Reminiscing

I have spent the last couple of nights reading the blogs from the last year in Massachusetts and the first year in Utah.

I find it unbelievable that I have lived in Utah for nearly 8 years!  That is the same amount of time that I lived in Pennsylvania and that felt like a long time...but of course at that time I was raising young children and my time here in Utah has been a decent percentage of empty nesting.  I'm sure that's the difference in how I perceive the time.  Still. 8 years.

I'm still not quite ready to call myself a Utahn though I do like it here for the most part.

Good things: 
being near family. I missed them for so long.
no (or almost no) mosquitoes.  Dang I love being able to go outside after dusk.
the mountains. I never tire of looking at them.
my house. It really is just the right size. I love my covered porch and my lovely back yard. I still want to change almost everything about the inside and decor but the house itself...so good.
A job I enjoy and nice coworkers. 
A couple of my kids are living here locally which is super-dee-duper good!  I try to make an effort to stay connected though they are grown up and have lives and stuff now.

I still miss the East so much and I feel like I've struggled a bit to really fit in here or make new friends.  I haven't totally lost my Eastern attitude and, dare I say, crankiness?  Maybe I shouldn't blame the East though. It's probably just me. 

Back East I was kind of "conservative". Here, I feel like I'm a raging liberal. 

It's different and some of it is good and some of it isn't.  Of course, I'm now at a point where I am remembering all my time back East so fondly and forgetting all the hard stuff...that how we humans work I suppose.

Lots of things have changed:

My parents moved to AZ and our weekly get togethers were over.

Mom died after the horrible fight with Alzheimers.

My dad remarried and is living in AZ.

My oldest son and his wife and kids (who lived here when we first came here) moved away: first to Alaska and then Michigan.

Some kids left and then came back. Some left and stayed gone. 

My family is kind of broken. I can't fix it.

I'm an empty nester. 

I have a job. Ok, I've had jobs before but now having a job is like...my thing. My main thing. What is up with that?

I don't get together with my family enough. Everyone has lives you know?! And it totally gets in my way of hanging out with my family all the time!  Plus for some reason Frank wants to do other stuff besides hang out with my siblings. Who can even understand this?

Anyway, regarding the blog, I'm so glad I have it.  There are so many things I would have forgotten but there they are, all written down!

My cousin Emily has been my number one commenter and I thank her for it. I honestly feel like we are close though we haven't seen each other in years! It's probably because she posts comments on my blog and also from Facebook posts. Thanks Emily! Let's get together sometime!

I've been meaning to get back to blogging for some time now. I cut way back when I started working full time (I think that's when it started. Or stopped. Whichever) and I just never have any idea what to write about anymore.  But I think the reason I used to blog a lot and had stuff to say was because I was blogging a lot. haha 

Does that make sense?  The more I wrote, the more I had to say.  And  I probably have stuff to say now, I just can't think of it yet because I'm not writing enough.  I used to really enjoy the act of writing.  I know I've mentioned this before, probably the last time I blogged!  I do tend to repeat myself.

But I'm going to try to get back to it. Again.