What a crazy couple weeks it has been. Now that I am finally in a better place with my back and sciatica, I feel like life is back on track health-wise. I was even able to get back on my Peloton grind, slowly but surely. Last week, as many of you who follow me on social media know, my 8-year-old laptop gave out and retired itself to the top of my closet with my even older MacBook. I knew this was coming. I had been preparing my husband, Daniel, for it and it was more of a “when” rather than an “if” scenario. But still, a bummer nonetheless.
It was a very Carrie Bradshaw moment, if you are familiar with Sex and the City. And if you’re not, I have questions for you… Anyways, in the show, when her laptop crashes, she takes it into the Apple Store hug-holding it as she waits to hear the inevitably bad news: all of her past work is gone. Luckily, I was mostly able to avoid this and got my work transferred from my old MacBook to the new one. I’m especially thankful for my friend who works for Apple and got me a great deal on my new MacBook and for my other very tech savvy friend who saved my ass with the switch over. In other technology failure news,I was not so lucky this summer and had my backup hard drive crash or “fail.” Who knew they went bad so quickly…? *palm to face* Things they don’t teach in the new version of a “basic life skills” course. With this hard drive crash, I lost about two-thirds of the info of my 1TB drive, so about 600ish Gigs of photos mostly, you know you know…one of the most important things you tend to keep on a hard drive… so it’s a big blow to my memories and my heart. I think it will take years to understand the full amount of things I lost, because my life from pretty much 2012-2020 was on that hard drive. Luckily my phone has a lot of photos on it from 2018, when Len was born, and on, because I never delete them. I think most parents these days are in the same boat. Anything before that point that had been on my computer and was moved to the hard drive for safekeeping though is probably gone… Instagram has some stuff from years back, but definitely not all of it. Plus, Instagram is just the parts of your life you allow the world to see, not the parts you don’t want to share or that are just for you. So that’s a whole new set of stresses and grief I’m dealing with at the moment…yay.
Let me be the example for you: ALWAYS have a backup hard drive for your computer, and ALWAYS know the health and age of that hard drive so you can move your info before it goes bad or has a part fail. This will save you from the heartache I’m going through, that’s for sure.
The silver lining in all this is that my new MacBook Air will be much easier to travel with since it’s a bit smaller and definitely lighter. This will be good for traveling more and being able to write along the way which is the whole point of this, right? Thumbs up!
This week also brought a lot of reflection for me and Daniel about where we need to be investing and how our money and family values can best align. Last March, we decided to buy a travel trailer because we had no idea when we would actually be able to fly or really travel anywhere again. With two young kids, Covid, mask requirements, and travel restrictions virtually everywhere, we really weren’t optimistic we would be airborne anytime soon. With that, we put all our eggs in the trailer basket and were full steam ahead. We were so excited and I truly made this trailer our second home. I poured my heart into the details, decorated, and filled it with all the comforts and amenities we love so much. When we were on the road it never felt like we had left home…we packed our clothes and settled in all the same. It was also a great space for our guests to stay when visiting and it sure beat the heck out of sleeping on an air mattress in the boys’ room. Unfortunately though, it’s been very hard to use as much as we want and we couldn’t go whenever we wanted to. There were things we didn’t realize would be issues, like the rising cost of campgrounds and their lack of availability, gas prices going up with no end in sight, and also, less ideal parts of the year for camping—late Fall and Winter. So after many, many conversations, back and forth, we decided to list the trailer and our truck for sale. As heartbreaking as it is, we feel we have to invest where our hearts ultimately lie: long stays abroad with the hope of making it permanent at some point in the future.
We realized we can’t do it all, especially being a single income household, and sometimes the not-so-fun choice, the hard choice, and the right choice are the same one. Not having these monthly payments in our budget will free up our finances so we can really prioritize being in Paris (or Europe in general) every year. Wow, that freedom, the possibilities, it really excites me. Again, to some this may seem extreme, like “didn’t you just get the trailer?” but for us, it is shedding the things holding us back from going in the direction we continue to feel led. I’ll never forget the many great memories we made in that trailer, but I am also really excited for the next family who owns it to do the same.
Needless to say, these last few weeks have been a bit on the stressful side but going forward I hope we will continue to feel really confident in the choices we are making for our future and for the future of our family. I hope that in the end, us following our hearts will pay off with more joy and fulfillment than we have ever experienced, and that we can continue to make the most of this life for ourselves and our boys.
More to come…
She's gone to Paris 