Looking to the near future...

Ahh, March. When it first began, I posted a sincere hope that March would be a better month than the cold hearted and deplorable February was. It certainly was, though not to any level that I would call exciting. While most of this will be described in detail as I reach it in the story, March was the month we took a couple of last ditch attempts, failed at those, and began to look towards the future plans.

We still have a few options floating around, we have Realtors both at home and in Washington looking into a couple of things, but essentially, as of this writing, our dreams are in a holding pattern for the next 12-24 months. Naturally, if things were to suddenly swing our way, and solid, good news arrived, we would immediately dive back in, but for the time being, we need a break.

For the last year solid, Lindsay and I have breathed, ate, slept, and worked Motels. In the process, we've learned a lot, and it has been fun, in a special kind of soul sucking way, but it has been a lot of work, and endlessly stressful. I haven't drawn or sculpted anything substantial in the time we've been working on it, and Lindsay's writing had slowed to a halt. After our most recent, and most complete failure, we have decided to take a break. Apart from the few little possibilities we're looking into, for the next year or two, we are going to concentrate on living our lives to the fullest, and preparing to dive back into the search after we are in a slightly better place. We plan to pay off some debt, build a larger down payment, work in our yard, draw, paint, write, play, and generally try and get our minds back to a good place. Right now, we're so frazzled and burnt out by the process that we've found ourselves short tempered and less considerate about some things in our lives. That isn't us, and we have no intention of letting a few bad experiences turn us bitter, so as hard as it is, we've decided to stop and re-combobulate.

It could be fun. We've never really experienced a lot that Pocatello and the area has to offer, and we plan to change that. We're going to eat at every restaurant, climb every trail, and explore the city we grew up in, and at the same time, we both plan to work on secondary incomes to build up a better down payment for our next attempt. We both plan to work on books; Lindsay a historical fiction, I'll either write a mystery, or a zombie survival novel... we'll see. I also plan to start a full website for my sculptures and artwork, painting more and expanding my commissions. Next week, we're taking a week off, and heading to the coast again, but this time strictly for leisure. We're going to walk on the beach, read books, camp in the back of Strontium and not do anything related to Motel running. (In theory. Whether we'll be able to avoid it is another matter entirely....) It should be fun. When we get back, we'll start unpacking our entire house again, Lindsay's going to start looking for a better paying job that utilizes her degree, and we're going to try and make a fresh start in the same place we've been the whole time.

Naturally, there's a lot of downsides to this, my mom and brother were going to live in this house when we moved, so now they're out of a place to live, and we've spent a lot of time and money chasing phantoms for the last year and every once in a while we both get pretty nostalgic and depressed about what we've lost so far, but we hope to stay upbeat and happy about what we do have.

When we're ready, we'll sell the house, hopefully at a profit, and start in again, a little more skeptical, but every bit as determined.