Why, hello there! (READ: the blog is not dead.)

No, the blog isn’t dead.  It’s just been on ….. life support, I guess you could say these past several months.  I am so  sorry everyone.  Let me just catch  you up on what has gone on in my life, as succintly as I can, over the last (gulp) 10 months.

When I last posted, I was still working full time at the animal shelter and doing transcription on the side.  By November of last year, I just knew I physically couldn’t keep all of that up.  I was falling asleep on my couch every night by around 8, waking up at midnight to let Snuggles out to do his business and then falling back asleep, sometimes too tired to even walk the ten feet into my bedroom, and thus, finding the comfort of my couch again.  So what did I do?

Well, I quit the animal shelter and began transcribing full time.  Mistakenly (or over-enthusiastically, I realize it was in hindsight), I had predicted I could type a whopping 100-125 pages per day, which would be necessary in order to pay my bills.  Yeah……..even as fast as I type, I soon realized the error of my ways.  A friend moved in with me into my one bedroom apt.  That meant I slept in the living room again as I had done in ABQ.  Less space wasn’t a big deal — you all know of my tiny home obsession.  But living to work became kind of old.  And I really missed my friends back home in Boston.

Here’s the thing:  Typing 80-100 pages per day makes you not want to type any more, even if it is therapeutic and you do like to write.  That has been the main reason I have not blogged.   I am so sorry.  But I have found some higher-paying transcribing work, so I now hope to be able to blog somewhat more regularly, because I have really, truly missed it.  And I have missed the community that I was starting to build on here.

Wonder what I look like these days?  Well, wonder no more, because yes, that is me in the photo below!

So let’s fast forward to March.  I missed the change of seasons or so I thought.  I decided to move back to Boston and my best friend back and there (and sister by another mother) and her husband graciously said I could live with them.  They had an extra bedroom that wasn’t being used and I missed my niece, who I had only seen once in the past few years.  So I found someone to take over my lease in Florida, and packed up The Herd and off to Boston, we went.  Three and a half days later, we arrived.  A week later, I flew out to Tucson for my oldest nephew’s wedding.  I saw a lot of my family and it was an awesome time.  And wow, did that warm weather feel good after freezing in Boston for about a week.

Flying home from Tucson, I wondered if I had made a mistake coming north.  I even journaled about it for a while on the plane.  As in many, many pages.  While Boston is gorgeous in summer, in March, it is dead.  As in the buds are just starting to form on the trees but nothing is really growing.  And this past April went on record as being the rainiest April EVER.  Now, while I like gray days in Florida, I have come to learn that I like them because they are a break from the sunshine, but there is a big difference between gray and WARM days and gray and COLD days.

Putting it as briefly as I can (just because I have a lot of typing ahead of me today), my depression came back pretty strong while I was there.  Those of you who have struggled with depression know what it means “to spiral.”  And that is what I was doing.  Things that I knew should not bother  me drove me to tears.  I know I was hurting my best friend by not being happier, as she had really gone the extra mile in allowing me to stay with them.   Rent-free.  They had all looked forward to my arrival for months now, and here I was, complaining about the cold every day.  That was something else that made me feel horrible.  I should have been elated to be back but here I was, fighting those feelings of depression again, willing myself to get through the day again, because as I used to tell myself right after my divorce, “Tomorrow will be better.”

I felt maybe I had not given Florida enough of a chance.  My mom questioned me — “Are you ever going to be happy?  You can’t keep moving like this.”  Yes, Mom, I know.  I felt defensive again like I had when I first left my husband and it seemed like she was questioning my every decision.  So I abruptly ended that phone call saying I didn’t need her judgment.

I did a lot of soul searching.  I spent a lot of time looking for jobs.  Getting even more depressed at realizing how insanely expensive living in Boston has become.  Seriously.  $1500 for a studio?  $900 just to live with your closest (or not so close) 4 friends in a shared house?  You have got to be kidding me.

I realized when I had thought about coming back to Boston, I truly thought I could come back as Terri 2.0.  That things would seem very different to me.  Different, yet familiar.  Does that make sense?   I also realized I must have been very homesick.  I hadn’t been back much during the time I was gone and yes, a lot of it was financial.

Here’s what it felt like.  I felt like I had given up on my dreams or whatever quest I had started on back in August of 2015.  I’ve changed a lot in those four years.  I’ve lived in different parts of the country and met a lot of people that I otherwise would never have met.  I’ve lived in UT, AZ, NM and FL.

People kept saying to me, “You will get used to the cold again.”  My brain kept saying “But you don’t have to.  There are other parts of this great big country where you don’t have to deal with it.  Places that are also cheaper to live.  Places where it isn’t so dead and gray during the winter months.”

So I talked to my friend Jon who was back in Florida and who had tried to talk me out of moving back to Boston.  Long story short, we now rent a 3 bedroom/2 bathroom in southwest Florida.  I’m in a town called Cape Coral, close to Ft. Myers.  Close to the water, which I have realized is so important to me.  If you follow me on Instagram, that is abundantly clear.  The third bedroom has become my office and I do tend to get a lot done in there, even if I do have the laziest supervisors (READ: the furballs) in the entire world.  All they do is sleep!

I noticed that once I decided to move back to Florida, the crying jags stopped.  Maybe that was my gut telling me something.

Being back in Boston, my best friend also works from home.  I learned to be much more productive from her.  She goes to the library sometimes to concentrate and get shit done.  So I’ve also started doing that here some days.  Plus, working from home can be isolating.  I like to feel like I am around people, even if I’ve got headphones on.

It has been good to live with Jon.  He works nights in law enforcement, so I still have a lot of alone time.  But we still get to hang out so I don’t feel lonely.)  He has a German Shepherd who is a big old baby and who gets bullied around by Snuggles and Sophie.  (Yes, a new member of the Herd, I will have to add her to the page, and blog about her separately.  Yes, she is a rescue.  Are there any other kinds of adoptees??!!)  For now, please content yourself with this picture of her engaging in a favorite activity.  Sleeping.  (Like I said, I have lazy supervisors.)  And also enjoy the picture of Steel, who at four, is just a teddy bear with the sweetest eyes.

I have joined a gym that is literally across the street from our duplex that we rent.  No excuse now to not go and work out.  That may have turned out to be a good picture of me above, but I don’t like how I look these days.  Being back in Boston, I realized how I have let myself go over the past couple of years, not exercising on a regular, consistent basis.  This gym has spin and yoga classes and some others as well that I need to try out.  And yes, a Boot Camp class at 5:30 that I still need to go to.  It is taught by this guy who is super jacked, and surprise, surprise, he was formerly in the military.  Gulp!  I did a 5:30 am spin class (once), and it felt so amazing to come out of the gym, already a sweaty mess and the sun had yet to rise.

All this to say — if you were one of my readers before and by the grace of whatever deity or spiritual entity you choose, you are still reading this rambling post today, THANK YOU for sticking with me.  I am so incredibly sorry for not having written over the past several months.  And if by chance, you are new to the blog, well, welcome!

Writing this post really didn’t take as long as I thought I would.  There is really much more to say, but that will come in coming posts.   And yes, my blogger friends, I have been reading your posts as well.  I don’t comment usually if I’m reading it on my phone.  (Laziness, sorry.)

I’m still here.  If you are as well, could you drop me a comment and let me know?  I’ve missed you.  And this writing/blogging thing.

p.s. In case you’re wondering why the format of the blog has changed, it’s because the other theme was expensive and when renewal time came up, I realized I couldn’t justify the cost at the time, seeing as it had been months since I had blogged.  This theme will work for now.