Greetings from Utah

I’m writing this blog post in Utah. Because I’m in Utah. Because I live in Utah.

Bizarre.

Melanie and I arrived in the Salt Lake Valley around 5 p.m. (Mountain Time) today. We’re now in the house we will consider our home for the next several months. Even so, it doesn’t seem real that we now live here and will not be going back to Florida. We’re used to visiting Utah during the summer every year, so this feels like a normal visit. Except, officially speaking, we’ve moved in.

I can’t think of anything interesting to report about our drive from Laramie, Wyoming to our new home in Utah. It was another day of feeling exhausted and fighting off sleep. It didn’t help that I struggled yet again in the night with dead arm problems. When I woke up at 5:45 a.m., I couldn’t get back to sleep for a while. My arm was too dead, and the hotel room was too bright. Despite the curtains being closed, their short length allowed a good dose of sunshine to flood the room by sneaking in beneath the curtains. For having curtains that actually close, this is the worst curtain situation I’ve ever encountered at a hotel. So, with lots of light and lots of pain, I moved myself to a desk chair and just sat for a while. Eventually, I ran my right hand under some scalding hot water, which can sometimes stimulate blood flow. It helped enough that I could return to the bed and catch another 20-30 minutes of sleep in relative comfort. (I’ve noticed something that I assume is related to this dead arm problem, and it’s that if I open and close my right hand, there is a kind of knocking in my wrist area. As I open-close-open, it does a kind of thunk-thunk-thunk. My left hand doesn’t do that, and I rarely have issues with my left arm going dead.)

The boys have had a lot of fun here at Grandma and Grandpa’s. They’ve played Minecraft and done a bit of swinging out in the backyard. Melanie and I felt chilled in the 66 degree evening weather. I loved it. I love the notion that we can sleep with our bedroom window open here, and it could actually be a positive thing!

Poor Edison, my anxiety-ridden boy, is struggling now that we’re here in Utah. He’s done amazingly well on the journey out here, and it gave me some false hope. Now that we’re at our destination, the worries are taking over. It’s heartbreaking that a seven-year-old can struggle with such relentless and profound anxiety. I hope this adjustment period passes quickly.

And that’s that. So our new chapter of life begins. Melanie pointed out that we’ve lived less than a full year of our married lives in Utah, while we’ve lived eight such years elsewhere. It’s strange to think that this is, in some sense, new territory for us when it’s otherwise such a hyper-familiar place for us to be.