Moving Along

Life ain't fair.  The more people, and especially peers, I speak with these days the truer that seems to be.  And life seems to be a lot less fair to other people than us but we too were kicked in the teeth recently.  It's shocking to speak with people and find out how many folks out there are going through rather serious crises from jobs to personal lives to health issues, often at a much too young an age.  This spring we had our own bout with fate and have had to make some difficult decisions.  Drum roll please....We have decided to move...again.  Okay, I'll be honest, I just threw up in my mouth.  Clearly, this was not an easy decision. This will be our third cross-country move in less than 18 months.  One might say we are quickly becoming experts in packing, unpacking and learning the interstate highway system.  Or we could just be referred to as snowbirds.  We moved back to Florida in November and look to be vacating in May.  Oh, Florida, why will you not just embrace us?!

This time we're taking a crack at Wisconsin.  I left Wisconsin in 2001 when I moved to Boston and have been goofing around mostly the east coast since then with stays in New York, Miami, Gainesville, Tampa, Cedar Rapids, Tampa again and now back where it all started Lake Geneva.  I've been afforded an opportunity to join the family business and look forward to all small business has to offer.  I'll be joining my father and brother in a business my dad started some 33 years ago.  Ironically, I think it pretty likely my parents move to Florida.  Ha!  Hey, I know where you can get a great (well actually horrible deal) on a really nice house in Tampa. C'mon, you know you want it!

At the end of the day we think it will be a nice town to raise our family in with a solid public school system, close to family and the job will afford me some much needed flexibility in our lives.  For example I'm traveling around 40 weeks a year and this job would get that down to nil. As the boys have gotten older the single parenting stress on Carrie and the absentee parenting has had a negative impact on me and the boys.  We want to spend more time together and get a lot less sleep as a family.  It's no fun getting 2-3 hours of sleep a night away from each other.  Families that stay awake all night together, stay together - period.  Sweet.  I can't wait for more evenings of fighting with the boys to get to bed and then stay in bed.  I keep making that argument to have another kid, by the way.  "Care, we're getting up every 2 hours anyway.  What's the difference?  This body isn't going to stay this way forever, you know. Grrrrrar!"

So, as we roll into another state, Quinny's third in his three years and the potential to have 3 kids born in 3 different states - we don't want to be referred to as boring! we look forward to everyone's help. We need it this time around. We bought a house in foreclosure and it needs some TLC.  We did find a place we can grow into with 5 bedrooms and it sits on nearly an acre of property.  Did someone say Stinky needs a friend?  Plus we have a swimming pool.  Oh, we've dreamed of a swimmimg pool since after arriving, ironically not wanting one, in Tampa.  Oops!  Oh, well, getting a pool (with heater!) that we can use 3-4 months out of the year is better than no pool at all.  We miss our weekends with Aunt Jo and Uncle Bobby and their kids grilling and chilling pool side and hope to have more weekends of the same once we get that swamp in our yard back up to swimming pool par.  Thanks for setting us straight on how to spend a Sunday, relatives. 

We bought 10 gallons of paint yesterday in anticipation of a lot of painting ahead.  We also bought an entire kitchen full of appliances.  One might wrongly think that would be fun.  Then you see the price tags. Yowsers.  Thank you Sears for putting everything 50% off the week before we move in.  The folks moving out were clearly a little grumpy and caused some, mostly cosmetic, damage on the way out the door. You could tell it was hard for them to do real damage and most of it is fixable, but the place has been vacant for about a year.  If you have any talent (or none at all - we'll still take ya) come on down for a painting party in the LG in about 10 days.  Plus, it's Carrie's birthday and she told me there is nothing she likes better than moving on her birthday.  That would be right in between our anniversary and mother's day.  Like I said, life ain't fair.  Wish us luck we'll be moving one week from today.