The Albany Life

I have been in Albany for about 3 weeks. Here's how my life and routine is shaping up.

I arrived in Albany on a Friday night. Julia flew back to Utah Saturday afternoon. I was going to live with 2 cool girls from my branch (read: my local congregation at church). After being in Albany for roughly 48 hours, my living situation changed. At my first Sunday at church, the branch president (the leader of the congregation) wanted to meet with me to get to know me. As we chatted and I told him I was here to write my dissertation, and he invited me to live with him and his wife. I moved in Tuesday morning.

The branch president and his wife are great. They live very near the same place I was going to live (which is about 15 or 20 minutes from campus; that's half what my commute in Austin was). Their kids are all married and gone, and they have a big house. I have the entire basement to myself. I am set to live the ideal life of an academic hermit.

Here are some pictures of my new place of residence.

This is the driveway.

I park my car next to the house in a smaller driveway off the main driveway.

The backyard. (Very woodsy.)

These are some pictures of the basement, where I live.


My room.

I have two offices on campus at Siena. One is a shared office with other adjunct faculty. Since I'm teaching a class (intro astronomy for non majors), I have a spot in there. I work there sometimes, mostly when I have office hours. The other is actually my adviser's "outer office" (his office has two rooms). That's where I work most of the time. It's just me, my laptop, and a big table. This office is really cold. I usually have a blanket on my lap (or around my shoulders) and a space heater roaring next to me almost non-stop.

This is me in my office, working on my laptop, drinking hot chocolate.

Besides sleeping and working, I am also finding my gym routine again. I tried the gym on campus at Siena, as I get to use it for free. The college is small, which means the gym is small. It was a few steps up from an apartment complex work out room. Although the weight room was pretty decent...I tried it out, and was the only girl among like 20 guys (who are all like 19, by the way). That kind of thing doesn't deter me though. The funniest part was as I started my weight lifting, the radio in the room was blasting Beyonce's "All the Single Ladies." Ha! Anyway...

Nothing can replace Gregory Gym in my heart, but this didn't look like it would be able to replace it in functionality either. I needed more.

So I went to check out Gold's Gym. (I would have also looked into 24 Hour Fitness, but sadly, they don't have any up here.) The nearest Golds to my new place is a 10 minute drive. There's another on my way to school, about 5 minutes out of my way (in Latham). I checked out the one up in my town. It was pretty nice, despite not having a swimming pool (but there's a pool on campus). I got a multi-club membership so I can use that one or the one in Latham on my way into or out of campus. The one nearer my place is a lot nicer than the Latham gym, but it's nice to have options. I've worked out a couple times at each place, and feel fairly neutral about it. But it seems to be doing the job, so I'm satisfied.

That's about it. I am not completely a hermit though, I regularly attend activities (namely FHE every other Monday and Institute every Thursday) with the young single adults from the branch. (All 10 of them.) They're a great group. This weekend I'm going out with a few of them to a regional YSA conference in Ithaca (where Cornell is; about 3 hours from here). That ought to be fun.

In the meantime, I better get back to work.