Alive and Well and On to New Things

Hello everyone!

At this point, It's been almost a year since I've posted anything.  To all of you who've followed my blog during the past few years, first and foremost, I wanted to apologize.  Dropping off the face of the earth is not a very nice thing to do to your friends.  So shame on me!  I hope that all of you are doing well and I can't wait to reconnect with many of my blogging buddies.  Secondly, I wanted to give a quick update on what we've been up to these days.

But before I get into that, I just wanted to briefly explain why I stopped blogging last year.  Since moving to Vermont, our family has been busy exploring the state and our neighbor to the north.  Canada is a wonderful place - one that I hope all of you get to visit.  The summer of 2012 was one of our best.  We spent most of our time outside - going on many picnics, hikes and farm forays, swimming in Lake Champlain, cooking with great friends and drinking our fair share of wine.  When confronted with this new found joy, blogging became less of a priority for me.  Then a credit card glitch tipped the scales.  You see, I had set my domain registration to automatically renew each year but for some reason, it didn't happen last summer.  Unbeknownst to me, a third-party had placed a reserve order for my domain name and once I failed to renew in a timely manner, they were able to buy it from underneath me.  Now they are listing it for sale at the bargain price of $28,000. All I have to say on that subject is 'Boo!!!!'.  In any case, I looked upon it as a sign.

Fast forward to winter, we continued to enjoy what our new state had to offer in terms of winter sports.  Jonathan took ice skating lessons, went to hockey games and we went cross country skiing for the first time.  The cold was brutal, but it didn't take long for us to adjust.  Then earlier this year, completely out of the blue, we were confronted with an opportunity to move back to Massachusetts.  The choice was a difficult one to make, but since I was still commuting into Boston part of the week for work, as difficult as it was to leave a state that we'd grown to love, it seemed like the most logical decision to make for our family financially.   So as Spring arrived, we packed up our stuff  again, said goodbye to our new friends and moved back to the Bay State (admittedly with some reservation).

Readjusting to life in a larger city (and a more densely populated area) has been somewhat difficult to say the least.  We miss the slower pace of life that we got to experience in Vermont.  The work day now goes by slower, our daily commute seems much longer and finding the sense of 'community' we'd grown accustomed to in Vermont has proven to be much more difficult than expected.  That being said, we're determined to take the best parts of our life in Vermont and transplant them here. 

In late August, we are set to close on a new home in Scituate, Massachusetts.  We are very excited to be living about a mile away from the ocean, in a community with great schools and in a town with great historical character (Scituate happens to be the second oldest town in the United States).  Our family is looking forward to laying down permanent roots, starting new traditions (Jonathan and I now dig for our supper on the clam flats of Duxbury Bay) and I'm looking forward to starting a new garden.  

Once we settle into our new home, I plan on starting a new gardening blog and I hope many of you will come along for the ride!  Until then, I hope you all have a wonderful summer!

Sincerely,
Thomas