I have finally moved out of my house and into a (nice!) apartment.
It took a while, and it was the most stressful thing I have ever tried to accomplish in my life, but we did it. I have been agonizing over this apartment for the past month now, and every step throughout the way, I was instilled with doubt -- can I do this? Am I allowed to do this? What if I don't end up doing this? Should I live with my parents forever? But now all of those thoughts have been put to bed, and I am currently sitting in the living room (that I pay money for) typing away on my computer on the Wi-Fi that I set up, on the desk that I built with my hands. Everything has paid off for me. I genuinely can't believe this is my life.

Franz Marc -- Cottages on the Dacau Marsh
The move-out process was probably the most headache-inducing thing I have ever had to go through. I was worried about so many things -- so many insecurities about how this even worked, whether or not I had all the stuff needed, whether I was prepared mentally to go through this -- so many things.
The previous nights before the move-in, Bree and I had started packing up all of the things (clothes, trinkets, electronics, etc.) into boxes that my Dad had left for us over the week. If there is one thing that I truly hated about this whole process, it had to be packing things. You don't realize how many things you need, and how they don't fit neatly into half-meter x half-meter boxes until you start putting them in those boxes. We were scouring through cabinets and closets and trying to organize it all neatly to where when we eventually reached the apartment, we would be able to neatly unpack them and put organize them in an orderly fashion. Not excited to do this again when I move out in the future.
One of the other things that gave me headaches was trying to figure out how to set up my electricity. Not sure if this is the standard, but for this apartment complex you had to choose your own electric plan and have it active under your name on move-in date. In my previous apartment, that stuff was already handled because the onus would be on the apartment itself to figure that out, and then you would pay those bills on top of your rent in the Resident Portal. But whatever. That was in College Station, so it was probably way more streamlined for college students who don't know how to do anything. This is real Adult Shit. Anywho, my apartment complex is partnered with TXU Energy, so I set it up a week before with them on a pretty decent plan. But two days later, when I checked to see if it was active, there was an error on their website and mobile app to where I couldn't even view what plan I was on. So I called customer service, and was met with a pretty nice representative who asked what my problem was.
I told him that I couldn't see what my plan was.
He told me If I was a returning customer, or a new customer.
I told him I was new.
And so, forty minutes were spent on him getting me on this brand new plan, one that was more expensive, and one that was not the one that I had set up previously. But me, being a too-scared-to-send-back-the-food kind of guy, just sat through everything -- until he said that he couldn't even set up the plan because the service would be active a day after my move-in date (and if you remember what I had said before, I needed this active on the same move-in date. The day after I was able to get with another customer service agent and get my first plan set up and discontinue whatever new bullshit the other guy gave me. But I wish I didn't have to do any of that. Oh, and also they didn't send me a proof of service to show the apartment manager on the day of the move-in, so I had to call and request one be sent to me a day before I had to move in. Ugh!

Paul Klee -- Cat and Bird
After moving everything in, which took a lot of elevator trips, the unit looked like it was furnished with cardboard boxes. So I decided to try and put the bed together just to get a real furniture piece up and visible. I struggled so hard, so I just called my Dad to come over and help. Then Bree's sister and her husband also came over to help, which was great because it sped up the process. By evening, pretty much every table and console and my bed was put together. It was all coming together. To celebrate, I went out with Bree and her sister and her sister's husband to eat at a very yummy wing place. I had their Zesty Hot Honey chicken wings and they were soooooooooo good. Then her sister was feeling generous and bought us a shit ton of stuff for our apartment -- bathroom organizers and bath mats and whatnot. She is such a generous and kind soul, it's crazy. She's awesome.
What a crazy week for me. The University of Houston also won against Duke in the Final Four. I watched that with 'N' and 'G' at Kirby Ice House. A top 3 experience probably. People were going crazy. Smiling through it all.
world happenings
There was little rest on Wall Street this weekend. There was plenty of anger, anxiety, frustration, and fear.
Anger at President Trump for a brash and chaotic rollout of tariffs that erased trillions of dollars in value from the stock market in two days. Anxiety about the state of the private equity industry and other colossal funds with global investments. Frustration among Wall Street’s elite at their sudden inability to influence the president and his advisers.
And fear of what may come next.
Hedge funds tallied up their losses, and bragged if they only lost a little. Bankers and lawyers tore up already sparse calendars for deal making, reasoning that no chief executive would risk a big merger or public offering soon. Major banks played out emergency scenarios to guess whether one client or another would fail in the cascading effects of an international trade war.
In conversations with The New York Times over the weekend, bankers, executives and traders said they felt flashbacks to the 2007-8 global financial crisis, one that took down a number of Wall Street’s giants. Leaving out the brutal, but relatively short-lived market panic that erupted at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the velocity of last week’s market decline — stocks fell 10 percent over just two days — was topped only by the waves of selling that came as Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008.
Like then, the breadth of the sudden downdraft — with oil, copper, gold, cryptocurrencies and even the dollar caught up in the sell-off — has Wall Street’s biggest players wondering which of their competitors and counterparties was caught off guard. Banks have asked trading clients to post additional funds if they want to continue borrowing money to trade — so-called margin calls that haven’t nearly reached the level of a generation earlier but are nonetheless causing unease.
-- New York Times