***September 9***

It is official! On September 9 I will be moving into my new home in Washington! I was accepted today and will be signing the lease on Monday! I am so pumped!

I am going to be living very cheaply. My rent will be $589 a month and I will be making $1183 a month, so there won't be a lot of wiggle room as far as spending goes. I have been figuring out my budget, and I think I can make it work, as long as there aren't too many unexpected expenses. Check out my hard core budget.

Monthly stipend: $1183
Rent: $589
Electric: ~$75 (hopefully less, that's a worst case scenario)
Food: $100 (yay sales and never eating out!)
Gas/Car: $50 (yay living within walking/biking distance to school)
Car Insurance: $25ish I believe (yay keeping my car under my dad's name and paying him for insurance costs)
Miscellaneous: $150
Cell phone: $20 at most (yay hopefully staying on my parent's family plan)
Total costs: $1009

That's the budget for 9 months of the year - the other 3 months will require a job of some sort for survival. ;) I'm hoping to get some piano students, or possibly work at a state park in Washington.

I'm so excited to have my own apartment! It looks really cute, and it has a pool! It's more expensive than I was originally hoping for, but with most real estate management companies requiring an in-person visit, I ended up having to compromise in order to get something, especially after the distant relatives all fell through. I'm so excited that this is real now, that I have an apartment and that I have a move-in date. I feel like I can officially be excited now, like I can truly start to plan and dream...because I have a place to live. I am slightly nervous due to the fact that I haven't seen it, but I'm trusting that God is looking out for me and will go with me wherever I go!

I'm so excited to meet people, make friends, and start a new life. I'm excited to make a whole new set of memories and explore this brand new (to me) region. I'm excited to live in a beautiful city and learn to love a whole new culture (it will doubtless be entirely different than Hicktown, SD). I'm blessed, and so thrilled to embrace my new life! It will be bittersweet leaving the Midwest, but honestly, I think it will be much more sweet than bitter. There's nothing left here for me. College was so wonderful, but it's over, and the people that I love so dearly are scattered all over (relatively speaking). I don't have any friends left from high school, and friends from church are few and far between. My jobs are far from "career jobs" and I will not be at all heartbroken to leave them. My family is wonderful, but I don't really have a place here. Everything I own is either a) in the attic or b) in the hallway. So it's time to leave. It's definitely time.