I'm baaaaaaaack ... kind of

Hello, beautiful.

The New/Old Job started Monday. I'm back in Portland, working at the newspaper I worked at part-time for two years. Only now I'm full-time.

The key in that first paragraph is it is written in first-person singular sense. For you normal people out there, it's the obvious: It's just me up here. No Daisy Duke. No The Wife. No TV, cooking utensils nor any other comforts of home.

That stuff will come, likely May 4 when we load up for to cover a specific 110-mile section of road between Boston and Portland for the third time in three years and one day.

The moving truck arrived in Portland on May 3, 2010. TW and her mother had flown into town a few days earlier to procure housing. All I and a couple of friends had to do was drive across the country. The degree of difficulty in driving was slightly higher than you think; Dukakis, our first chocolate Lab, had a penchant for cutting some of the worst farts known to man and we were in tight quarters.

Still, Maine was a revelation. It was green. The ocean was brilliant blue. The islands. The Portland Head Light. The local restaurants and creameries. With a maximum elevation of about 310 feet, it was pretty much the opposite of Utah.

We've only been in Boston for a year and I've made a few trips back to Maine to visit friends. The Bearded Beernut and His TW are moving away, but Nacho Man and Molly Lu Who remain among a cavalcade of friends who would do anything for us (including, but not limited to, helping unload a moving truck for an hour and a half on May 4; there will be food and/or beer provided).

It has been a weird few days, walking into the building where a job was quit less than a year ago. A stranger asks for street directions, I think for a second, then give a spot-on description of how to navigate. Of, course, things have already gotten a little hot and steamy.

It is weird to be back and it is boring. Daisy Duke and TW await me back in Boston; or maybe it's the other way around, me awaiting them in Maine. There's nothing to do during the day, so I eat Shaw's Salads and exercise. I've lost 3 pounds in three days.

Things are going absurdly very well for us. We are under contract for a new townhouse that's a half-mile from work. TW has job interviews. We have been waiting for the other shoe to drop for weeks and our luck to change.

But it won't. There is a feeling that this is owed to us. That's me being a little annoyed about spending three and a half years without a home or a solid financial situation. We're owed this. That, of course, isn't it. You could argue that we're really lucky or God is simply shining his rays of light on us. We are lucky and he certainly is shining his light on us, but that's not what's happening. We planned it this way four years ago.

Four years ago, we decided we'd sell our 2,500-square-foot house in Stansbury Park, Utah. We moved into a one-bedroom apartment that had to be 400 square feet. We rented half a duplex from Molly Lu Who's mom (who really deserves her own nickname). We rented a shoebox of a place in East Boston and tried really hard to like living in Boston.

None of it felt right. We did what we had to do, to be sure. We did what we had to do to get here. TW went to graduate school, we both quit our jobs, we tried to hold onto our nest egg for this. It is exhilarating and we feel blessed.

I also feel fat. I ate bacon-dusted French fries for lunch at Nosh along with pork belly poutine. There has been a lead ball in my stomach since 1 p.m. It's good to be back!