A New Leaf

 I think I'd like to get back into this "blogging" thing. I found it a really helpful way to organize my thoughts about a project, and I liked the ability to share it easily with friends. Plus there are sometimes things I want to write about in more than just a group chat way, so why not?

The sun rising above Fort Lauderdale Beach

To start with, I think I'll blog a little bit about my recent move. For the last... 25? Is that how old I am now? That I can refer to things being a whole lifetime behind me and yet not be my own whole lifetime? Wow, anyway... For the last 25 years, I've lived, gone to school, and worked in South Florida. I don't fully regret it, partially because I was brought there as a young child without my consent, and partially because that's where I met and married my spouse, it's where I conceived and birthed my daughter, and that's where I met some of my best and closest friends. However, for a lot of reasons, South Florida was really just not the right environment for me. 

 So I decided to return to New York, where I was born, and where I'd spent quite a lot of time growing up. I had a feeling it was going to be the new start I desperately needed. We had this all planned out, more or less, in the summer of 2019. We were going to save every single cent we could all year and in June of 2020, when our (for lack of better word) "lease" was up, we'd put down on a house, move in, and find some jobs in the area. And yeah, I know, you're supposed to find the job and then move, but the economy wasn't that great to begin with back in the Good Ole Days of 2019, and the kind of work we'd had in Florida didn't lend itself to getting us long distance interviews.. So this would work. We would make it work.

My 5am progress: a map that shows a "You Are Here" arrow pointing at Palm Bay, FL which is directly east of Tampa on the Atlantic coast of Florida.

But you know what happened, didn't you? Reading this sometime after the summer of 2020. Covid. Coronavirus. The Pandemic. Of course we both lost our jobs, of course Florida's help for the pandemic lasted an entire 2 months and didn't involve any kind of eviction freeze, and of course we lost nearly all of our savings just trying to feed ourselves and keep our vehicle from being repossessed.  But we still had some money left, and we weren't getting an extension on the "lease" even though it was with family members who supposedly cared very much about us and wanted the best for us, so we hatched a plan. We'd rent a uhaul, pack all our stuff in it, and just drive up and hope for the best. Of course, we could only afford a little trailer to hitch to the back of my Nissan Altima, and of course that meant getting rid up about 90% of our earthly possesions, but hey! Things are replaceable, right? Obviously, this also went to shit.

Of course the hitch broke; this picture shows it pointing down towards the ground rather than being level like it was supposed to.

So we had to spend even more money on this trip than we planned, but it's fine. It's definitely, totally fine. Of course it's fine. There's more to this story, of course, and I took a lot of pictures that I'll be using as prompts for the rest of this, but that's where I'm at now. Well, not up there with the broken hitch, which broke in South Carolina. We made it to New York, where we now sleep in a tent on a relative's property. But that is a story for another time.