Two Weeks in a Brand New City Before Everything Changed Yet Again

There is something deeply strange about uprooting everything you know and landing in a completely new everything. New home. New city. New climate. New people. New life. All at once.

I would love to tell you that the day after we arrived the POD showed up and we unpacked everything beautifully and it was magical and the house came together like a Pinterest board and we celebrated with a gorgeous dinner and toasted to the new era.

That is not what happened.

What happened is I spent the first day in our brand new home violently ill on the floor of my house in a sleeping bag.

Two months of stress, homelessness/nomadic living, an ungodly amount of Alani energy drinks that I regret nothing about but that clearly have a limit, the road trip, all of it caught up with me the moment I was finally still enough for my body to collect its debt. Nause. Headache. Cold sweats. Huddled on the floor. In a sleeping bag because my furniture hadn’t arrived. 

That was my magical day one in Portland.

The next morning the POD was arriving and with one eye open and one eye closed I made a decision I had not planned on and had absolutely not budgeted for. 

I needed movers. We have stairs in this house, not a small amount of them, and I was still not fully human yet. So I hunted down a moving company that could come that same day within a couple of hours.

Here is my advice. Same day movers are not always the best movers.

The level of things that got broken was… deeply disappointing to say at the very least. The wood glue situation that happened that night while I was still feeling terrible is something I would like to forget but cannot and might still be high from the fumes. But at risk of sounding epically spoiled, I was grateful for the help. I am also grateful not all my antiques broke. 

Now the couch situation.

After measuring the living room I realized our sectional absolutely would not fit in the room I had planned to use as the living room. Which meant this massive piece of furniture needed to go somewhere else entirely. It ended up upstairs, which is now a projection room, which is actually a whole different story. But listening to the sounds of movers hauling a sectional up a staircase while commenting about my weird choices in room utilization was not my fav.

And through all of this I was still working.

Because the business does not pause for moving or illness or wrong room furniture situations. Podcasts still needed recording. Client social media still needed managing. My own content still needed creating. I was doing all of it from a barely-unpacked house with boxes everywhere and a sleeping bag on the floor because every part of me that is slightly OCD was screaming to put the whole house together immediately and every other part of me knew that was not the right call.

My sister made that very clear.

When I called her and told her I wanted to get the house organized before doing anything else she asked me a question that stopped me completely. 

She said do you want your kid to remember these last few days as the time you unpacked boxes really efficiently or do you want them to remember being tourists in the city that is now home.

Tourist it was.

We gallivanted all over Portland feeling simultaneously lost, overwhelmed, excited, thrilled, and completely in awe. The weather. The trees. The mountains that just appear occasionally while you are driving down a completely normal street. The water, which tastes genuinely incredible after years of water so chlorinated it smelled like a pool. The secret beach a stranger gave us exact directions to. The billion restaurants within reach that I would happily eat at for every meal of every day for the rest of my life. Everything was a whirlwind of newness and joy and we leaned into every single second of it.

I also threw every ounce of my healthy eating journey directly out the window the moment we left Texas and I have zero regrets about that either.

But underneath all of it, underneath every adventure and every new restaurant and every moment of genuine awe, there was a clock ticking. We both knew it. We just did not say it out loud until we had to.

Three days out I was sitting in the projection room and I turned to my kid and said I know we are having so much fun but it is time to get you packed.

Which was its own emotional journey. 

Finding things in boxes that were not the things we needed. Moving boxes out of the way to get to the things that were. Figuring out what a person needs for their first semester of college when you have never done this before and also most of your belongings are somewhere in boxes in a house you just moved into. But we did it. We got it done.

We picked out our route. We set our alarms. And at 6am we all loaded into the car. Me, my kid, and our two little dogs, for another lengthy drive to Colorado Springs.

When we left Texas at 3am I did not cry. The Shrek soundtrack saved me.

This time was different.

Because this time I knew what was waiting for me when I came home.