An event five eight years in the making
According to my old blog "Psychotic Infarction", 9/30/2011
was the date that I had set for my family and I to move to Hawaii - a five year
plan. I'll wait while you double check today's date. Yeah... I'm a bit late. In fact
we didn't even return to Hawaii until almost two years after that date. Now I know several of you
are frantically searching for what is sure to be an embarrassing snapshot of my
life back in 2006. Let me save you the trouble. It had one post and 95
views and a total of 5 comments. Two comments from friends and 3 from anonymous strangers trying convincing me
that I was an idiot for even dreaming of moving to Hawaii. I learned several
things after that. 1) Life is hard (Duh?). When I set that date, my wife had
recently become a stay at home mom. It
didn’t take long before I realized the true cost of that worthwhile investment.
Supporting a family on one income tends to change your perspective on a lot of
things. 2) Turns out you can't just declare you are going to do something, not
follow through, and expect results. Crazy right? 3) There is no shortage of
haters. People who literally hate your dreams and aspirations. Especially when
it comes to moving to Hawaii (or leaving Nebraska as I've recently found). You
have the "Good Lifers" as I like to call them. The people born and
raised in Nebraska home of "The Good Life" and insist that you'll
never be able to make it anywhere else. I may be exaggerating slightly.
Obviously there are many benefits to raising a family in Nebraska. You also
have the "Paradise Fear Mongers". A group of people so bent on
keeping newcomers out of Hawaii that they literally troll forums (it was 2006
remember forums?) and blog posts looking for people expressing a desire to move
to Hawaii and then beating them over the head with tales of over-priced milk , killer
geckos and meth’d out Haole Hunters.
Admittedly, I got a little discouraged.
The naysayers had some very good points as it turns out. I wasn't remotely
prepared for a relocation to Hawaii. Not only was it expensive, but there was
(is) a severe shortage of jobs that pay a living wage. Remember A
Beautiful Mind? Well that was me, crunching numbers for days on end trying
to figure out a way to make it work. One night, I had a realization. I cracked
the code. I only had to move the cheapest part of the island where access to
necessities is limited and the threat of volcanic activity was very real oh and
work 2 full time jobs with an average of 4 hours of sleep a night. It didn’t take
long for me to realize that it just wasn’t going to happen. So that dream was put on a shelf. You know
the shelf in your house where things go to die? A once-treasured gift loses its
luster and is put up high to only be occasionally acknowledged with awkward
side glances. Eventually the guilt gets to you. So you push it back even
further on the shelf or get rid of it. For a while my mental shelf worked. I
got so busy taking care of my family that I really never had time to think
about my failed dream. 9/30/2011 didn't even register on the radar. How could
it? Between working two jobs, learning Chinese and keeping a toddler from
consuming everyday household cleaning products I was tapped out.
So how did I go from not even considering
a relocation to literally counting down the days? To be honest I don't really
know. It’s as if my subconscious kept at it always looking for the formula that
would crack the code. A couple of years ago I was fed up with my job. I had a
horrible supervisor who didn't understand how to manage a technical resource
and I just couldn't take it anymore. I came home one day with a box of my stuff
from work and told my wife, "If I don't get a new job in two weeks, we are
moving to Phoenix." Sure enough I found a great job about a week later. It
would seem I was not being allowed to leave Omaha. In fact some friends and
family even suggested that this was a clear indicator that I was stuck here. A
year later some things started clicking into place. Here I was with a job that
I enjoyed, a job that challenged me and not to mention had an okay salary. My
wife went back to work and I quit my second job, all of the sudden I could
think clearly. After years of neglect it was time to dust off that little mental
shelf. What did I find? It wasn't broken, it wasn't lost. My old dream of
living in Hawaii was right there waiting for me to just ask the right questions.
I didn’t even realize what I was doing at the time. In passing I’d ask my
manager questions like “What’s our policy on working from home…occasionally?” A
little more time would pass and here I am asking more questions. “Have we ever
had a remote employee? What if I were to live in another state?” “What if that
state is say…. and I’m just pulling one off the top of my head… Hawaii?"
Boom. That was it. Management considered
it, and then with a little more time they considered it some more. Finally they
agreed to it. Forgetting moving back to Phoenix, just like that my dream of
moving to Hawaii became very real.
So why are you here? The purpose of this blog is document my
family's journey to Hawaii. I haven't written in years so I apologize in
advance as I will be a little rusty. If you are like me you are tired of
reading blogs that don't relate to you in the slightest. I've read blogs where
people detail their struggles in moving. By struggles I mean deciding which of
their three mainland homes they are keeping and which are they selling to
purchase their new home in Hawaii. Or smart people who have been saving for a
decade and have a year’s salary sitting in the bank allowing them to spend the
first 6 months on the island reading books on the beach. Not to take anything
away from their accomplishment, they made a decision and followed through with
it. Congrats. No this blog is for people that despite all of the things working
against them refuse to give up on their dream. There is also a good chance that
my situation wont relate to yours either. After all, not many people can simply
decide that they want to be a remote employee 5,000 miles away from your home
office. If that doesn’t do it for you, then just come for my perspective on
working remotely, java development, learning Mandarin and other assorted
geekery. I’ll even have guest posts from Hope and Gavin just to keep things
interesting.
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