February 07, 2014

Lately


Bend is nothing if not drop-dead-gorgeous. From the sunsets, our front porch view of the mountains, waterfall hikes, and five straight days of snow...it makes adjusting a little easier when I get to see a giant jack rabbit hop in and out of the foot of snow in our yard while I sit at the window and type this sentence. I mean, come on! Is this real life??





January 29, 2014

Now What?

Confession—I’m having a hard time. 

I’m having a hard time finding a job. I’m having a hard time being completely alone 80% of the week, and not knowing anyone to call in this city to chip away at that percentage. I’m having a hard time maintaining some sort of normality with my sleep schedule (aka not watching Veronica Mars until two o’clock in the morning and then sleeping until eleven). I’m having a hard time being with our dog all the time now that he’s gone insane and seems to be beckoning me to join him. I’m having a hard time being even a little productive with my empty days. I’m having a hard time trying not to be negative and sarcastic about life right now. I’m having a hard time trying to let go of how I thought life would be this year. 

When I watched babies and people asked me what I did I always replied with, “I’m just a nanny”.  Just. It was easy since I knew the job already had a time limit to it, two years and then I would move on to what I was supposed to do. When I actually moved on and ended up working for durable medical supply company, I really fought hard to not let this be something that I felt defined me. I was grateful for employment and the stability it offered, but I wanted to do my best and move on as quickly as possible. “I’m a CPAP consultant”, I would reply with the biggest possible eye roll and smirk on my face. It wasn’t who I was it was just what I did. 

Now I cook and clean, do the laundry, take the dog for a walk, and wait for my husband to come home. So if this is just what I do and not who I am, why do I feel so defined by it?

Moving across the country felt like a clean slate. That was how I comforted and reasoned with myself. A fresh start! I can be the kind of person I’ve wanted to be and talked about being, because no one will know the difference! I can get a job doing something I really want to do, no more excuses!…I can think of plenty excuses to take just about any job that comes my way after applying to at least 20 postings in a week and hearing absolutely nothing back from anyone—even in retail.

So yeah, I’m having a hard time. And I know I probably sound ridiculous and ungrateful—I’ll get around to writing a out how gorgeous it is here and how I honestly feel that Miles and I are going to be so happy here…but in this moment (and most of the moments in the past 3 weeks) I needed to confess that I feel really lost. 


At least now I have the time to unsubscribe from all Nashville area deals, shows, offers, exciting news. 

January 28, 2014

Tennessee to Oregon



It was absolutely gorgeous all week. We saw a bunch of cows, horses and tumbleweeds, unbelievable colors in Arizona and New Mexico, discovered Gallup is an extremely scary and depressing town, learned that you can see the light from Las Vegas filling (ahem, polluting) the sky from 100 miles away, and that theres a whole lot of nothing in between the bigger cities in the southwest.

Miles and I listened to four audio books, and are still trying to finish the last one we started--its a little harder in 10 minute bursts of in-town driving now. Jack was so stressed he started to lose his hair.  We thought we lost Rowan in our Las Vegas hotel. After a solid 15 minutes of frantically walking running  through the lobby and down all the hallways, we found him hiding really well under the bed in our room. Boone actually did the best of all our animals on the trip (he is now the worst in Bend. its like the terrible twos for dogs with him). We drank so much gas station coffee and ate all the weird flavored chips, and we made it to Bend without any real issues. 

This is obviously a briefest of summaries. This was huge--the trip and the journey. The trip is over, I'm still processing what the end result is...