2013 was a year of change for us. We moved from California to Minnesota, and two months after arriving in Minnesota we moved from the city to the suburbs. I started working in a real office (still for Ameriprise), R started a job with a new company (Boston Scientific), and Veronica went from alternating days with daycare and a nanny to attending a Montessori school full-time.
Living in Santa Barbara felt like a great secret that we had stumbled upon. It seemed if other people knew what the place was like, everybody would want to live there. Even when we were busy caring for a child or working hard to afford the higher cost of living, there was something about the place that made it easy to get out of bed in the morning. After five years of living in fear that this paradise would be taken away, we brought the change upon ourselves. R found her new job in July, and we were embarking on our giant road trip a month later. It felt fated to work out the way it did, and the timing just made sense.
Veronica appears to be handling the shift well, but there are times when it's clear she misses our old home. It's a complex, human reaction that changes from day to day. She has such a good memory. She'll still pull out things about the place that I had totally forgotten about or little things I hadn't paid attention to. Seeing her "write" letters to her old friends or hearing her talk about the fountain outside our old condo breaks my heart. Where we are now feels more permanent and that is comforting to me.
We sort of became numb to big, life-changing decisions. It felt like we rolled the dice on a lot of them and eventually looked to see where we ended up. We reverse-90210'd ourselves to a more conventional path. That's not a bad thing. Our mortgage is a third of what it was. And it is really nice to be able to visit our families without requiring a flight and a week of vacation to do so. I miss the extra time with Veronica that working from home allowed me, but seeing her with her grandparents more frequently helps make up for that.
Due to the move, our travels were scaled back in 2013. We did make some small getaways to Pine Mountain, San Diego, Disneyland, Monterey, and Yosemite National Park. We also spent a week visiting family in Minnesota before we realized we'd be living there shortly after. But the most memorable trip was probably our "transitional journey" from Santa Barbara to St. Paul. We stopped at Disneyland (again) and the Grand Canyon along the way.
I managed to work on a few creative projects during the year, most notably this scaled-back performance video, and I finally started my long-term retrospective blog series. I'm hoping to continue with some similar projects in 2014. And as always I'd also like to get more serious about my photography, if I can find some inspiring light in Minnesota. You can keep up with our family photos over on my other blog, although I have to warn you my output has slowed considerably since the move.
I need to get this posted. As usual, the longer I spend on it, the shorter it gets. Cheers-
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