Sunday at the Beach with Friends

That is where we are headed, today, to celebrate a friend's birthday. That is our PLAN, anyway.

We met them at the beach a few weeks ago, these friends, new friends we first met at a 4th of July party and liked, friends who are artists and teachers and workers for Obama, people right up our emotional alley. That over there to the left is a picture of our encampment. Sea Wall / Sand Castle designed and constructed by Ken, to save us all from the waxing surf.

Makin' friends - as I posted before, it's a process. It's why we miss home, Seattle, so much - all those people who know us, who have known us for years and years, who showed up to birthday parties and Solstice parties and who opened their doors to us on Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter and summer picnic gatherings.

We miss them. We miss YOU - since you're probably the ones reading this.

And now we are here, in the southern corner of the United States, and we're trying to make new friends.

And Kenny & I reverb back to adolescence, wondering Will They Like Us, Are We Weird, and sometimes (frequently) end up staying home with our heads under the covers. Which we can easily disguise as Playing Fort With Finn.

But today, I think, we are going to be brave. We're goin' to the party. Or at least we're gonna try.
Deep breath.

Wish us luck.






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A Year? Unbelievable

I had such good intentions.

I was gonna write every day, or at least some days...

...describe my journey, join the blogosphere, have lotsa readers, touch lives, be known, be read, be wildly successful, whatever that looks like.

And I never came back here to write. Not until now, nearly ONE YEAR to the day of that first post.

I did write. Just not here - I wrote, as I have all my life, in scrawled journals. And in emails. But did not write all that much, I guess. I kinda shut down.

I shut down to survive.

It turns out Moving is Hard. Moving can Suck.

Moving means you might end up in an apartment with shared walls and an drunken neighbor who falls asleep with two TVs BLARING (one tuned to ESPN and the other channeling porn) while your new city bursts into flame and your new co-workers confess they work 50 to 60 hours a week (but didn't think to tell you that when you interviewed) and your not-new husband had a brand-new kind of breakdown. Moving means you have to find a lawyer to break a lease and then find a new home and learn how to set boundaries at work in a brand-new way and figure out exactly what the "for worse" part of the marriage vow means. Moving means you have to make new friends and Moving means you realize that is much different in the decade of 40 and the decade of parenting than it was in the decades of 20 & 30 and "I'm in theatre so let's be friends and do a Play!" Moving means your son might not have anyone at his 4th birthday party except his mom and dad, instead of the 30+ entourage of friends and family who attended his first 3 extravaganzas.

Moving brought me closer to despair than I've been in many, many years, and nearly a year later I am not entirely sure we're out of the woods.

So maybe I'll write some more on here soon. I'm not done Moving yet, that I know.