I was born in Sartell, MN, so I didn't have too much choice on that location. But it turned out fairly well. I lived in a little rambler on 2nd Ave N, across from the softball diamonds. When I was really young, the high school was the only building across from me, but as I got older, they built the middle school there as well. Our house was about 2 blocks away from the river (the Mississippi, for those of you who don't know your central Minnesota geography), 2 blocks from school, 2 blocks from the ice skating rink and 2 blocks from the grocery store. So when I said I lived two blocks away from everything, I really meant it. :-P
When I was in 10th grade, I started practicing to get my driver's permit. So naturally, mom and dad fought over who was the unlucky one to ride along with me. Mom tended to get stuck more often than not. ;-) She and I were driving around Sartell and we came on some new developments on the north end of town (about a mile away from where we lived). About two months later we were moving. So we moved about 14 blocks north from our old house to the outskirts of town. If you drove about another two blocks north from the new house, you were into farmland.
After I graduated high school I decided to give college a try. I ended up getting accepted to DigiPen in Vancouver, BC. That's Canada for those of you wondering which state BC is. ;-) So I packed my stuff, and dad and I drove up to the Pacific Northwest to get me all settled into my new apartment in downtown Vancouver. I lived about a block away from Burrard St (kinda near Davey). I went to college at DigiPen for a semester until I was told they were opening a sister school in Redmond, WA (just across the border; three hours away) and that all American students should go there since we'd have a chance at getting financial aid. So my cousin Chad (who happened to be in the area for reasons I can't remember anymore) helped me move all my stuff down to Redmond.
I lived in a nice quadplex just off I-5, about 20 minutes away from school. The new DigiPen was located inside of the Nintendo complex on the outskirts of town, so it was kinda neat going to school. I had my little clearance badge and got to wander thru parts of Nintendo. It was real trippy checking out the Evil Empire (erm.. Microsoft) campus just up the road. It's a few miles of parking lots. In any event, I went to DigiPen for another semester before realizing that I wasn't getting a very good education. You have to keep in mind, they just opened this school up. My first day of class was spent setting my computer up and installing two OSes on it (Windows 95 and Caldera Linux), and we had some staffing issues for classes. It's not that DigiPen is a crap school -- I actually learned tons from it. It's just that I transferred to Redmond about a year too early. Oh well!
So I moved back to Sartell, MN so I could attend college at Saint Cloud State University. I ended up graduating in 3.5 years with a BS in CS while working 20-30 hours a week for Home Depot. Pretty soon after graduation (about three months later, to be exact), I was offered a job by REAL Software.
So I up and moved yet another time. Down here to Austin, TX. That was quite a move -- dad, my uncle Larry and I all drove down. We left Minnesota as a cold front blew in...it was about -17 the day I left. We hauled into Austin two days later and it was 85. I was a wee bit surprised! I moved into a 1 bedroom apt in south Austin called Barton's Lodge. The apts were alright, about 20 years old but very well maintained. It was nice because I was about 10 minutes away from downtown and about 10 minutes away from work. But alas, the big city folk tried to screw me on rent after my first year of living there, so I moved out.
I moved up to north Austin and roomed with one of our testers (Jon) in a place that was about 30 minutes away from work (more or less, depending on traffic), and about the same to get to downtown. What really sucked about living up there, aside from the trek to and from work, was that my girlfriend (Elissa) lived back in south Austin, not too far from where I previously lived. So after about 8 or 9 months of living in the stix, I moved to a different part of the stix.
I hauled my gear back down to south Austin, except this time I managed to find a luxury apartment! 1.5 bedrooms with an enormous balcony (like 16 feet long) to share with Pixel. I'm a bit further south from my original apartment by about 5-10 minutes. So I'm a good 10 minutes from work, and about 15 away from downtown. I like the new place because I'm more out in the country than before. Not much traffic, almost no noise ever, and I finally have room in my apartment to live!
And that's the progression of where and why I lived in the different places I've lived!
Sweet! I liked:)
luv and pickles,
jesse!