This week marks a couple of anniversaries for me. Two years ago yesterday we drove away from Sarasota for the first of 3 trips to move us here to Chicago and two months ago yesterday was my last day at SuperFile.
My how time flies.
For the move, we didn’t complete the move until 17 December, when we permanently made it up here to our new place. At the time we still didn’t know if we would be happy here or not. After all, we had spent about 25 years saying we would never move back to Chicago.
Two years later, we love it. It turns out the key was for us to actually move into the city and not another suburb. Today we can walk everywhere in a community that just feels alive and we love it. It’s also the first place where we can see the water (Lake Michigan) from our living room. That’s something after living on Maui and in Sarasota, both of which attracted us for being close to the water (in Sarasota we could at least walk to the beach on Siesta Key). Ironically I can still hear the same traffic on US-41 here as we did in Sarasota as the road passes a few hundred meters from this place as it did our place in Sarasota.
Chicago has turned out to be home in ways we never expected and I’m so very grateful for it. We still talk of moving to Europe, and the current situation in the US may mean we have to sooner rather than later, but for now Chicago really does feel like home and I’m very glad we’ve spent the last two years here.
Yesterday also marks two months since I left SuperFile, another very good move in my life. I took the job to meet people to help Chicago feel more like home. That part was successful. In May, however, I knew it was time to move on and started applying for everything I could. It took a little while but I’m remote again at an org with a great product, a bright North Star and a healthy culture. I haven’t been so happy with a job since I first started at WP Engine with the DevKit team and hope it can be a place I stay for quite some time.
For once, life feels pretty good.