It's not till Thursday, but my gut is telling me this might be the one. This is one crazy road I've thrown myself down. It all started a little over a year ago. I was sitting at home after work. My roommate looked over at me and with a big exhale he said, "Dude I'm so tiered of Ohio." I replied with, "I'm right there with you man." I mean it's not that I don't love my home state, but it's such a boring place. Sure we have Kings Island, or whatever they are calling it these days, and Cedar Point. I've been there a hundred times now though. There are a few cavern you can check out, but there is no excitement. Aside from the few places you could name it's just corn, more corn, Dayton, more corn, Columbus, a few hills, and even more corn.
After a few days of giving it some thought I had come up with a plan. I said to my roommate, "You know we can leave in 6 months." We set a plan in motion of saving and crunching our budgets. At first it was going great, until my car started acting up. I tried to fix it knowing I'd need it to continue our plan. Just seemed like she was done. Every time I'd get a problem solved it just get worse. Finally I couldn't go on, I sold the car for pennies compared to what I had paid. It was a major set back, but I was determined to make up the difference. I started looking to the internet for maybe a way I could get a side opportunity going. Anything I could think of, trying my hardest to get an income generated. As most of us know this is a lot harder to do than it sounds. YouTube becoming harder every day to even stay alive in. Even some of the YouTubers I've watched for years are leaving the platform.
Our 6 months deadline came and passed, and well I'd be a lier if I said it didn't bother me we where off schedule. However our plan became a reality out of a stroke of bad news. My roommates grandmother had taken a turn for the worse. Her health had been on the fence for a long time now, but she was a fighter. She was a very sweet old lady, and her passing affected my roommate in a way I'd never seen from him before. She was a very wealthy woman though. She had left him with a very large chunk of money. The chance was finally a reality for us. I proposed this to my roommate, "Let's get out there, you know me I'm going to pay back every penny I owe you. If you can find us a place to live I'll apply to every place in the area if I have to. I'll work two jobs if that's what it will take." He told me, "I know I can trust you man, don't you worry about anything." I couldn't help it though my nerves where jittering.
Well the day finally came when all the papers where signed and the goodbyes where said. We headed down the road.
We had set our sights on Colorado Springs. We didn't want to go to Denver mainly because it get far too cold up their. While we wanted to more like in the Durango area we figured the springs being a bigger city it would be our best chance for success. That and it was pretty much I70 the whole way. It was a 1200 mile drive, and my roommate that crazy bastard drive it straight. We had left about 4pm, and with the two time zones we passed we arrived in the springs at about 8am. We pulled off into a rest stop and he was out like a light lol. After a few hours of sleep the uncomfortableness of the car woke him back up. We spent the day looking for apartments with only a few possible good options. After the day was coming to a close my roommate looked at me and said, "We are going to have to get a hotel room." I agreed, but we don't have credit cards so it was a risk trying to find a small place that wasn't a roach motel. We pulled into a place called Travel Inn. It was actually a really nice place, manager was nice and the price wasn't bad. We ended up staying there for a little over a week. Ever day hitting the grind, we spend all morning going to showings and all night setting up appointments for the fallowing morning. Anywhere we would stop, gas stations, restaurants, nerd stores, I'd ask are you hiring. Finally we found a place, its a 4 bed 2 bath recently remodeled tri level. 
I've been working on getting better at portraiture. I'm still a bit nervous about showing any of it. The human figure is one of the hardest things to master. The details in our features are very sensitive. Even the slightest loss of perspective can make the image look weird. Don't even get me started on skin, man is that hard to make look real lol. One day I will look back at some of these paintings I've done and I will laugh at the mistakes that I'm learning from.
