I’m Thinking I’m Back
Hi. It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. Time to rectify that.
For those who don’t know, April and I (and the dogs) moved from California to Colorado in August. Huge change, which has pretty much dominated my brain space since May, when we first started the house hunt. We bought a house, giving us an opportunity to have our “forever” home, and start this new chapter of our lives.
It’s been two months since we moved out of the place in California where we’d lived for the previous seven years. Our new house is finally starting to feel like home. Fresh coats of paint on all the walls, furniture in all of the rooms, and ~90% of the unpacking done. That last 10%, of course, will undoubtedly take years to finish. We’re adjusting to higher altitude, drier air, and having more space to spread out.
Uprooting my life at the age of 50 was daunting. And yet, it was absolutely the right thing to do. I’m often finding myself looking around the rooms of the house, or watching the sun set from our back porch, and thinking, “We made it.” And the opportunity to spend more time with my brothers and their families has been wonderful, exactly what my soul needed.
I’m still an introvert, though, and I don’t have 29 years of history here like I had in the Bay Area. I knew that I’d be starting over with my social circles after I’d just spent the past two years re-establishing them in the Bay Area. This was going to take deliberate effort to get out of the house and meet people.
To get things kick-started, I launched the Denver chapter of Tough Guy Book Club last month. I’ve posted before about how much joining the San Francisco chapter of Tough Guy Book Club meant to me. I made good new friends there, and I knew I’d miss the monthly gatherings with those guys.
Enter the new Denver chapter. Two meetings in, and we’ve had tremendous turnout. We had twelve guys at the first meeting, ten of them complete strangers who found out about the meeting via Reddit; "my wife found a post about this on Reddit" was a common refrain. Eleven of the twelve came back for the second meeting, plus two more new additions, as a well as a visiting Tough Guy Book Club member from Australia who happened to be in town. There was clearly an appetite in the area for our kind of book club, and I’m excited for this new community we’ve started building.
My pen hobby was somewhat in hibernation over the summer while we were in the throes of moving. I put my YouTube channel on hiatus – but that status will be changing very shortly, stay tuned! My recording setup is finally production ready again, and I’ll have some fresh content coming out of the Colorado Pen Show this weekend.
I also joined the Colorado Pen Posse, although I haven’t gotten really involved there yet, other than going to the Pelikan Hub last month. Certainly not as involved as I got with the San Francisco Pen Posse. I expect my involvement will grow, after everyone recovers from the Colorado Pen Show.
So... watch this space for more of my writing, and follow my YouTube channel for new videos of my pen journey.
In the words of John Wick:
“People keep asking if I’m back, and I haven’t really had an answer. But now, yeah, I’m thinking I’m back!”