It’s over!

When I wrote the inaugural post of this blog on July 3, 2011, I was preparing to leave Boise, head out for a stint on an organic farm in New Mexico, and possessed of the vague notion that I might, possibly, just maybe, wind up in Austin, Texas.

Well, here it is, April 10, 2012, and here I am, in Austin, Texas, where I did in fact wind up. Some things have happened since I wrote that first blog post:

·         I finally, officially graduated with a Bachelor’s degree, thus concluding an epic saga twelve years in the making.

·         I volunteered at an organic farm in New Mexico for roughly three days. I originally intended to stay for two weeks.

·         I got lost in Navajo Nation en route to said organic farm.

·         My cat family and the realization that I was way too thirty-one-years-old to be bunking with two early-twenty-somethings in the throes of True Love hastened my departure from said organic farm.

·         I secured a (yet another, throughout the on-again, off-again course of the last decade) library gig here in Austin.

·         I accepted my fate and finally applied to library school.

·         Since embarking on this blog, I’ve written up a blue streak: here, elsewhere, and approximately 41,000 words of a failed novel

·         I decided to self-publish my first novella and am making active strides toward doing so.

·         I decided to see if evacuating civilization (well, not really, but this move is closer to doing anything like that than I’ve ever been) is really what I want and signed a six-month lease to live on five rural acres in Georgetown, Texas.

And that last point brings me to, well, my point. I’ve had a swell time documenting the highs and lows (and low-highs and high-lows) of this Austin transition, but let’s face it: this blog has run its course. I’m no longer on the road, for one thing; for another, I’ve been in Austin for nearly a year now. I can’t run around pretending to be a neophyte forever.

So, onward, and upward, and I’m off to find love, as Nick Cave once crooned and as Sparty so beautifully embodies here:

Thus begins a new chapter. Thus begins a new blog. I will be compulsively chronicling my bucolic frolics here:

http://countrylouse.com/

Save the link, kids!

And, for the sake of having a repository for nonsequiturs, I will be toying around with this and that here (or there):

http://thereisnodealsporto.com/

Because WordPress is where it’s at, man.

Thank you for reading, those of you who read, thanks for your support, those of you who supported, and thanks to all of you who I’ll be seeing over at the new blogs.

More to follow soon!

Moving out and moving on.

It’s official. I signed a six-month lease today and will be giving country living in Georgetown a shot come April 15. Well, that’s when the lease starts, anyway, although my lease at the Hellhole at Turtle Rock doesn’t officially end until May 6. As I listen to the slamming doors, shrieking children, the screaming parents who are worse than their shrieking children, what I can only assume is the sound of bodies being dragged up or down multiple flights of stairs, the incessant revving of the engine being worked on in the parking lot, the screeching of tires on Anderson Mill Road, and the unctuous, velvet-lined indifference of the leasing assistant whose thin veneer of solicitude fails to bely the extent to which he clearly does not give a shit about the fact that I live across from possibly The Worst People on Earth (rivaled only by the champs with whom I share a bedroom wall), I know I’ve made the right decision to spend what in the end will amount to thousands of dollars to extricate myself from the Nucleus of Suck.

My new neighbors will include a horse named Handsome Ransom, a donkey named Pedro, some chickens, and a kick-ass landlady who, nine years ago, after spending her entire life as a city slicker, decided to realize her girlhood dream of living in the country and riding horses. Once the Turtles from Planet Hell have bled me for as much as they can (which is fully how I expect this to go, and if I’m wrong, I’ll own up to it and make it public here that I was), my rental money (for the next six months, at least, and hopefully forever, because property management companies are Satan and I am done, done, DONE with them) will factor as part of this wholly impressive individual’s retirement plan instead of subsidizing, like, an evil corporation, man.

Of course this means a new WordPress site is in the offing, because, while it’s been a good run, this blog has served its purpose and really isn’t relevant anymore. I’m not on the road, and I’d like to have a more cohesive thematic focus than look what my cat did today or here’s what was playing at Supercuts. Not that these subjects aren’t eminently worthy of documentation, but surely they can be examined within some greater framework, such as what it’s like for a lifelong city slicker to eject herself from civilization (all right, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea), primarily because it’s not civilized, and take a stab at being a country mouse. All right, I may have to abandon the Supercuts thread. But you get the idea.

For further details on this upcoming project, stay tuned, stay tuned.