I have lived in many places. Six states and about a million cities/towns. I decided I'd like to write a 'review' for each state that I have lived in. Maybe it will help others decide where to go, or just entertain those who want to know more. My life, in terms of moving, has been quite an adventure. I have much to say about the 6 states I have lived in; their differences, their similarities, and everything in between. That means Missouri is next! (Spoiler hint: there's a reason why they call it 'Misery' jokingly).
So in the last entry I talked about how our jerk landlord in Arizona raised our rent immediately after COVID 25%. We said no thank you, and moved to Missouri to be close to the only work location that sounded even somewhat reasonable.
What an absolute FUCKING NIGHTMARE moving to Missouri was. We were in a time crunch, and I went with the first movers offer that came across. I had no idea what amount would be appropriate to move from AZ to MO, so I took the $2800 offer. It turns out, I had been speaking with a broker, who didn't work for the actual moving company. The day before our utilities were to shut off, the moving company came, told us that the broker had put down "27 boxes" (we had more like 200) so the guy said it would be "thousands and thousands more". In the end, we got charged $10k, which we basically didn't even have. Then They proceeded to break our things while loading them on their truck. They left, and we had told them what date we wanted them to arrive in Missouri. When we arrived, we called the company to confirm they'd be there the next day, and the lady laughed and said they were storing our stuff in a Warehouse while they find more people moving to that region of the country, then they'd load our things up with other people's shit on a giant 18 wheel truck. What?! Why didn't you tell us that before! We had no bed, no eating utensils. No anything. We had to go to Walmart and purchase an air mattress and baby silverware to use in the meantime. The truck finally arrived 10 days later, after calling every day to get an answer as to when the truck would arrive. It was the truck driver unloading, who took about 20 minutes to back up the truck. You could tell he had COPD.And then, someone they'd hired from Craigslist who lived in his truck, took our items into the apartment. He too, sounded like he had COPD. He was friendly, but drug the furniture across the walls of the new apartment, making marks that were difficult to scrub off because the walls were only painted with matte paint, so it came off when you scrubbed.
Anyway the whole thing made us broke and gave us PTSD. It was hell dealing with those people. Shame on them. Anyway, once we got settled, we got 4 storage units on the first floor next to the lobby. We put all the yard stuff, and house stuff from Arizona in there. More to come on that later.
We enjoyed walking around St Louis (carefully and paranoid-ly) at first, and then I realized how dangerous St. Louis actually was when in late July of 2022 I awoke to automatic gunfire, and when I looked out the window, there was a freaking automatic weapons gun battle taking place between to rival parties. What the ever living fuck. After that, I thought less of St. Louis, and we took one of our mattresses off the bed to make it so the bed was no longer level with the front window - in case of gun fire that I felt could erupt at any time.
Our storage units were stolen from 3 times. Whoever was doing it broke the locks off, and the apartments never told us what they did to solve the problem. Probably nothing. They didn't even give us an update if they'd caught the person who did it.
I started to grow even more disgruntled when someone kept stealing our packages from the lobby shelf, where all the carriers put our stuff when delivering. I don't know what came of it, or if they ever caught the person. Our warranty rings (maybe I will write an entry about that sometime) made of Dinosaurs and meteors were stolen, so we had to order new ones. The car window had been busted, as someone broke in to steal something but realized we had nothing in the car, for that very reason. But we were still having to purchase a new window, and it happens so often in St Louis that Safelite was backed up for 2 weeks.
The people were interesting. They'd say hello and hold a door open for you when you still had 30 feet to go.. but they'd rob you blind as soon as you weren't looking. Half the apartment building was made up of AirBnB units. People were always coming and going from other places and that made it kind of sketchy, too.
We did have some fun, so it wasn't ALL bad. We went to the baseball game one day (we didn't go see the actual game, but we dressed in Cardinals colors and ate out in the ballpark village which was cool. For my birthday we went to the Anheuser Busch headquarters and pet a Clydesdale horse, while learning about it all. That was pretty cool.
Delivery was always a pain, too. We lived on the second floor, so I'd have to get a bra on and go downstairs to get our food. The order was usually always missing something. It happened nearly every single time we ordered from Taco Bell. The Under Over restaurant had amazing buffalo chicken dip that we loved, and some other good food. We had a favorite beverage place where they served alcoholic slushies, called Narwhal's Crafted which was very cool.
But none of the good stuff was enough to make me want to stay in Missouri. So we decided that when we moved next, it would be our final place. We looked at over 16 cities in almost every state. We scratched all but 2 off the list, and it came down to Cincinnati or Indianapolis. We made a power point comparing the two cities in terms of saftey/crime rate, mental health care, lgbt rights, cost of living, etc. We made the move finally, and bought our house! This occurred only about less than a month ago.
My next entry will be about my first impression of the city we chose.
