2014 in Review

My year in review:


January 2014 found us in Nashville.....going through our usual routine.  Steve was working for QHR, traveling and away from home about 4 days a week, home mostly only on the weekends.  I was working 50-70 hour weeks at Guardian Home Care as the Executive Director, feeling mostly like the little kid sitting at the adult table......learning a lot, but feeling the stress and burden of all the responsibility.   I was miserable when Steve was gone.....pretty much crying myself to sleep every night and talking to my puppy a lot.   There were some highlights though....On 1-4-14, I went down to mom's and picked up Cayland and Bethany and we had a "girls-day-out!"  We had a right proper tea at The English Rose and played around at The Chattanooga Choo-Choo.  We got pedicures and ate a ton of BBQ at Rib and Loin.  It was a wonderful day full of lots of giggles and love and fun.  Those girls own a huge chunk of my heart!  <3 On 1-14-14, a package of Christmas goodies arrived from Alyssa in Japan!  Lots of weird candy, including Wasabi Kit-Kat bars!


February rolled around, along with our Valentine's Day Anniversary.  Steve told me to pack for an overnight trip and that I would find out where we were going once we got to the airport.  He wouldn't give me ANY other clues!  He told me to pack warmly, but to pack a dress and "stuff you can walk around in"......so the morning of 2-14-14 found us at BNA Airport, and my boarding pass said that I was traveling to Charleston, SC.   We flew into Charleston and rented a car and explored around town, walking and taking in the Saturday morning market and we had lunch on the waterfront outside on a deck, overlooking the boats coming in/out.  It was the old Navy Pier that had been renovated into a nice restaurant!  In line with my goal of being more adventurous, I ate raw oysters and drank a watermelon martini at noon and we feasted on Seafood before getting in the car and heading north.  Our destination was a hotel in Murrell's Inlet, a place where I had kidnapped Steve to for his birthday many years before!  We stopped and checked into our hotel to rest and freshen up before my BIG surprise!  Steve had purchased tickets to Medieval Nights Dinner Show for me!  It has been on my bucket/dream list for YEARS!!!!  I squealed with delight when I found out!  Literally squealed.  And cried a few tears of joy.  It was AMAZING!!!  Horses!! Beautiful horses! And Princesses, and knights!  And serving wenches!  And food you eat with your hands!  It was all delicious!  And magical!  AND I got to wear a paper crown and cheer for our knight!  After our Medieval adventure was done and our bellies were full, we went to Barefoot Landing, where we used to visit when we lived in North Carolina.  We walked around the shops and checked out the pretty lights reflecting in the water.  The next morning, we took the beach-route back to Charleston, stopping in beach-side towns to walk along the board-walks and see the sights before stopping for a quick lunch and heading back to Nashville.  It was such a wonderful adventure!! It was around this time that Steve started interviewing with Baycare Hospital systems in Tampa, Florida.  He was sick of life on the road and I was not doing well with him being gone so often.  I had been fighting the demons of depression and being alone seems to shine a giant spot-light on the darkness.  I was completely miserable when he was out of town.  The job in Tampa seemed like a dream come true!  He officially accepted the offer on 2-25-14 and we announced it to the world on 2-26-14, after I had told my kids, my Mom and given notice to my boss at work.  My whole world started to tip on it's axis just a few degrees.


The hustle and bustle of moving several hundred miles away is daunting.  The beginning of March found me meeting with realtors, listing our house, meeting with realtors some more, staging the house (all on my own - since Steve was working out his 30 day notice as well and still had to travel right up to the day before we left Nashville).   The weather in Nashville was particularly cold and brutal in Late Feb-early march this year, with several mornings of snow and frost and temperatures dipping in the single digits....which made planning the move to a warmer climate a little more appealing.  One of the harder things to do was to leave my job at Guardian.  Things were not always a bed of roses, but we had come a looooong way in a short time and pulled together as a team.....the people I worked with were like a second family to me and I felt like I was the momma-hen most of the time.  I really come to love and cherish my co-workers and saying good-bye was difficult.   Leaving a job that I loved and co-workers that I loved for the unknown was a scary thing for me.  Leaving my son in Nashville was also difficult.  After so many tumultuous years, he was finally pulling himself together and doing well and our relationship with him had grown and matured and we enjoyed getting to see him on a semi-regular basis every couple of weeks.  Moving so far away would be very difficult for me as a Mommy.   As luck would have it, my last 2 weeks on the job were also 2 weeks of Jury duty for me!  I think you could hear me howling "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!: when I pulled the yellow postcard out of the mailbox.  Of all the dumb things!!  But luckily, I made it the entire 2 weeks without actually having to go to the courthouse and serve on a jury!  Thank goodness!!  My last day at Guardian was 3-21-14 and we left for Florida on 3-22-14 and moved in to our temporary condo on 3-24-14.   On 3-25-14, I received my Florida Nursing License in the mail and began my job-hunt in earnest. 


After many weird twists and turns, we finally accepted a full-price offer on our house in Nashville on 4-3-14!  I went on several job interviews and spent quite a few hours pouring over job listings on the internet.  We met with our realtor here and went house-hunting almost every single weekend and spent evenings cuddled up on the couch looking at house listings....searching for the perfect place to call home.   I was restless not working....even for a short period of time.  I did get to drive down to Fort Meyers and spend a day with my Uncle Hubert and Aunt Mildred and had a lovely time.  Steve and I felt like we were on a weird extended vacation, staying in the condo.  He worked all day and came home to a home-cooked meal at night and then we'd go for a walk in the evenings before dark.  I accepted a position with Greystone Home Care and began working again on 4-10-14.  I was out of work less than a month, but I was very glad to be gainfully employed again.  I took the position as PCC (Clinical Supervisor) but by the end of the month, I was promoted to Director of Clinical Services.  The job was difficult and the office in a state of near-constant turmoil.  It was sooo not what I was accustomed to dealing with.  I spent my first few months wondering what on earth I'd gotten myself into and, well.....I suppose that feeling still somewhat continues today.  It has been one of the most stressful positions I've ever held, that's for sure.   We had planned a trip to New York City with some friends for the end of April and even though we moved to Florida, we were able to get our tickets changed and fly from Tampa instead of Nashville.  We met our friend at La Guardia and took the Big Apple by storm!!  The trip was amazing and exhausting and everything I ever dreamed it would be!  I got to see all the famous sights:  The Statue of Liberty, Manhattan,  Time Square, Broadway, Radio City Music Hall, The Bull on Wall Street, Chinatown, Central Park, The Met Art Museum, Fifth Avenue, Rockefeller Center, The Empire State Building, the 9-11 Memorial.....it was all just like a movie!!  We ate at fancy restaurants and drank wine in fancy bars, we dressed up like rich folks and saw a play on Broadway!  And we walked our feet off!  We took taxies and we rode subways!  Ahhhhhhh!!! So many, many bucket-list moments!!! 


As April gave way to May and the weather started heating up, living in the condo lost a lot of it's charm.  The view was beautiful, overlooking a pretty lake with exotic waterbirds and fish that liked to flip and flop on the surface of the water....but the thin walls and loud neighbors and lack of parking wore thin quickly.  And having to go up and down 3 flights of stairs to take Sophie to potty wasn't much fun either.  We longed for our own furniture, my own kitchen utensils, our own BED, our own furniture, a Television (we didn't have one the whole 3 months in the condo) and the rest of our clothing and belongings.  We missed being HOME. The closing on our house in Nashville and the closing on our house here in Florida were scheduled for the last week in May.  We packed up the truck, the dog and our workclothes and we headed back to Tennessee.  We spent a week packing and cleaning and culling through years of belongings. The packers came and took most of the stuff, but we had several things we brought back in a Uhaul truck ourselves to save some $$.  Jaron came back with his and got to stay for a few days with us.  That was the best part! The work was exhausting and it was so hot and miserable and there was a looming deadline to be done and out of the house and we were all stressed and pushed to the max.  When we finally got to the new house and unloaded the truck and were able to relax, it was the BEST feeling! 


The movers came with our stuff on the big truck a week later and the first week of June, we officially moved into our new house!!