This blog has been rather quiet for some time, but it certainly hasn't been due to any lack of activity. For a while now I've been working on a plan to devote more time to "the baking thing", and while this seems rather counter-intuitive from the perspective of this site, that required less time devoted to writing about it and more time actually doing something about it. First up, the condo and the bills associated with it had to go. If I was ever going to give baking a real shot I'd need to leave my stressful and time consuming job, but to do that I had to get rid of the expensive mortgage and bills that depended on that job. And so I spent months and months doing various home improvements and going through rounds and rounds of purging. It's amazing how much stuff you can amass in nine years! For a long time people couldn't come and visit me without leaving with bags and bags of random things from my many seemingly bottomless closets. I had a friend come over and help me sort though the remainder of my things for what I'd actually need and what could eliminated/donated, and then I had another friend come and help move furniture and stage the place. Once everything was about as ready as possible, I called a realtor...and this is where the entire plan fell apart. I knew the market was bad and I certainly wasn't expecting to make money on the sale, but the picture he painted for me was so bleak that I dropped the whole thing for six months with a slightly depressed air of defeat.
Things stayed pretty stressful at work as the people around me kept changing, and the workload kept increasing, and my mindset about the whole thing kept deteriorating, but it wasn't until spring when I'd decided that I needed to stop waiting and start making serious changes, no matter the cost. There would never be a perfect time and so now will just have to do. I put my home on the market and began planning for the future. It took dozens of showings and several months of keeping the house clean and my bed made every morning, but I got lucky and several months after the whole thing started, I'd received an offer. The call actually came on my birthday and I immediately started calling family and whooping for joy over the phone. Closing, of course, took a few months, and being a bit skittish and superstitious, I waited until everything was final before putting in my rather generous notice at work, so it wasn't until Christmas that I found myself living back at my parent's house with all my remaining stuff in their basement, homeless, jobless, but absolutely ecstatic with life and how things turned out.
Before I devote all my time and effort into making baking, and possibly blogging, a full-time career, I've decided to take a few months sabbatical and travel the world. So all this is to say that don't count me out on this blog just yet, I'll definitely be back, but for now, if you want to follow my travels please visit me at Baker Gypsy. I'd love to hear from you as I feed this travel bug.
