Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Utah

I love my dentist. Two crowns and a bridge, and you'd never even know they're there. They look like real teeth. And my mouth feels much better. Still a bit tender, but nothing like it was.


So that thing I wasn't supposed to talk about a few weeks ago, the thing that's been constantly on my mind and keeping me from writing (at least, writing anything that's actually amusing)?

We may be moving. Jeremy's job wants us to move out to Salt Lake City. The offer is very attractive, though we don't have all the details yet. We've kept it on the down-low, but I don't think anyone from his work is reading this blog, and if they are, they've probably put the pieces together already.

Two things stand in the way: selling the house, which we will almost certainly have to take a loss on, and leaving our friends and family.


Our house is still in fixer-upper condition. We've cleaned it and painted, but none of the major projects have been done. It was something we were going to spread out of the course of the next several years. It's a cute little house, and I've been happy with it the last two years. But now that the possibility of getting out of it is here, all the little things about it that annoy me have been magnified tenfold.

But there's so much to DO. Clean and paint the porch. Clean the siding. Reinforce the back deck and restain it. Trim the bushes (and I just can't bring myself to do the outdoor work because of spiders, so all this is on Jeremy). Patch the paint in the dining room that we didn't do properly the first time. Reclean the carpets and replace those that aren't cleanable (poor Grace--her room is the stinky room, the one that has a faint odor no matter how much we scrub and how much we leave the window open). Recaulk the tub upstairs or, possibly, replace the floor and tub upstairs (oh joy). Make the kitchen cupboards look something better than horrible (they're this awful forest green, and one of them has fallen off--Klassy!).

This is all much less exciting when it's a house you're not going to be staying in.


I am *just* starting to make friends. This is not something that I am good at, not when I don't have classes or a job to conveniently put new friends right there in front of me. I'm outgoing when I have a good reason to talk to people, but I'm too timid to walk up and strike up a conversation with someone who looks interesting.

We love our church. There are several churches of our same denomination in the area, but the people in ours are not replaceable. It's taken a while; we live a good distance away from the core of our church, and, as I said, we make friends slowly. But these people are starting to feel like family, and it will break my heart to leave. There are a few families in particular that I wish I could pack up and take with us.

And the grandparents and cousins. I was looking forward to the girls growing up close to their grandparents. I was very close to my mom's parents, and some of my best childhood memories are from staying at their house.

My most absurd worry is over finding new doctors. I'm afraid I'll never find OBs as good as the ones I have now. Our dentist is one of a kind, and the girls' pediatrician is fabulous, competent, and hilarious. She's the trifecta of awesome.


Even after all that, the offer is pretty sweet. I've never liked Wisconsin. The last twenty years of my life have not been a misery, but it hasn't ever felt like home, either. When we went out to visit SLC, This is home, kept popping into my head. Something clicked. I was thinking it before we even got to the hotel. Which is saying a lot, since the trip from the airport to the hotel was miserable. I've only ever felt this way about South Dakota, which is where I'm from, and Denver.

The idea of picking up and starting fresh is exhilarating. I've never done anything adventurous in my life. And I do think that if I were completely cut off from all my friends, I would learn to get out there and just do it. I'm lazy and timid and shy, but I can also rise to challenges. Since I've always had friends near enough, I've never had the motivation to just get over my hangups and make some new friends here in our town.

That's what I keep tell myself, at least. Feh.

3 comments:

  1. It can be fairly liberating to just pack up and go. (Which would involve a bit more planning in your case, what with the house and the kids, but still.)

    I moved to Oregon from Texas after I finished college, so that I could finally be in the same place as my fiance. I didn't have a job, friends, or a place to live, although I managed to find all three of those things. Packing up my car and driving 2,000 miles to start an entirely new life in an entirely new place has been a truly wonderful experience. It isn't always fun, but I think it's always been incredibly good for me.

    It was very out of character, and I was always inclined to stick close to home out of fear of the unknown. My fiance is one of the few people/things important enough to make me do something different. But for what it's worth, I'm happier and just generally like myself more than I did three years ago, and I think a lot of it has to do with cutting myself off from the familiar. It's forced me to rely on myself to an extent that I never had to before. Changes like that can build character (to quote Calvin's dad from Calvin & Hobbes).

    I hope that if you end up moving to Utah, you find that the same is true for you and your family.

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  2. I wish you luck, if you do decide to move! I lived in the same general area, which I loved, from birth until last year. My kids loved their grandparents and knew them so well, and it was great. Then my husband joined the military, and everything changed! Since then we've lived in two different places long-term, plus had several short assignments that meant living in temporary housing and such.

    There's a lot of fun in moving to a new place. Finding a new house you love, looking up all the local mom's groups and stuff like that (which is, BTW, a great way to meet people if you don't have something like school or work to put yourself in their proximity). It's hard, though, leaving the people you love behind, especially when you have a lot of family behind.

    My advice would be, if you move, to try to hook up with some sort of mom's group, or something like that, as fast as you can. Or if not a mom's group, something else. You can probably do a lot of research online in advance. You could even look up some local churches before you go there, so that when you get to your new location, you get connected as soon as possible. It's a lot easier to meet people when you can say, "Oh, we just moved to the area!" If you put it off, it becomes harder. "Oh, yeah, we've been here for a year, so..."

    And good luck! I wish you were moving near us, I think our girls would get along great!

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  3. I live in the same city I grew up in, save for my college years. I am ready to move on but the logistics of moving with 2 small kids and changing everything they know is so daunting. Still- my husband's in touch with a recruiter for his field and we're putting out feelers from the east coast to the west.
    Good luck with whatever happens!

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