Well, That Wasn’t It Until Retirement!

So, back in April 2025, I posted my third most viewed blog of the year about moving to a new apartment in Decatur. (“Blessed and Thankful For Many Things”, which was a travelogue and being fortunate to travel so much, is the most viewed. “You CAN Go Home Again” is now the second most viewed.)

I’m glad I’m a much better weather forecaster than a psychic when it comes to predicting my future.

God and the cosmos laughed about two things I wrote in the April blog: “My new work contract runs through April 2028 and I hope to stay another 18-24 months after that and then consider retirement.” and “So, I hope I love the new place and we don’t move again until Miss Xanadu and I ride off into the sunset!”.

As many of you know by now, I’m no longer at WAND and Central Illinois. And, I didn’t love the new place and would’ve moved at the end of my lease in February 2026 anyway.

The apartment, which had a balcony the lime tree and tropical plants loved, was sun-facing most of the day with no shade. With the relentless heat wave, my apartment stayed in the low-to-mid-80s all summer long because the cooling system couldn’t keep up!

I’m now back in the Quad Cities, where I spent 11.5 years from Thanksgiving 2005 through May 2017.

I’m the “new” “old” morning meteorologist and co-host at WHBF, the CBS affiliate, where I worked for four years from 2013-2017. I’ll spare you the drama of why I left Central Illinois in this blog because I posted that on November 21st in the aforementioned entry, “You CAN Go Home Again”, which you can read by clicking here:

https://anthonypeoples.wordpress.com/2025/11/21/you-can-go-home-again/

After getting the new job, I came back to the Quad Cities in late-September to look at apartments and one house. I used a company that’s been around since 2012, but many of the properties I looked at were recently acquired.

None of the pictures posted on the website looked like the dwellings in real life. Like some people on apps, the photos were many years old (and probably many tenants ago).

Of the eleven apartments (mostly in Moline and Davenport) and one house (which should be condemned and torn down) I saw, only one didn’t have a big “X” in my notes, so I took it.

I’m betting that when the apartment complex was built in the 1970s, it was upscale. However, the wear and tear and lack of pride from tenants has taken its toll.

The building seems sketchy, but luckily we’re at the far end and I don’t have to visit the rest of it except to get my mail. I have no plans to do laundry here and I’ve already found a laundromat!

The neighborhood is nice and Xanadu loves walking and exploring with sidewalks. There were no sidewalks where we last lived.

Once I got into the apartment, I realized it was much more spacious than I remembered. And, the views are incredible.

This is from one living room window (and the window views from the bedrooms) when we moved in in early November.

The other windows in the living room and the dining room have some evening sunshine and the views are also wooded!

Since we moved in at the beginning of November, it was time to decorate for Christmas! That was a week late for me since I usually have my decorations up three months from November 1st through January 30th!

Xanadu didn’t help with the decorating (actually she did by supervising when she wasn’t sleeping)…

but, she definitely took part in the spiked Egg Nog!

Who knows? Maybe this year, I’ll leave the tree up until March 1st! 🙂

I already know what I’m doing with that window when it comes down. I’m going to buy four matching planters and have an herb garden in the window!

To have fresh basil at my fingertips or just to have it on my fingertips sounds splendid!

Now, I want to share a few quick stories about the move — some funny and some scary that turned out okay!

While I’ve moved many times, I’ve always hating transporting my car behind a big truck. I ordered a 20-foot U-Haul since I was getting rid of my sectional sofa and only had one mattress and boxed springs to take.

They called and said I had to take a 26-foot truck since they only had 20-foot ones for local use! While I understand their logic of making more money by keeping the local trucks and renting them by the day, it’s just stupid. Truck drivers go to school to drive 26-foot trucks and U-Haul just signs them over to the general public!

I paid for extra insurance to have one of their people put my car on the tow dolly since they’re “professionals”! When I got to Moline, hours later, this is how I found the front passenger tire!

Luckily, it stayed on the tow dolly and didn’t fly off and kill anyone!

This is my honest reaction to this horrible overall U-Haul experience.

We made it safely and the next day, I got everything inside.

Oh, the local moving company forgot to book me for that morning even though they took my down payment/deposit. They arrived over an hour late after I’d already moved a lot of my boxes and stuff up to the second floor. No, they didn’t offer any discount for the inconvenience.

BREAKAGE

Considering I had a larger than life U-Haul truck and not enough stuff to fill it, I only ended up breaking two things: my garden pasta bowl and the handle on a Christmas mug (I’m still using it for the holidays even without a handle!) 🙂

And, there was a chip on one of the lamp globes.

I actually broke more packing in Decatur.

UNPACKING…

Now that I was in the apartment, it was time to start sorting boxes, setting things up, and putting things away.

It’s incredible how many times I moved boxes from one place to another looking for something and then having to move them again to find something else!

At first, I couldn’t find the sheets I took off our bed in Decatur because I was going to put them back on since I just washed them.

Then, I was distressed because I had just bought 200 stamps before the price went up again — a $146 purchase.

But, I did come across this. Didn’t even know I had it!

Finally, I found the sheets and the stamps!

In the spare bedroom, I set up my CD and movie shelf and then my bookshelf. As I was sitting on the floor putting my ties in the closet, I heard a huge crash behind me!

Luckily, the bookshelves missed me and Xanadu and it didn’t take long to set it back up and finish the room!

WHAT TO EAT!

Many times when I move, I pick up a rotisserie chicken, crusty bread, and wine and that sustains me for days.

Here, my first meal was one of those pre-prepared food dishes you order online. It was Smoky Gouda Chicken with Roasted Red Potatoes & Parmesan Green Beans. Two were given to me by a former neighbor and my sister gave me one. (I added the salad, bread, and wine!)

Those were my meals the first week.

Our first weekend here was cold, so I made a pot of vegetable soup in the Crock Pot and the second week, I baked chicken thighs, made a pot roast with butternut squash, potatoes, and onions, and made a boxed Almond Cake with Caramel Latte frosting.

NEW BEGINNINGS

With the move, I treated myself to a new couch and chair for the living room.

ENTER “EXHIBIT LR 1.0”!

I loved the sectional I bought back in 2018 when I moved to Duluth, Minnesota, but after seven years and four homes, it was time to retire it — especially after the drama of getting it in and out of the last apartment, where it would only fit in one cramped space!

Thankfully, the couch arrived a few days after I bought it (my first weekend in town), but the chair didn’t arrive until this Wednesday!

Xanadu immediately claimed it as hers!

ENTER “EXHIBIT LR 2.0”

Once the couch arrived, it bothered me that I couldn’t watch TV and see the Christmas tree at the same time. You know me well enough that that was a total buzz kill! Once I get a thought in my mind, I might as well do it because I’m going to obsess over it.

So, Sunday afternoon, I moved the couch, the coffee table, three lamps, and two pieces of wall décor.

And, I have to say I love the new more spacious set-up — I can see television and the Christmas tree and I can move around in the living room.

Thoughts — LR 1.0 or LR 2.0?

DECORATING

Decorating is taking forever for a couple of reasons — waiting on the chair and there were many things I wanted maintenance to repair or replace and they did a great job.

NEW FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS

The first person I recognized on my return was Kyle Kiel, a meteorologist at one of the other Quad Cities stations. He actually worked with me at WHBF during my first time at the station (2013-2015).

On a solo walk while Xanadu was napping one day, I met Phineas, a fawn pug, and his human, Leslie. A few days later, Xanadu and I were walking and I looked up at a window and there was Phin. Leslie invited us into their fenced yard and the rest is history.

Xanadu and Phin are besties now and she even met his brother, George, and is going to their 4th birthday party this weekend!

PROGRESSIVE NEIGHBORHOOD

One thing I realized the first time I moved to the Quad Cities was how progressive it was. I didn’t know what to expect moving to the Midwestern Corn Belt.

Upon moving back, it’s so refreshing to see Pride flags in different iterations and signs promoting inclusivity!

We need more tolerance and love in this country and world!

FIRST HOLIDAY IN THE QUAD CITIES

I worked Thanksgiving morning, but came home and cooked myself a feast. Miss Xanadu even dressed up for the occasion and enjoyed a sample of veggies.

WHITE TRASH DRESSER

Now that I’m in, I definitely need to treat myself to a new dresser.

I had my old one since 2009 and it finally fell apart as I was packing the truck in Decatur.

In case this apartment turns out to be like the last one — unbearable once summer arrives and I have to move again (God forbid!), I didn’t want to get rid of too many of my boxes.

However, I didn’t want to look at them all the time in the spare bedroom.

So, I got creative. I have the empty ones stored away in the closet and I’m using them as a makeshift dresser for now. 🙂

Some may say “I MacGyvered it”. I say, “I white trashed it”!

Thank you for coming along for the ride and for visiting our new place.

Anthony

Happy 30th to the Best Decision I Ever Made!

Life is full of ups and downs (or highs or lows) and there are many dates or anniversaries that can bring melancholy or smiles.

This week, I’m celebrating the 30th anniversary of a decision that changed my life.

As I drifted through my late-20s, I knew I needed to make a change in my life. I just didn’t know how to make it happen.

As my 20s were winding down, a weekend getaway provided the answer I needed and that’s when my life really started (and almost ended).

I made a move that introduced me to the big city and the world that George Bailey (“It’s a Wonderful Life”) never saw except in magazines.

I experienced the nightlife, I met a stalker that would almost kill me, I fell in love for the first time and I started my television news career.

KENTUCKY BOY

Except for four months in the summer of 1990 when I moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I spent the first 29 years of my life in Mayfield, Kentucky, where I was born and raised (three of those years I lived 30 minutes away in Murray, Kentucky, where I attended Murray State University).

I was your typical southern boy — I went camping and fishing many weekends during the summer and I played basketball in the neighborhood (and I was pretty good).

Hunting was never my thing, but it really didn’t matter to my alcoholic, hateful father. Nothing was going to make me acceptable in his eyes.

Good thing, I was golden to my mother!

When I was in college and too young to legally drink, I started sneaking into the local gay bar in Paducah, Kentucky.

It was there, in 1986, that I met someone and started dating for the first time. While the relationship lasted four years, it was turbulent and not love.

The late 1980s were exciting, but, at the same time, unfulfilling.

I graduated college in 1989 and started applying for television weather jobs and the first station I sent a tape to was KTKA in Topeka, Kansas.

Could you just imagine me ending up in the same city as Fred Phelps and his cult, the Westboro Baptist Church?

Nothing happened in my career and I made the decision to move to Milwaukee in the summer of 1990. While it wasn’t a wise decision, I believe everything happens for a reason.

It was a short-term move, but it had its benefits: That college boyfriend and I broke up there after four years together and he moved to the Northwoods of Wisconsin to be with his grandparents and I met D’nell, the woman who would become “Mom” to me until she passed away in February 2009.

And, that fall, the NBC affiliate in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, offered me the evening weather position.

I considered the offer and declined it and I packed up the U-Haul to move back to Kentucky to be with my family.

In a sad twist of fate, my dear mother, Dessie, died of a heart attack at the age of 47, less than three weeks later!

I was miserable the next three years.

While dealing with the loss of my best friend, my mother (yes, I was a “Mama’s Boy”), I was already struggling with an eating disorder that started in 1986.

Once it gripped me, I was a practicing bulimic for eight consecutive years (until 1994) and my weight dropped from 169 pounds to 116 pounds!

With the ignorance and the stigma surrounding the AIDS epidemic, the 1980s and the 1990s were not ideal times for a gay man to be frighteningly thin.

However, there were definitely fun times in the early-1990s. I loved hanging out with my two besties, Steve and Dennis.

With Dennis, I went to Las Vegas for the first time.

And, we went to Cancun!

However, I was wasting away physically and mentally, and then in November 1993, my grandmother Helen (the last of my living parents and grandparents) died.

Taking care of her was really the main reason I was still in Kentucky.

While my sister, Tammy, was still there and we had grown closer after our mother’s death, she was young and she had her own family.

She’d be okay if I left Kentucky. But, I stayed and struggled through the 1993 holiday season and the winter months of 1994.

I often wondered if Reba McEntire was singing to me on her 1992 hit, “Is There Life Out There”?

NOW, here’s where life becomes more interesting and happier!

“TALES OF THE CITY”

I have my cousin and bestie, Steve, to thank for introducing me to Armistead Maupin, Laura Linney, Mary Ann Singleton and “Tales of the City”.

It sparked a “wanderlust” that gave me hope.

In early 1994, PBS started airing the English television series based on Maupin’s 1970s “San Francisco Chronicle” newspaper series of the same name. (The newspaper series was reworked into a book and the first one came out in in 1978. The latest, the tenth in the series, came out in early 2024!)

It’s about a group of San Franciscans at 28 Barbary Lane in the 1970s. But, it was Laura Linney’s Mary Ann Singleton that touched me the most and became my inspiration to make a “fantabulous” change in my life.

She was a small town girl (Cleveland, Ohio) that visited the city by the bay and never went back home.

After just working jobs to pay the bills, Mary Ann eventually became an on-air television personality!

MEMORIAL DAY 1994 CHANGED EVERYTHING

Months after I watched “Tales of the City”, Steve, Dennis, and I went to Chicago to party over the Memorial Day weekend and we had a blast!

At Gentry’s on Rush, the owner started sending over free cocktails, the men were very hot and the music was incredible!

It was there that I fell in love with “Dreams” by Gabrielle (one of my 30 favorites songs of my first 35 years — yes, I love lists and countdowns) and Sarah Brightman’s “Once in a Lifetime” from the “Dive” album!

It was also that weekend I decided to move to Chicago!

Six weeks later, over the Fourth of July weekend, Dennis, Steve and I loaded up the U-Haul and my chow chow, Keshia, and I moved to the big city.

It was the best decision I ever made!

NO MORE COUNTRY BOY SMALLTOWN FOR ME

In 1975, Glen Campbell sang “Country boy, you got your feet in L.A./But your mind’s on Tennessee”.

While that “Country Boy” might have been missing home, this Kentucky boy didn’t!

I started waiting tables at T.G.I. Fridays and happened to stumble into Charlie’s, a gay country bar. It became a big part of my life through the summer of 1996.

THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT

Living in the big city not only provided me a nightlife, but there were fine restaurants, history, culture, art, and movies at my fingertips I’d never see back in western Kentucky.

One of those movies came a month after I arrived and I got to experience the incredible Australian film, “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” on the big screen!

I’ve watched it many times over the years. I saw it again recently and it holds up well.

And, I still can’t believe how incredibly sexy Guy Pearce was in his breakout role as Adam/Felicia Jollygoodfellow!

MEETING THE PSYCHO

That summer, I got on the wagon and ate sensibly for several months and gained a few pounds.

And then, in October, I met a charming psycho on my 30th birthday. Dating quickly turned into a cycle of domestic abuse leading to a spring 1995 break-up.

That turned into a stalker situation and a near-death experience at his violent hands. Needless to say, I fell off the wagon hard.

This is a photo just after that final attack with my bestie, Steve, who was visiting at the time.

You can see how alarmingly thin I was, the gash on my forehead and the black eye!

Okay, it’s in the past so I can laugh about this now.

When I went to the emergency room that night, the nurse looked at me still with blood on my face, and asked “Which of you is the victim?”. Steve and I still laugh about it to this day. (That facility looked like Haddonfield Memorial Hospital in 1981’s “Halloween 2” and was staffed as poorly!)

FALLING IN LOVE FOR THE FIRST TIME

Back to my story… at the darkest point in the spring of 1995, I met Christopher, started my longest relationship and I got back on the wagon.

Even after we broke up nine years later (2004) and I started another relationship in 2009, I still fought the food demons.

While there have been temporary bulimic lapses, I’m eating healthier and keeping the food down.

FINALLY, THE CAREER HAPPENED!

It was also during my first residency in Chicago that my television news career finally took off in the spring of 1996. (Spoiler alert: I left Chicago that summer and moved back a second time from 2002-2004).

That first job was as a part-time reporter at a PBS station in Merrillville, Indiana, about 50 miles from Chicago, for $5 an hour.

I was only there for about six weeks — just long enough to do a few stories to update my resume tape (with an old 1989 weathercast).

And, here’s a connection to Central Illinois before I moved here in 2020: My 1996 news director in Merrillville, Dave Benton, moved to Champaign in 2005 where he anchored news until his death in 2015.

My first real network-affiliated television weather job was in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1996. From there, jobs in Texas, Ohio, Maryland, Illinois, Florida, and Minnesota followed!

This is from the Mansfield, Ohio, station, on May 4, 2000, covering the 30th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre.

SUMMING IT UP

My career has given me the opportunity to live in many places and leave when I wanted to try something new.

I stayed in Chicago for almost two years the first time before moving to Rhinelander to start my career.

It was an interesting two years — bartending at Charlie’s, meeting a psycho that tried to kill me several times, and then falling in love.

And, speaking of that country bar, it was there that I discovered an unknown Canadian singer and the song, “What Made You Say That”.

That popular Charlie’s song only made it to #55 on the country chart in the U.S. But, I loved the self-titled album it was from.

And, in 1995, America, Canada and the world would discover Shania Twain with her follow-up blockbuster, “The Woman in Me”!

THANK YOU ARMISTEAD & MARY ANN (LAURA LINNEY)

Armistead Maupin, thank you for giving this small-town Kentucky boy the motivation and the courage to move to Chicago just three months shy of my 30th birthday, just as you allowed Mary Ann Singleton to leave Cleveland, Ohio, for San Francisco.

And, just like Mary Ann’s career as a television personality, I fulfilled my dream of becoming a television newscaster and meteorologist!

And, by the way, Steve, Dennis and I are still friends across the miles. I got to see them last month in Clarksville, Tennessee.

THAT’S IT

With all the craziness in the world, make it the best in your little part of it!

Anthony