirror, lamp, large electronics, pictures
- Buy lots of packaging tape and moving paper
- Pack everything but a few necessities
- Make final California Dentist appt
- Make final California Doctor appt
- Research apartments
- Research crime at various apartments...

Well, I have found an apartment, been approved, and have a moving date of early April. I am spending hundreds more per month than I had budgeted for "low cost Tennessee", but it is a 5-star apartment, and isn't that why I put off retirement for years and worked so long for? So I could afford what I wanted and not have to compromise again. Hey, you only live once.

What's money for if you can't spend it?

That was easy. OK, not as easy as it sounds.
...

I have decided to live near Knoxville.

Key here is that I will be renting an apartment for a few years so apartment availability is essential. The best bedroom community is useless to me and I ruled out several around the state. Had I been looking to buy a home rather than rent an apartment, I might have chosen elsewhere.

There wasn't really a lot of consideration in choosing Knoxville. Lots of shallow, knee-jerk decisions were made. I wanted to be near a reasonably...

Like you, I'm eager to put the snow and ice events of a few weeks ago behind us. Not before, though, your writer found something on YouTube that you won't even catch every year.

Oh, but now that the following is captured, all of us can watch it over and over again until,...........well, until the owner of the YouTube vid decides to remove it, which I hope is the twelfth of Never. That snow that blanketed much of Texas made it into South Texas, but also the...

I had long wanted to live on the east coast, and specifically in the Commonwealth of Virginia, until Virginia flipped into a blue state. I am crushed that Virginia is no longer an option. But I get over it. Plenty of fish in the sea, so to speak.

So now I'm lost. Where to move?

It comes down to a simple process of elimination. I know I don't want to live in Alaska. Presto, I am down to 49 states.

I want to live in an eastern state, which means...