This has been one crazy year. It's my first full year as a married man. My first year living somewhere not called Virginia or DC. My first year being involved in selling a house. (It sucks by the way). My first year moving somewhat blindly across the country to a completely new place, where the amount of people I know can be counted using one hand. Yep, crazy year. It was a great year though.
This year I learned a fair amount about planning. Planning everything so that you can coincide a move, a job, a home sale, finding a new place, and moving into it. It's stressful. This year was a crazy year. Did I mention that?
The year started out pretty nicely - we went to Aruba with Jena's parents, her sister and bro-law, her Aunt Louise, and our awesome nephew. It was an awesome trip, mostly spent floating around the lazy river...
Spring was pretty uneventful. We were getting ready to sell our house, and starting to do the awesome dance where you leave every weekend and are forced to clean every morning before you leave the house. I got pretty good at being a better cleaner though, so that's good. Also we always came home to a clean house. Those are roughly the only two things that I can think of that were good about selling the house.
Over Memorial Day, we got a visit from Jena's sister and fam. We went to Annapolis where our nephew learned to drive boats and dressed like a pirate. We had a great time out on the boat and walking around town.
Over the summer, the house sale process dragged on, but it didn't keep us from doing a fair amount of fun stuff.
La Jolla Cliffs
We did some boating on the Chesapeake Bay, spent July 4th in Annapolis with family, and I made it out to San Diego for the first time. What a beautiful place.
We also took in a Tigers game in Baltimore on a beautiful day for baseball. And we got a win! It was a fun time and erstwhile Tiger Edwin Jackson threw a gem!
We finally sold the house this Summer. Wow, what a pain in the ass, dealing with the most unreasonable buyers and agent, but it allowed us to finally realize our dream of moving to Colorado! With the house sold, we moved in with my parents-in-law while everything fell into place for our journey. Jena was allowed to keep her job at WeddingWire, and I lucked into a job at eCollege in Denver. I traveled out for an interview in August and did some house hunting while I was here. I found a great rental that had everything we wanted in a great neighborhood, and got the job offer, all in the same 48 hrs! It was finally time to roll out!
We got everything packed up in a POD and shipped off to Denver while we waiting for our moving date to arrive. It was a long and tiring process, but the POD worked out great, and everything made it cross-country in one piece. An amazing feat, and it was a pretty good deal too. We moved in with Jena's parents, which was not bad at all. I am blessed with a great pair of parents-in-law, and I think they enjoyed having their daughter back home for a while. We took some time out to attend a beautiful wedding in Vermont and watched Jena's cousin KC get hitched to his beautiful bride Annemarie. Once we got back, it was pretty much go time.
We made it out here pretty quick. We made a couple stops along the way - we saw my grandparents:
And then we stopped in Iowa to see our friend Tricia, who showed us around her wacky little town:
Then we hightailed it the rest of the way to Denver where we were met with an awesome housewarming surprise from Jena's friend Meredith's mom...what a great welcome!
So anyway, this is where we live now. Denver. It's weird, because I keep calling the DC area home, and it's not really home anymore. It's a place I grew up, and it's where I am from, but it's not where I live, which is quite a change. I have three months under my belt in Denver, and the other 380 were spent in DC. The good news is that we love it here. We love the friendly people, the great neighborhood we landed in, and the wacky weather is even growing on me a bit. Our house is nice for a rental, but we look forward to buying something that we can call our own. Work is going really well - I couldn't be more pleased with my manager, my team, and the work that I get to do. It's been a really pleasant surprise, as I went in pretty much blind. We have had a lot of good times since we got here. We've done some sightseeing, beer tasting, skiing, and we've been pretty busy sampling all the great restaurants in our area. It's been quite a year, but I can't wait for next year. We are all settled in now, and we can put all our energy in enjoying everything that Colorado has to offer, including snowshoeing, hiking, more beer tasting, and skiing.
Goodbye 2009! Bring it on 2010!
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