quiet life

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Moving to Alabama Helped Me Realize I Am an Extrovert

I have spent most of my life thinking I was an introvert. What furthered this thought process was how Nashville had become increasingly crowded each year I lived there, over the past 19 years.

It got to the point where I felt anger and rage at even the thought of having to do anything in downtown Nashville:

The traffic, the $50 parking, the drunken tourists riding pedal taverns while thinking they look cool, the fact that you can’t walk without strangers bumping into you. It made me feel invisible and detached; like I was Rob Thomas in the music video for Matchbox Twenty’s “Bent”.

To some, downtown Nashville may sound exciting and attractive, but to me, it made me believe that “I don’t do well in crowds” and even that “I don’t like to have fun.”

But now that I have moved back to Fort Payne, Alabama, I now realize the fundamental issue:

I am actually one of the most extroverted people around!

It’s not that I am introverted- it’s that I require meaningful relationships and in-depth conversations with people, on a daily basis.

I had a fever… and the solution wasn’t more cowbell.

The solution was to move to a smaller town where everyone knows everybody; or at least we all seem to know each other through a family member, through the church, or through the school.

My new “quiet life” is getting even quieter with each passing week that we further our way to the very bottom of the house renovations list.

A couple of weeks ago was monumentous. It marked the first time we were able to park both of our cars in our garage (due to the moving boxes finally being fully unpacked). Coincidentally, it also was the first week that I was able to successfully fit all of our garbage in the one bin we are provided (due to us finally getting rid of all those moving boxes).

These are little victories that I certainly celebrate.

This past weekend was a big deal for me too. It was the first Saturday where we didn’t have to recruit help from family to work on any kind of home renovation.

Despite us living just a few miles from a state park, the weather was a bit swampy and on the verge of rain. So it wasn’t a good day for a hike.

Instead, I pitched a brilliant (and equally stupid) idea to my brother-in-law, Andrew:

He had just played and beat the Super Nintendo game Super Mario World for the first time over the past few weeks. As for myself, I grew up playing the game and had beaten it multiple times all the way through; however, I hadn’t played it in at least a decade.

So I said, “Let’s do a side-by-side tournament to see who can get the furthest before we decide to stop.”

To ensure there were no distractions of other responsibilities, we set up shop at my parents’ house in their bonus room above the garage.

We made it an hour and 50 minutes before A) our eyes started hurting from straining at the TV screens and B) my mom began making lunch for us downstairs. Like Yogi Bear and Boo Boo floating through the air, making their way to unsupervised picnic baskets, we at that point shut down the fun factory in the name of food.

And that… is the right way to spend a Saturday.

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My Mother-in-Law Came to Visit Our New Home in Alabama

In July, we spent our summer vacation on the Oregon coast; where we celebrated my mother-in-law’s 80th birthday.

Now, a month later, she spent some time at our new home in Alabama. She flew all the way out here from the Sacramento area, on the other side of the country.

I always enjoy her being around. She and I clearly both have the “can’t sit still” gene. We can certainly relate to each other.

As a passive viewer of every episode of every “house hunting” show on HGTV and Roku (because, you know, my wife…), I have always openly mocked the husband and wife as they say, “Oh, this would make a good space for entertaining guests…”

My immediate response to the TV is always, “Yeah right! You are not going to be entertaining guests! That’s just staged footage at the end of each episode that you set up for the camera crew and then you never have anybody over after that!”

I am quite passionate (and skilled) at heckling reality shows: “Really? You just conveniently saw three houses, made an offer on one that the two of you just happened to say the name of at the exact same time and then you were able to buy that house before somebody else made an offer?!”

Now that I think of it, why does my wife keep inviting me to watch these shows with her?

The funny thing is, the entire time we have been in the renovation process (which we are technically almost done with any day now), I have kept telling my wife, “It is very important to me that we host family and friends for meals together.”

So it makes me happy that we’ve already been able to do that, as we had my side of the family over while my mother-in-law was here. We are actually “entertaining guests”!

As I’ve said before, we are aspiring to live a quiet life here in Alabama.

To be able to have my mother-in-law fly across the country from her home near Sacramento to stay with us… to see her and my wife catching up on the back porch as the sun is doing down… that is the quiet life I came here for.

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We are Currently “Settling In” Our Alabama Home… But Not Yet “Settled In”

Exactly 16 years ago today, my wife and I got married. It was a clever and strategic choice to be married on July 5th, knowing our wedding anniversary would always have a paid day off from work attached to the date before it.

Our wedding anniversary this year is particularly special, in that any babies born on the exact day we got married are currently taking their driver’s license test today. Also, we are now at the end of our first week of actually living in our house in Alabama.

To be clear, we are not “settled in” yet. Instead, we are “settling in”.

While we are indeed cooking meals in our kitchen now and sleeping in our beds in our bedrooms which now have door handles that lock, there is no question that our home looks like we are on our way… to being classified as hoarders.

Despite our Alabama house being nearly identical in square footage, my wife and I are using this time to get rid of as much of our stuff as we can; to make our Alabama home tidier than our Tennessee home. Instead of having to go through the trouble of deciding where to put our belongings, the easiest choice is to just give it away.

Sometimes that means we give it to my parents or my sister. Other times, it means I drag the unnecessary items out in front of our house; which happens to be on a busy connecting street from one side of the town to the other.

A few days ago, our daughter started laughing as she announced, “Hey Daddy, there’s a man in our yard stealing something and putting it in his car!”

I responded, “Oh good! He’s hauling off the living room rug and the bathroom shelf!”

Like I mentioned before, much of our inspiration in moving to Alabama is to live a “quieter life”. One of the ways we will be doing that is by having a living space that is without clutter.

As we are paring down our possessions each day, I am also looking less and less like a meerkat…

I managed to live through the entire process of finding a house to buy in Alabama, selling our house in Tennessee, renovating our home in Alabama, and packing up and moving to Tennessee- all without ever feeling one ounce of anxiety or stress.

Well, at least I didn’t experience anxiety or stress in my mind. But subconsciously, my body absorbed it all, in the form of a spreading rash.

Strangely enough, the unquenchable itch began around my eyes (now the meerkat reference makes more sense); then around my neck and down across my arms. No amount of aloe vera would give me relief.

At first, I thought it was because I started drinking a cup of beet juice in the morning once I moved to Alabama. But no matter what I ate or drank, or didn’t eat or drink, the rash continued to intensify.

At the end of the month that we lived with my parents, my mom told me, “I have a feeling once you move into your own space in your new house, that rash is going to go away.”

She wasn’t wrong.

After all, Enneagram 9s like me use repressed anger as an underlying fuel source; powered not by minds (head) or our emotions (heart) but by our bodies (gut).

So unknowingly, I literally wore my feelings on my sleeve?

To be sure, my wife and I hired DUCTS Air Duct Cleaning to professionally clean out all our vents in our Alabama house.

They sucked up a scary amount of sawdust, wooden debris, and lent that was trapped in our home’s ventilation tubes. This was not only from all the renovations we’ve been doing, but also from the nearly 3 decades of previous owners of this house.

As we have begun settling in this week, it quickly became apparent that our neighbors are amazing. The day we moved in, our next door neighbor had delivered flowers to us. The girl across the street baked cookies and brought them to us. And the couple behind our house reached to to us to let us know we are welcome to let our kids play in their yard, which more than doubles our own yard space.

We are noticing that the positive effects of living a quieter life are showing up in our kids. They are choosing to talk to each other and play together… on their own.

Granted, it’s themed around aggressive pillow fights in the living room, laced with obscure trash talking: “You don’t even know how to hatch!”

We are settling in. I like it.