A Blog About Things We Do

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Category: Summer

  • London and a Narrowboat – UK Summer Part 1

    London and a Narrowboat – UK Summer Part 1

    For quite a few years I’ve talked about a hand-wavy future in which I am somehow able to split time between the US and the UK. The dream is to secure a permanent home-away-from-home somewhere inspiring that scratches our travel itch when visiting, but that also also allows us to invest in that place. Join local communities and meet friends, join a local pottery studio, have those friends over for dinner. Maintain a small garden perhaps. Family and friends would have a cool and free place to stay.

    We lived in the UK (York specifically) and we absolutely loved it. The people we met (and ability to easily communicate!), relatively easy and inexpensive access to Europe for travel, and far enough from the US to feel unique – all great things that checked a lot of boxes for us. This summer we are spending around seven weeks back in the UK as a bit of a fact-finding mission to see if the UK still felt like a potential cake we could eat while having it back in the States too. Starting with London and life on a narrowboat.

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  • A summer in Austin (and Chicago)

    A summer in Austin (and Chicago)

    Well it’s been awhile since I’ve updated the ol’ blog. Over a year Over TWO years. So I’ll recap the past events, starting at the previous blog post:

    1. We ate the ramen for dinner, and had some leftovers that we took to Lindsay’s house. The leftovers were perhaps more disappointing then the original meal. I have yet to attempt ramen again since this last attempt but recently have begun the search for bones to give it another shot.
    2. Lindsay and I went apartment hunting and ended up finding a great apartment in Chicago. The apartment itself was perhaps a bit odd at times, and certainly rough around the edges (exposed insulation in areas, partially pained ceiling, walls that crumble when you touch them).
    3. We moved to Chicago, Lindsay got a job at a great middle school, and I decided to start back at ID working remotely. We met a bunch of great new friends, including friends through a cooking community, and some very wonderful people we share the house / apartment with.
    4. We decided to go to Austin, TX for a month during the summer (that’s where we are currently at – that’s where we were at when I started this blog post… which is sad, because that was the summer, and now it’s winter that’s where we were over a year ago. We’ve since moved to a different apartment in Chicago, and it’s now the end of the NEXT summer from when I started this blog post!!).
    5. We ended up with rat issues in our apartment on Palmer St… we dealt with them for quite a few months, but eventually decided we should move. The rats were in the walls, and I would wake up often times in the middle of the night and pound on the walls to get them to be quiet. Also, the rats ate some of our clothing INSIDE of our bedroom, so at some point the rats were getting inside the apartment itself.
    6. We ended up moving to a new wonderful apartment in the Avondale neighborhood of Chicago

    That’s the basic life update for our own memories, but I’d like to spend a tiny bit more time writing about our time in Austin as it was a wonderful summer and I feel like it would be sad to not capture some of the memories from the trip for the future. Already many details are going to be lost, but I’m going to just take a stab at it, as they say. And by “they” I mean.

    So, what can I say about the summer in Austin..

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