Welcome! Come along for my (our) journey and other things!
Hi everyone, and welcome to my redesigned website. It had been stagnant for years, hosting very out of date info about my second CD I recorded 18 years ago! (Gah! Has it really been that long?!?!) It was dedicated to my “music career,” which never came anywhere near lucrative. I think I knew it never would, even while I was a student at Berklee studying music performance for saxophone. But that is a story for another blog entry.
The motivating factor to finally do something with my website was to document and share my family’s and my experience as we rapidly approach a major new chapter in our lives. My wife, Kate, has accepted a job at an international school in Bangkok. It was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up, so we decided to take a leap of faith and move overseas in June of 2024.
We still have about five months until we move, but time is moving extraordinarily fast with a lot to take care of. We have a nice modestly sized townhome in Northern Virginia, where we have accumulated a LOT of stuff in the eight-plus years we’ve lived here. Having two young boys will do that to a home, I suppose. Our plan is to keep the house and rent it out while we’re gone. Kate will be on a three year contract. What the future holds beyond that three years is anybody’s guess. But since we’ll be renting the house out, we need to empty it of absolutely everything. We’ll likely rent a small storage locker to keep a couple pieces of furniture and keepsakes that we want to hold onto. Other than that, we’re purging nearly everything we own. Trying to sell as much as possible, donating what we can’t sell, and trashing what isn’t worth donating.
Leading up to the move, I got set up with a pretty ideal contract job at Malala Fund that takes me through early April, when my contract ends. That will give me a couple months to really go to town on our house to prepare it. We have a contractor that will come in and replace carpet, paint, and do some other cosmetic work to set it up. But I’ll also have time to decompress, practice saxophone, get to the gym, play golf, and consider what types of things I might pursue when we move to Bangkok.
While clearing out the house and preparing for the move is daunting, the thing that is the most anxiety inducing is considering what I’ll do when we move. My wife has her job set up. My boys Henry and Miles will be in school (the same school Kate will be working at). But me? No fucking idea.
So many things are going through my head. Should I try to play music? (Hell yeah!) But aside from that, should I find something more lucrative? Friends of mine that have lived in that part of the world say I shouldn’t have a difficult time at all finding work over there. The question is, do I want to do that type of thing? I’ve been working in accounting for over 20 years now! I think I’m ready to step away, at least briefly, to re-evaluate what kinds of things I want, and can do.
I love cooking. Well, baking, making pizza, and smoking BBQ, to be more specific. And I’m damn good at it. But starting a restaurant is prohibitively difficult. Especially in Thailand, where, from what I’ve heard, is very difficult for non-Thai individuals to start a business, unless you have Thai business partners. But it’s certainly something I want to at least explore.
I could also potentially look to teach beginner saxophone lessons. I think I could enjoy that. I could also look to teach English lessons online.
Ideally, at least at first, I want something that offers a ton of flexibility where I can really set my own hours. My wife will have a large amount of vacation time, and we plan to fully take advantage of it, and travel all over Southeast Asia.
So anyways, that’s a glimpse of the things I’ll be writing about as we prepare to embark on our journey. I’ll also have a page on the site with info about my long-past musical endeavors, including some clips of live performances from long-ago, as well as a page of my photography, and probably a page dedicated to my pizza making, baking and BBQ. Because who doesn’t love food porn?
