Chris WiegmanWe’re officially residents of Chicago!
That’s a sentence I never thought I would say again after moving away from the city 25 years ago. Frankly, I had gone as far as saying that if I ever did move back I had failed at life.
Yet here we are.
I officially called my move complete on 3 December after numerous trips back and forth to Florida. Joy followed a couple of weeks later on 18 December which meant we could be with our families for the holidays, a nice bonus.
It wasn’t the move we wanted to make, even now, but it was the move we had to make and it did get us out of Florida.
While it wasn’t our first choice I can say I’m actually pretty happy about where we have wound up. Instead of the suburbs we’re actually in the city, about a 5 minute walk from Lincoln Park Zoo. It’s something of a dream area for me. We can walk nearly everywhere, weather permitting and, more importantly, we are very close to pretty much all of both of our families.
Our place itself is also nearly perfect for us. It’s a 2-bedroom condo that we got for a descent price and, even with only 2 bedrooms it has a walled-off dining area that makes a great 2nd office. The smaller area is actually my office this time and Joy has a full bedroom. This is reversed from what we had in Florida but makes sense here. I simply don’t need a lot of room and this will give her far more space for hobbies or anything else she might want to do. As an added bonus we can even see the water of Lake Michigan, about a block away, from our living room window. That’s a much better view than we’ve had anywhere.
We’re not completely done with Florida yet. We had put the house up for sale on 18 October but the realtor was pretty clear we wouldn’t get much action until after Joy was out and after the holidays. So far it sounds like she was right as we’ve had a number of showings this past week and I’m really hoping we can have it sold by Spring. Then we’ll be done with Florida completely.
As for the future, I don’t know where it will bring us. I would still eventually like to move to Portugal but it will be a few years yet before we can move anywhere. In the meantime I look forward to making the best of our time here. I’m attending a WordPress Meetup (virtual, of course) on Thursday and am looking into other things to get involved with.
While it might not be where we wanted to come to, we’ll make it home. Now that we know where we aren’t happy I think it’s safe to say we’ll enjoy our time here.