Location, Location, Location

   This past winter was a rough one for me mentally.  A lot of dark, cold and sometimes snowy days.  By the end of the winter I had quite the case of cabin fever.  Those first warm, sunny spring days were like music for my skin eyes and soul.  This winter for the first time in my life, I asked myself do I want to spend the rest or at least a good chunk of my life bearing these long cold Wisconsin winters?  My answer is no I would rather not.

    In March in the middle of this winter Charlie and I visited some of her relatives in the Dallas area.  It was sunny and in the 70's and 80's while we were down there.  Being able to go for a walk in shorts in March was a special treat for me.  This furthered my thought process.  What would it be like to live here?  Now to be fair we spent 4 days in Dallas and there is no way based off of that to know.  There are so many factors that go into where to live.  Presence of friends and relatives, avaliabilty of jobs, quality of schools, weather, just to name a few.  I do know ideally I would like to live somewhere warmer and sunnier.  I am just not sure how realistic this is. 

    So to be fair, their are pros and cons to any place a person lives.  Yes Dallas is nice during the winter compared to here 50's 60's 70's and 80's, but as we saw this past week they can also get violent and tornadic thunderstorms on a much more frequent basis then here in Wisconsin.  It can also be brutally hot in the summer.  Last year they had a streak of over 40 consecutive days over 100 degrees.  None of this is to mention jobs and schools etc.

   Milwaukee.  There are many things that I love about living here.  Milwaukee in the summer is quite simply a gorgeous place to be.  The fairs, festivals, bright warm sun, green trees and grass, and of course the Brewers.  There is quite simply no other place that I would rather be in the summer and early fall.  At the same time I am suseptable to Seasonal Afectional Disorder.  I have a natural light that helps me get Vitamin D in the winter, this helps with sadness but not the boxed in feeling.  As much as I love being here in the midwest in the Summer, I can think of many places that I would rather be in the winter.

  California has a lot of nice weather, but the cost of living is pretty steep.  Virginia is another place I have heard a lot of good things about, but having never been there I can't say for certain.  There is also the personal.  My wife has many friends that live in southern Wisconsin and it would be hard for her to leave them.

   Every place has it's pros and cons.  There are so many things I enjoy about living here, but there is one pretty big one that I don't.  So  in the next few years we have to weigh all these things as we decide where to settle down and buy a house after I finish school.  I will look here first, but who knows where God will lead us to.

Visable Progress

     This past weekend, I became aware of how silly and potentially harmful a negative thought pattern that I had was.  I was able to take a step (or more) back and see it for what it is.  This thought pattern doesn't represent reality.  As I was talking with my pastor about this issue he said "you are worrying about a bunch of things that haven't even happened yet, and might never happen."  I know that in some of my previous conversations with my parents and others about this topic they have told me this.  That I was engaging in "stinking thinking", on some level I relaized this.  However, this time it kind of sunk in.

   Before now I wasn't able to take a step back and look at my negative ruminations objectivley.  In this case I was able to do that and internally say "hey wait a minute that isn't right", just because I am afraid that this might or is happening that doesn't mean that it is or will.  For me this is big.  Since my teens I have been a pesimmist where negative thought paterns are well established.  To be able to get a bit of distance and to look at this more rationally and objectivley.  So I am very happy about this.  There are some big changes going on in my life right now (ie going back to school), so I am prone to more anxiety then usual, but I must be making signifigant progress if I was able to break out of this patern long enough to see the flaw in my thought patterns.  I thank God and my family for working with me.