Hello there. Considering the time gap between this post and my last one, you might thinking something had, indeed, gone catastrophically wrong with my PC build. Perhaps I blew up all the parts. Or maybe I electrocuted myself. It would make sense.

In fact, the build was a success! My new rig has been under my desk for months now and humming along smoothly. Every day, I enjoy the crisp loading times of a solid state drive. It’s pretty wonderful.

At some point, I’ll eventually knuckle down and spring for the VR headset which prompted the whole upgrade in the process. Still haven’t gotten around to that. But I have a pretty good reason. Been really busy these last few months.

Around the time of my last post, we suddenly got serious about the home buying process. A few months before that, a house had come up for sale that I’d really liked, and I even drove out to visit it myself, and really liked it. And then it occurred to me that I really had no idea if we were close to being ready to buy a house or how one goes about house buying! I knew, vaguely, you weren’t supposed to call the name of the guy (or lady!) on the for sale on the house. I think I read somewhere that it would be donning a meat-shirt before jumping into wolf country.

So, not knowing what to do, but knowing how to fix that problem, I went to a class at the library. Because that’s pretty much my solution to all of life’s problems; go to the library.

And then after that class, we were meeting with an agent, and then we had an agent, and then suddenly I was zipping out the door when a new house popped up on Redfin. I’m not even kidding, if a house in our area in our target range was sitting on the market for more than three days, my first thought  was “wtf is wrong with that house.” Because the houses we looked at and we liked, those houses literally sold out from under us. One house came up for sale and then sold before I’d even texted our agent.

So that turned into a whirlwind couple of months and then, all of a sudden, there was a house we found that we could afford and we wanted it and we got it! And then we were moving and even though I’m really very good at moving from a lifetime of experience, this was my first time moving as the dad to a still-new human being. That introduced a lot of interesting quirks!

Then we got moved into our house and MY GOD, the shit you need to buy to function in a house. Ladder and lawnmower and thingy that whips a string around to whack the weeds (weed whacker? String trimmer? I’ve heard it called both). And a chainsaw. I had to have a chainsaw. And now I do, and I love it.

I also had to buy a washing machine. And a dryer. Drier? Dryer looks more right. I think it’s a dryer.

That was all back in July.

I think after that all happened, I sort of went into a mental fugue. It was this huge culmination of years of saving and hoping and wondering and thinking and worrying (oh, so much worrying) and then . . . it was there and it was real. I don’t think I knew what to do with myself. I knew if I sat down to write about it, to really open up my brain and reflect on what this all meant and how I felt about it . . . even thinking about it now makes me tired, and we moved in July!

So instead of thinking (or writing, or reading, for that matter, I am seriously so far behind on my personal reading goal), I obsessed about light bulbs and played way too much World of WarCraft for a few months.

But eventually, you do have to start thinking again. And feeling. And reflecting. If only because you realize that although you have the home office you required, you haven’t used it for anything even remotely resembling work. And maybe you think about how you can’t remember the last time you even looked at your novel. And the longer time presses on, the bigger the gap grows, the worse it feels, which actually dovetails nicely into even more avoidance behavior if that’s your thing (and it’s totally my thing).

So I’m trying to take it slow. Allow my brain to rove over these topics. Try not to automatically tune out at the end of every day. I want to get back to thinking and reading and writing. So that brings me back here. Trying again. Day after day. Because really, what else can you do? What else is there to do, but try again? And keep trying after that?