It's about time

I finally have a blog. A place to put down my thoughts, my goals and my daily mishaps. A year has passed since I moved to Nebraska and started a new direction in my life. I regret not having a blog then, because with every big choice we make in life we are changed and I want to have an account of those changes. However I have noticed a few:

I have noticeably changed in many ways I never expected. I learned about myself being alone...really alone and that I can get motivated to work even when it's for myself. I realized I wasn't as outgoing as I once thought, when put in a place I'm not accustomed to and when I don't know anyone else around within a couple thousand miles, I actually had trouble branching out.

I hope to move every couple years, not because moving itself is great...it's hard to pick up go somewhere new, but because of the ways I am able to reinvent myself and gain new prospectives about life and people. People in Nebraska are different, well different from where I grew up, but in great ways. There is a real feeling of family and a "good neighbor" quality that I wish would rub off on other parts of the country. Life seems to move a little slower, at a pace where it can be enjoyed.

To give an example of the kind of people I have met in the last year and the friends I have made I can recall the time I got stuck in the mud on the side of the road. It was a rainy day, and I had tried to haul some rocks behind a trailer over to my project site. I didn't get very far onto the property before spinning and sinking down in the grease-like mud that is native here. Within 20 minutes, literally every truck that came by asked if I needed help and was will to get out in the rain and mud on a Friday evening to help a stranger out of the mud. Kindness spreads, and you can imagine my anticipation for the opportunity to be able to help someone else when the time comes.

A second example is that when ever it came around a holiday, whether it was Easter, Thanksgiving, or Christmas, I would always get invited to dinner by at least three or four families. They of course knew that I didn't really know too many people, but these were people I didn't know all that well and they still were kind enough to invite me over. I challenge myself this year to find an opportunity to do the same. I can't think how many times I must have missed out on the opportunity to make someone's day by inviting them over when they have nowhere to go, when I was so caught up in my own family dinners. I know what it's like now and I know how good it fealt to have somewhere to go.

This was a long one. I hope the next ones will be shorter and more to a point, but I am an engineer and get very few chances to write....so look out!