There and Back Again...

Once again it has been far too long since I last posted an update to this blog. Many things have happened in that time and I will now take an opportunity to offer up my attempt at a recap:

In the last week of February 2011, I loaded my car with my clothes, my computer, and a few other odds and ends and departed the KC area for the great western frontier… also known as California.

Three solid days of driving through the plains of Kansas and Eastern Colorado then into the foothills of the rockies and the deserts of New Mexico, Arizona, and California. The last stretch was to cross the El Cajon pass from Victorville, CA and down into Ontario CA. I finally arrived at Ric’s house (where I’d be quartered for the next five months) at around 8:30pm amid a cold rainfall.

The next morning found me in my new digs with no real idea as to my surroundings, but I quickly caught my bearings with Ric’s help and in the short time I was there, I managed to visit a number of places including: San Diego, Santa Monica, Hollywood/Beverly Hills, Malibu, Ojai, Sequoia National Forest, the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas (though I had been there a few times previously), and “the Valley”.

Also in those five months, I got a very good sense of what Southern California was all about, its food, it’s people, its neighborhoods, its culture. Unfortunately, the few bright spots were heavily outweighed by the negatives. Too many people living there and a great majority of them completely self-absorbed with no real work or social ethic to speak of. As far as I could tell, SoCal is the land of the endless sprawl of strip-malls, fast food, and car dealerships. I don’t call that “culture” and I began to lose my enthusiasm for being there.

And so it happened one day. I don’t know that it was any one thing that triggered it, but I awoke that day and realized that I missed my friends and family way too much and I had really begun to despise SoCal. With that I expressed my need to get back to KC to Ric and we agreed that while not “ideal”, we could still make the business work with me operating off-site.

Now I have been back in KC for about a week and half and am getting settled in and into the swing of things. Sometimes the grass seems greener on the other side of the fence, but this is one case where my desire to come back to the Midwest was absolutely what I needed!

In the future, I’ll go into greater detail about my California Adventure, but for now this quick recap will have to do. Onward and upward!