Blindly Wandering

Yet again I've gone a crazy amount of time with no post.  Since my last post (almost a year ago now-yikes!) a LOT has changed.  Since my life course has changed I thought it was about time to revisit this whole blog idea.  This blog originally started as a New Year's resolution (clearly one that didn't pan out all that well).  Now I am going to use it as more of a conversation space.  Granted, this conversation may be extremely one sided as I talk myself through things but hopefully it will eventually be a two sided conversation.  I get these Real Simple "Daily Thought" quote things.  I'll occasionally be putting these in my posts (you'll find one below if you keep reading).  There really are some great ones that show up in my inbox so I feel its only fair to share them :)  It also will *hopefully* help focus my ramblings a bit.

So to fill people in on what this big change in my life is....I've moved.  It doesn't sound like that huge of a thing but it's turning out to be.  A few weeks ago Matt got a fantastic job offer in Michigan.  We'd been talking about moving for a few months but the right opportunity hadn't presented itself-at least not until this offer came along.  Now Michigan was never where I really wanted or thought I'd end up moving to but, things change.  I can honestly say I've never made such a huge decision on a quicker timeline.  Matt got the offer and we had to have a decision within the next four days.  We chatted about it for a night or two and then decided to just go for it.  From the time we made the decision we had 3 weeks to get everything set.  It has been a crazy whirlwind of a month.  Matt and I both gave our notice at work, subleased our Madison apartment, found a rental house in Michigan, packed up our lives, said goodbye to our friends and my family, and headed east towards Detroit.  That about brings you up to speed.

Quote of the day- "The thing that's important to know is that you never know.  You're always sort of feeling your way."  I feel like I have been living this quote the last few weeks.  I'm a planner by nature and I've never done something this big with this little planning.  I feel as though I've been blindly feeling my way through all of the options and decisions I've been forced to navigate through.

We're now in our rental house in Royal Oak, Michigan.  Things have not gone as planned since we've been here.  There were a lot of things that needed to be fixed in the house and they are taking much longer to complete than they were supposed to.  So we still have a general contractor going in and out of our place each day.  The saving grace there is that he's a very nice guy and after talking a bit it turns out he is pretty connected and has offered to introduce me to some people here in town.  I'll take any help I can get.  It was a very hard for me to give up the network I had built in Madison and I'm hoping to be able to build a similar network here.  The downside is that it is incredibly difficult to feel settled and "at home" in a house that is being worked on and that you can't use all of the rooms in.  I just keep telling myself that eventually everything will be fixed.  I'd just love it if eventually came sooner rather than later.

For now I'm trying to be more okay with taking baby steps each day/week/month.  There are a lot of things I will have to get used to here (I'm sure future posts will illustrate some of the differences and the challenges I'm having with them).  I'm going to try and see some of these challenges as opportunities, although I think sometimes this will be easier said than done.  I'm also going to try and focus on the small accomplishments and milestones along this so far bumpy road to happiness here in Royal Oak.  For now I am desperately missing my family, Madison and my second family there and I'm just trying to learn how to miss what I knew and grow to love what's in front of me now.  I'm hoping this gets a little easier each day.