Well, in roughly an hour and a half I will turn 36 and will now be on the late portion of my mid thirties. To think of what has happened to me over the past year is astounding. Comparing where I was a year ago to where I am now is just mind boggling. I would never have expected any of this to happen.
Last year on my birthday I was packing up my apartment in Kansas City and moving to Delaware. After five possibly misspent years out on the Great Plains I was moving to the east coast where I knew absolutely no one. Seriously, I did not know a single person within a hundred miles of my new home. I was returning to a company I had worked for in the past but was faced with the fear that maybe after seven years away I had forgotten everything I had learned on the first go around. I was saying goodbye to the familiar and hello to a complete blank slate. Incredibly, it worked out in the best way possible.
I didn’t feel that way at first. I still don’t feel that I am an east coast guy and I will never understand the whole idea of going to the shore on weekends. Wilmington is a small city and everything seems to be a drive for me whether it is to go to a bar or a grocery store or to an area of actual culture. But I love my apartment and I have gotten used to the area. It might not feel like home just yet but it feels pretty nice.
My job is going exactly the way that I hoped that it would. It is tough to explain just how at home I am talking about power lines and how energy flows. I know it sounds like the most boring thing in the world and I am sure to most people it actually is but I just love the fact that I can model every power line in the country and figure out what will happen next. Plus, I jumped back into the industry at the perfect time as everything is up in the air again. Having gone from a company I didn’t particularly like to this is a wonderful change of pace.
But obviously the biggest moment of the past year is the one I never would have predicted no matter how much I tried. I never even fancied the thought that Kim and I would get back in touch and decide to start dating. It would have been a dream on the level of winning the lottery; it seemed that unlikely. Yet today here I am dating the woman of my dreams and happier than I have ever been. Every day I remind myself that I am the luckiest guy on the planet.
All I can say is for the first time my life is precisely where I want it to be. I have the best girlfriend ever, a job that excites me and a wonderful family. Things aren’t perfect but of course they never are. I wish I knew people out here who I didn’t work with or had a regular trivia game to play or was fifteen pounds lighter but those are all things that I can address. I do miss my friends in KC and sometimes wish I was on my way to the Brick on a Friday night to unwind but sometimes you have to move to grow. That is what this year has been all about. I am looking forward to my birthday tomorrow for all the possibilities the next year holds. After this one I feel that anything is possible.
On that note I have something to announce. As my regular readers have probably noticed the posts have been a little lacking at times recently with the occasional skipped entry. For lack of a better term, I’ve been busy with my real life and am tired as a result. I still love to write but over the past few months sitting down at the laptop and writing a page of material has grown a little tougher. So, after some thought I have decided that after four years and ten months, 1,253 posts and probably around 800,000 words I am due for a little break so I am taking a two week sabbatical. I guess that would be more of a hiatus than a sabbatical but either way I just want to take some time to recharge my creative batteries and take care of some other projects. I’m not going to stop blogging or change from the five posts a week schedule or anything. Just taking a little time off to celebrate one hell of a year.
As always, thanks to everyone who does read my thoughts from my corner of the world. See you all in two weeks. Take it away Josh…
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