SK in Texas Month 10 of ????

Who am I kidding? My little "adventure" to Texas has become a big ol' permanent move. If you would have asked me ten months ago when I got on that first plane to Dallas I would have said probably not. You see, I'm a nomad. A proud wanderer and although I would have been open to the idea of staying for a while, my next stop was going to be the Bay Area, probably Oakland so that I could hang in San Fran with my sister and her family. After that, I decided that I would probably knock around the country for a little while, working and saving some money before going abroad - I'd start in Australia ( they pay cooks pretty well in Australia and I could learn about the Aboriginal culture and history) and then go wherever the wind blew me until I decided to settle down and start a family.

Obviously the winds had other plans for me :-) While living in Mexia as an Occupational Therapist at a State funded Mental Hospital (bizarre I know). Mexia is a small town in central Texas with a population of about 7,000. Not exactly a booming town, but the friends I made there, Ms. Gloria, Karen, Sheila, Crissy, Heather, Genipher, Barbara, Admerle, Rhonda and Jay were great and life there for me was pretty simple. But the challenge of living in a small town was that most people my age (29) were married with children, so after work I had little to nothing to do. This gave me a lot of time to think.

Sure there was the library and Walmart, but that gets old quickly. So after work, I would often drive to and sit by the lake. In the video, I call Lake Mexia "my" lake but its not, but I loved it so much that I adopted it as my own. Kinda like how Christopher Columbus discovered America.... but I digress lol.

Mexia was so quiet and so far from my norm that when my father came to visit me, he asked me in a concerned voice what I was hiding from. I like to think that I was finding myself. After the past year and a half of a tough break up, a serious leg injury, no health insurance, moving to NY from DC, losing my job, having to put culinary school on hold, finding a new job, learning who my real friends were the hard way, pinching pennies to pay for culinary school, traveling across the country on a train, graduating culinary school and then finally moving to Texas, I needed the break. Mexia provided that, I was away from friends and family and was forced to figure out who I was and what I wanted in my life. And for that I will always be grateful to Mexia and the folks who befriended me out there. :-)

I realized that I really wanted to settle down.
It took me about 3 days to realize that and an additional 6 months to finally make the move south to Houston. And this my friends is where my story begins again :-) Houston.