Post by DCW on Nov 8, 2021 0:51:21 GMT 8
I was thinking of y'all this morning and decided to check in. A lot has happened in my life since I was last here.
In June of 2020 someone tried to steal my Ninja 1000 and ended up totalling it in the process. Since I wasn't going anywhere it didn't make sense to buy a bike right away as it would just sit.
Around the same time my roommate took a new job. She used to work for an grocery store bakery department and now has a desk job. A week into it she said, "I now understand the near-addiction to caffeine that office workers have."
I had a few job interviews that summer and was hired for my current position in the early fall. My start date was to be in late September but got pushed back two weeks due to some stuff with HR and background checks - all about verifying employment history and HR having an issue with the fact that I had a recent period of unemployment.
As I mentioned in my last post I was engaged but our planned wedding had to be postponed. Over the summer of last year we talked about what we wanted to do and ended up deciding to do common law marriage (Texas is one of the few states that still has it) and we would file the Declaration of Informal Marriage (an optional legal form that is, effectively, a marriage certificate for those who have common law marriages) at a later point, when things opened up again. At the time county clerks across the state were doing marriage licenses by appointment only and were booked many months in advance. We decided to use the extra 2 weeks to take a honeymoon and went camping in east Texas.
Late last year we moved. Still in Houston but a different part of it, from northwest Houston to west Houston (about 20 miles from where we used to live.) The location was in part due to our roommate's work needs.
The job is going okay - I work for an IT consulting/outsourcing firm and am full-time on one client. I work from home.
My second marriage is so very good. When I divorced I felt like I had blown my chance at marriage in particular and maybe relationships as a whole. I did a lot of work, including a couple years in therapy, on myself and was able to heal a lot. I now realize I really wasn't ready for that first marriage and that it was something I rushed into in order to escape abuse in the household where I grew-up, unsurprisingly only to end up in an abusive relationship (it's pretty much impossible to identify red-flag behavior when your sense of "normal, loving relationships" is abusive ones.) I have fallen so deeply in love with my wife.
We had a mostly fun vacation in September: a week of camping in Davis Mountains State Park. The only wrinkle was that our car broke down on the way out so it had to be towed to a dealership and then we got a rental (2020 Kia Soul - CVT failure which that model and year had a severe problem with, some owners reporting failure in as little as 5,000 miles. Ours was just under 13,000.) It got towed to Odessa and it took over 3 weeks for the replacement transmission to arrive. I ended up flying to Odessa when I took vacation in October and driving home, about 500 miles. I saw several new-to-me species of wildlife while out there, particularly javalinas (their range is mostly Mexico and Central and South America but they do have a range into Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.) I also got to make the joke "why did the tarantula cross the road" because one was crawling across the driveway as I walked to the loo one evening.
I never did buy another motorcycle. Since I work from home and if I travel I want to do so with my wife motorcycles won't be daily drivers for me; they'd be toys, and I have higher priorities for that money. I feel sad for the way riding left my life but I don't feel sad for riding being over. With 20 years, 300k+ miles, more than half of the US states visited by two wheels and 3 years of the bike being my only vehicle it was one hell of a ride in ways that very few people can say they did that.
I am working on making the surgeries I want happen within the next year or so. Finally, after beginning this journey in the summer of 1994, I'm in the position to do so without others making insurmountable barriers.
In June of 2020 someone tried to steal my Ninja 1000 and ended up totalling it in the process. Since I wasn't going anywhere it didn't make sense to buy a bike right away as it would just sit.
Around the same time my roommate took a new job. She used to work for an grocery store bakery department and now has a desk job. A week into it she said, "I now understand the near-addiction to caffeine that office workers have."
I had a few job interviews that summer and was hired for my current position in the early fall. My start date was to be in late September but got pushed back two weeks due to some stuff with HR and background checks - all about verifying employment history and HR having an issue with the fact that I had a recent period of unemployment.
As I mentioned in my last post I was engaged but our planned wedding had to be postponed. Over the summer of last year we talked about what we wanted to do and ended up deciding to do common law marriage (Texas is one of the few states that still has it) and we would file the Declaration of Informal Marriage (an optional legal form that is, effectively, a marriage certificate for those who have common law marriages) at a later point, when things opened up again. At the time county clerks across the state were doing marriage licenses by appointment only and were booked many months in advance. We decided to use the extra 2 weeks to take a honeymoon and went camping in east Texas.
Late last year we moved. Still in Houston but a different part of it, from northwest Houston to west Houston (about 20 miles from where we used to live.) The location was in part due to our roommate's work needs.
The job is going okay - I work for an IT consulting/outsourcing firm and am full-time on one client. I work from home.
My second marriage is so very good. When I divorced I felt like I had blown my chance at marriage in particular and maybe relationships as a whole. I did a lot of work, including a couple years in therapy, on myself and was able to heal a lot. I now realize I really wasn't ready for that first marriage and that it was something I rushed into in order to escape abuse in the household where I grew-up, unsurprisingly only to end up in an abusive relationship (it's pretty much impossible to identify red-flag behavior when your sense of "normal, loving relationships" is abusive ones.) I have fallen so deeply in love with my wife.
We had a mostly fun vacation in September: a week of camping in Davis Mountains State Park. The only wrinkle was that our car broke down on the way out so it had to be towed to a dealership and then we got a rental (2020 Kia Soul - CVT failure which that model and year had a severe problem with, some owners reporting failure in as little as 5,000 miles. Ours was just under 13,000.) It got towed to Odessa and it took over 3 weeks for the replacement transmission to arrive. I ended up flying to Odessa when I took vacation in October and driving home, about 500 miles. I saw several new-to-me species of wildlife while out there, particularly javalinas (their range is mostly Mexico and Central and South America but they do have a range into Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.) I also got to make the joke "why did the tarantula cross the road" because one was crawling across the driveway as I walked to the loo one evening.
I never did buy another motorcycle. Since I work from home and if I travel I want to do so with my wife motorcycles won't be daily drivers for me; they'd be toys, and I have higher priorities for that money. I feel sad for the way riding left my life but I don't feel sad for riding being over. With 20 years, 300k+ miles, more than half of the US states visited by two wheels and 3 years of the bike being my only vehicle it was one hell of a ride in ways that very few people can say they did that.
I am working on making the surgeries I want happen within the next year or so. Finally, after beginning this journey in the summer of 1994, I'm in the position to do so without others making insurmountable barriers.