Update:

I just noticed that this post has been getting a lot of traffic lately from people looking for the SxSE festival in Myrtle Beach, SC. Somehow it has bubbled to the top of Google’s index on the topic even though it was from last year and was about my inability to make it to the SxSW Interactive festival. Weird. To anybody I might have confused, I’m sorry. To exclude search results that are talking about SxSW, try searching for “sxse myrtle beach”. Hope that helps!

Google

Continuing on with the old post…

I’ve known that it was coming. How could I not with all the buzz about it for the last few months? The truth is that I would love to be at South by Southwest (SXSW). In the past week alone the following people have posted about packing up and going down to Austin:

But like Jeff Croft, I won’t be there. There’s just too much up in the air right now. Financially, Amy and I are saving up for a move to a location we don’t even know yet. She’s in that weird holding pattern between graduation and hearing from PhD programs. We’re pretty confident that she will get accepted at the University of South Carolina in Columbie for the Fall, but we can’t start making plans till we get that letter/email. Which means we don’t know if we’re even going that direction, which means that I can’t start looking for employment, which means we can’t set any kind of budget, which means no major purchases for a little while, which means plane tickets to Texas.

There’s times when we (at least I) don’t think about the impact of all this, and just go about life as normal. But there are other times when you can cut the tension with a knife. One of the biggest issues is that our extension for living in on-campus married housing here at UF expires on April 18th. It would be nice if we could stay there in the same apartment until we’re leaving Florida, but if we can’t get another extension, the reality is that we’ll be putting our stuff in storage and finding a sublease - or moving home - or something.

Regardless of all the circumstances and uncertainty though, I stand behind my wife. As long as we’ve been together, it’s been her goal to get a PhD in Chemical Engineering and its my goal to encourage her to pursue that dream, but there’s not much I can do to encourage when we’re playing the waiting game. In the mean time, I’ll be praying for an acceptance letter from South Carolina - soon!