2025

or: pre-emptive dread in text

Sorry to just go all quiet there for a hot minute.

I was waiting for confirmation of a Thing that has my little world all up in a tizzy, and didn’t want to either a) spill any beans I wasn’t supposed to spill or b) get too worked up for nothing, in case the Thing ended up not happening¹.

However, we know now. Or know as well as we’ll know until it happens.

We’re moving.

And not just across town, or down the interstate a piece, either.

We’re moving to Texas.

San Antonio, Texas, to be specific-ish. I should have known there’d be consequences when J licked the Alamo when he was there last time, but I kind of thought it meant he owned the Alamo, not the other way around².

Photographic proof of said claiming by saliva.

There’s a bunch of reasons we’re ending up there, but boiling it all down to the essence: it’s for J’s job. And it’s a good job, for a good company, so if they were all pack your crap, we’re sending you to Mars, we’d probably say SIR, YES SIR and start googling whether or not my houseplants would survive in zero G.

There are a lot of good things about San Antonio, obviously.

I did a lot of googling when this first floated across as a possibility. Bought some travel guides and such. Talked to some folks about what neighborhoods we should be looking at. That kind of thing.

From what I could find, there are a million little free libraries, at least two places with public kilns for pottery, and a really cool and artsy downtown area. It’s a couple hours from the Gulf, right near a couple big state parks, and there’s a Sea World and some kind of reptile zoo³. If you know who The Bloggess is, her bookstore’s in San Antonio, so I will probably end up fangirling the crap out of that place…and buying books there⁴.

But…the downsides.

The Northwest is home. Like, not just where I hang my pants on the back of a chair. But home, like a heart-home. My soul’s happy here. I’m probably about half-amphibian and can drink the air and I love that. I need trees and ferns and rain to survive.

When J and I were talking theoretically once about where we’d go if we weren’t here, I had several hard No's: nowhere with tornados⁵, nowhere hot⁶, nowhere in Texas or Florida⁷.

And where are we going?

Somewhere with tornadoes with summer temps that routinely don’t fall below 100º⁸…in Texas.

FML.

So not only am I leaving my soul’s home, I’m leaving it for a place that I’m trying desperately to be excited about, but which will possibly try to shuffle me off this mortal coil.

Cool, cool.

Needless to say, that’s stirred up a cocktail of low-level panic that’s left me alternating between being:

a) fetal on the office couch, mindlessly googling “how to avoid dehydration” and avoiding all human contact, and

b) gobsmacked by the sheer amount of stuff there is to do/handle before we can actually do the whole moving thing.

We’ve been here for ten years, and even in this small house, we’ve managed to pack in a whole butt-ton of stuff. I’ve been trying not to get paralyzed by the overwhelming logistics, and have done this buy ordering moving boxes and culling out roughly 75% of my stuff to donate because I do not want to have to move all of it.

The good(est) news is that for what we’re paying here for the rental house, we can get about triple the amount of house there⁹. And possibly buy one. We’re still considering that. We’ll definitely need a good place, since the chances of me leaving it from like March to roughly November every year are low, lest I burst into actual flame.

So…if I’m kind of quiet, or if I miss a text or email…this is why.

Panic. And its optimistic rebrand: excitement. Also a mountain of packing and house-hunting and Moving Stuff™. And trying to squeeze in visits¹⁰ to every place here that holds a little piece of my heart, which is roughly everywhere. I don’t know what I’m going to do without my mountains, honestly.

I guess we’ll see.

Think calm thoughts at me if you’ve got a few to spare.

1. As Things sometimes do, usually right after you’ve had your epic tizzy.

2. Like the last slice of pizza.

3. I love reptiles. At one point in my pre-teen fantasies, I thought I might be a herpetologist. Then I found out that a biology degree requires lots of dissection, and thus ended that particular career choice.

4. It’s not Powell’s, but Powell’s didn’t give me Beyonce the Giant Metal Chicken, either, so there’s that.

5. Been there, done that, got the wristband to get into the town the sky ate so we could retrieve what was left of our stuff. It wasn’t exactly fun.

6. Not just for preference, but because heat can literally kill me, thanks to an internal thermostat that is sort of not all that functional, making me lethargic in prolonged heat exposure, and unusually susceptible to heat stroke. When I say “could kill me”, I mean could freaking kill me.

7. Politics. As a decent human being with ovaries, I’m fundamentally opposed to the political bullshittery in those two states in particular.

8. insert pathetic keening here

9. The PNW housing prices are, admittedly, insane. Seriously crazy. I looked at one bedroom, tiny-ass apartments in Portland proper, and the best I could find without bugs that also had reliable plumbing? $2500 A MONTH. It went up from there. I don’t know how people do it without seventy-six roommates and at least two jobs. It’s the one big downside of this area.

10. Luckily, there’s some time for this. Hopefully. We’re looking at moving around September, depending on his work stuff. It could be sooner, but I’m sort of holding out for September-ish. Still early enough to get through the mountain passes without much snow; late enough that it’s not four hundred billion degrees. I hope.