The past week was pretty uneventful, in that it was full of events, but none that I feel like talking about nor particularly wanted to attend, and thus didn't have a lot of time for things I did want to do. Oh well, as I have covered in the last two weeks' posts, it just put me closer to the other side of this month's section of metaphorical chunky gravel. I now have zero work lunch party things, one less 12-hour drive, and one less family holiday celebration left. Coming up I have a Christmas Eve dinner with my mom's side of the family, a 12-hour drive to Frank's parents', their post-Christmas family Christmas, and a four-hour return trip to my kitties on Saturday. If all goes well, I will wake up Sunday morning with nothing to do but drive myself out to the HNF and ride some literal gravel.
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| "The world's largest McDonald's" was out of commission as I passed through on my journey back to my parents' house. |
The other big thing for me this week is something that is out of my control. Frank began his job application process for the 2014-2015 academic year in earnest. The outcome of this will determine where I will be living when August comes, as my lease on my current house expires then and it is our goal to make the 9-hour drives a thing of the past at that time. Being that his marketable skills are much more specialized than mine, I plan to go where he goes. This is both an exciting and scary prospect, not knowing where I will live in eight months. IU is on the list of possibilities, so with some luck the changes to my life might just be limited to clearing out some closet space and suddenly having a lot more Jay Ryan posters hung on the walls of my house.
When discussing his Illinois tattoo soon after we met, I joked that I have no state to which I feel enough allegiance to get a tattoo of it. This is true, as I never meant for the Hoosier thing to last as long as it did, and I am definitely no longer an Okie. This is the first year where the trip "home" has not even served as training camp/a welcome vacation from real life. I've already traveled too much this year, and any driving that doesn't take me to my man or my kitties doesn't excite me much.
Although I get anxious at the prospect of having to find a new job and a new living space, and there are many things about Indiana that I would miss if I were to leave, the idea of making a new home somewhere else sounds pretty alright to me, even if the cyclocross scene is vastly inferior to OVCX. This will be the biggest thing in 2014 for me, and most of my other plans will revolve around the outcome of this job search. I suppose the one constant will be that regardless of what happens after the spring semester is over, I will still have a definite 10-week lead-up to the Death March once the holidays are concluded. So in that one way, this year won't be so different from the last.
So I just have to get through one more of week of the holiday season in which I will visit several iterations of "home". Then it will be Week #1 again, and hopefully the weeks of 2014 will finally lead me to the home in which I am supposed to be.
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