Posts by Rob

Exhausted

Nov20
2007 Rob Written by Rob

Counting today, we have 18 days to pull the rest of this move together. And that’s with a holiday stuck in for good measure.

Some stuff is going with me; some stuff is staying in a Florida storage unit for now. I still need to get the cats into the vet for shots and travel paperwork. A bank account to move. Boxes and stuff to shuffle around. All the other joyfulness that goes along with moving to the other side of the continent. And that’s with still a couple of client projects to juggle and get done in the next few weeks.

Right now I’m just physically, mentally, emotionally exhausted. I’m just ready to be on the plane on 12/7, and for this to be done already.

Posted in Travel

Forward Momentum

Nov15
2007 Rob Written by Rob

Okay, now I’m feeling it. The move. This morning I tendered my official notice to vacate with my building management, so after 12/15 I’m either in Modesto or I’m homeless. Power and internet scheduled for shutoff on 12/7.

It’s all rolling forward now. I still need to sell the car, line up the mover, finish packing, get the cats checked out for travel and do a thousand other things before the plane leaves in a few weeks. But now that sense of forward momentum is very, very tangible and I feel like I’m just along for the ride.

I lived alone for a very long time before reaching this point, and to be honest I never thought I’d reach a point where it wouldn’t feel natural anymore. My residences in Florida have always felt temporary to me, but never like this – this simply isn’t my home anymore, it’s just a place I’m staying at for a few more weeks. My home’s waiting for me in Modesto. It’s just so very strange, constantly feeling that strong pull towards finally turning off the lights and locking the door and heading out for the airport one last time.

And the forward momentum is just beginning..

Posted in Romance, Travel

The Last Airport Goodbye

Nov12
2007 Rob Written by Rob

Long distance relationships – even temporary ones like ours – have some serious drawbacks. When you’re separated by 3000 miles, you have to do a lot to keep your feelings alive after weeks of not being together. (Luckily Kristi and I share a love for literature, so we’ve been reading to each other over the phone in the evening. Right now we’re about a third of the way through The Count of Monte Cristo.)

The worst part for me is the airport goodbye. We’ve done this four times now; it gets worse each time. After several wonderful days together, meeting people and enjoying quality time with them and each other, eventually it comes time to put a continent between us again. And so once again we’re back at the airport, waiting patiently for the plane to start boarding, usually enjoying a Starbucks date, knowing that it’ll be weeks before we see each other again. Eventually one of us is on a plane for an eight-hour cross-country flight and the other one gets to return to an increasingly empty home.

As I’m writing this, I’ve just returned from seeing Kristi off at Orlando International. Her Southwest flight should have left fifteen minutes ago; I stayed with her in the security checkout line until it was time to leave her to the nice TSA people. Even so, I stuck around (as usual) until I couldn’t see her anymore. Now I’m back to my home in Winter Park, and the emptiness hasn’t hit yet, but I know it will.

This was the last airport goodbye. The next flight will be mine, in early December, coming to Modesto for good with the cats in tow, and then this half-year experiment in transcontinental romance finally reaches a conclusion. And I’ll tell you, it can’t come fast enough for me.

It was a great weekend for both of us. Kristi met my friends and family, and everyone loved everyone. We had a wonderful night at the beach, staying at the Cocoa Beach Hilton and enjoying champagne and chocolate covered strawberries while we both admired Kristi’s new engagement ring. But I’ll let her talk about that in the next post, once she’s settled at home.

For me, I’m just glad we don’t have to do one of these airport separations again. I don’t know how military couples do this. It’s been hard enough for us over just a few months, but trying to do it over years of an Iraq deployment? It boggles the mind.

Posted in Romance, Travel, Wedding

The Writing Life

Nov08
2007 Rob Written by Rob

Bipolar indeed..

When I started getting semi-serious about my professional life, back around ’95 or so, it was in tech. I sort of snuck in through the back door of the 90’s tech boom, first as an under-the-radar coder for Lockheed Martin and then a UNIX sysadmin for Verizon Communications. Did a lot of computer geeking, made more than a few dollars, and gradually discovered that I didn’t want to be doing that at 40. I’d dreamed of being a writer since high school and never found the nerve to really throw everything I had at it. Turning 30 in 2001 forced me to face that. So I walked out of tech and leaped headlong into the dream.

I started a copywriting business, did some tech consulting work occasionally to bring in quick cash, and gradually made it work. The first year I ate a lot of beans and barely paid the rent. Every year since then I’ve done a bit better than the year before, and by 2007 I was making almost as much money as I did in my tech days. Not bad when you consider that, statistically, only a few percent of working writers make more than $20K a year.

Writing can be a strange life. We meet weird people, learn weird things. We learn to walk this awkward line where we occasionally make a difference to people but mostly sit on the sidelines, telling the stories of people actually in the trenches. Like I told Monica and her firefighter husband Scott that night at dinner, us writers do what we do because we don’t have the guts to do what Scott does. At the same time, writers tend to get free license to be weird. We’re expected to be odd, which can be fun. Unfortunately I’m too conservative for my own good sometimes, so I rarely exploit that.

I think the pressures of running a business keep me in check. I don’t have the time to do the Hunter Thompson thing – I have clients to keep happy, marketing to do, invoices to print and mail, finances to manage, growth to manage. And it’s frustrating and exhausting sometimes, with a smattering of outright annoying from time to time. But there’s still no line of work I’d rather be doing.

It’s all something that I’m glad Kristi understands. Not many people do. She’ll never know how much that means to me.

(By the way, we’re launching a second copywriting website to build a larger West Coast clientele. Watch us grow at B2BWords.com!)

Posted in Everyday Life
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