As some of you know, my partner and I decided to make a pretty big change in our lives this year.

We sold our SoCal home and bought a piece of land in northeast Texas.

We’ll be building a new house there, but in the meantime…we are basically homeless. As in, we are currently sleeping most nights in a tent.

Why did we do this? It was a combination of factors. The cost of living in our new home will be considerably lower. We appreciate that the state government here is more supportive of small businesses (no chance that Texas will pass legislation like AB5, which threw a wrench into my ability to do my contract writing work).

Our new home will give us more privacy and closeness to nature :)

We have room for a big garden, chickens, some fruit trees, and potentially other projects tbd.

There were other reasons behind our decision, as well.

It’s been only a week since we closed the door to our Pod, finished packing the car, and handed over the key of our house to our realtor. And I’ll be honest, it hasn’t all been exactly fun. Primitive camping is a chore. We have to carry in water and ice. It’s more humid here than we’re used to, and we aren’t yet acclimated. Little things crop up that test our patience (one of our air mattresses suddenly decided to develop a leak! Really???).

We miss seeing our friends. We made such great friends in Cali — we love and miss you guys.

But — and don’t ask me how this happened — one of the things my sweetheart and I have in common is that we don’t ever want to stop challenging ourselves.

So in a way, the discomfort we’re experiencing is the point. The human brain is a pretty adaptable piece of bio-machinery, but to keep growing, it needs to be challenged. It needs new problems to solve. By plucking ourselves out of one environment and setting ourselves down in one that is completely different, we’re forcing ourselves to adapt.

And we trust the pay off. We are surrounded by incredible beauty, here, and the people in our new community are incredible. We have so many new places to explore.

It’s not for everybody, but we are excited about this new chapter in our lives.

And once our house is built, our doors are open — so please plan to come visit us. Who knows, maybe you’ll like it so much you’ll decide to put down roots here yourself some day :)