Ooh, Shiny!

I can tell there’s a shift going on.

First off, I changed my hair color (which means those author photos I spent all that money on are now out of date, but oh, well). It’s actually still not quite where I want it to be — I have a follow-up hair appointment next week — but still, it’s a change I decided to make and followed through with.

Erik and I have been talking about moving, which for anyone who knows us might sound as if it’s coming out of the blue, since we’ve always said how much we loved this house. Well, we love parts of it, but more and more of it is becoming inconvenient — we’re tired of living on a busy street, and we’d really like a two-car garage, and the floors and yard are a mess and we know our landlady isn’t going to do anything to fix them (we sold our last place before everything went blooey in the SoCal real estate market and decided to rent; smartest thing we ever did, despite having to deal with recalcitrant landlords). So we’re taking the first cautious steps in that direction…looking around and deciding to get rid of a lot of things, getting an idea of what’s available in our price range (a good deal, actually; we think we’re sort of overpaying for this place simply because it’s a “character home”), trying to figure out what we can do to make our lives more efficient.

That could have been part of the problem — just the downward drag of too much stuff and the household entropy that seems to suck the life right out of you. We’ve been here more than seven years now, which is the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I moved out of my parents’ house when I was nineteen. During most of my adult life, circumstances conspired to have me moving about every two to three years, which is a great antidote against collecting too much crap. But after seven years, things have gotten out of hand, and we probably would have had a major purge even if we weren’t planning on moving. The reasons stated above are the primary motivating factor, though. I think it’s going to feel really good to pare down and focus on  things that can make our lives better.

And I’m sort of feeling the same way about writing. I still have my rant about writing to a market vs. writing what you love stored up somewhere, and I suppose I’ll let it out at some point. However, this week I finally got back to writing after too long away, and it’s something silly and fun that’s never going to be “officially” published (we’re planning to serialize it on the Dark Valentine website). But that’s okay, because it’s still writing, still that process of sitting down and staring at that computer screen and making something come out of nothing. And I’m not really sure I would have even gotten as far as I did if I hadn’t had that feeling somewhere inside that changes were coming, and that things were going to get better, and that somehow everything would work out for the best.

Because you know what? It always does.

—Mirrored from christinepope.com/blog