The Houghs' 400th Episode: And the Sun Rises

Happy New Years Day, nation.

You know, I always feel bad for this holiday - nobody really celebrates it.  I've never actually heard of anyone celebrating it, come to think of it.

Now, before you guffaw "wait a sec, me and my wife always go over to so and so house's for their annual New Year's Eve bash and watch plastic Ryan Seacrest attempt to fill Dick Clark's shoes," I'll point out that you - like every other average Mohammed around the world (was gonna say 'Joe' there, but technically Mohammed is the most common name in the world, so there you go), celebrates New Years Eve.  The night before the holiday.

Keepin' it gangster.

New Years Eve isn't a federal holiday - it just acts like one.  Kinda like when you see suburban white kids at the mall sagging their pants and wearing flat-brimmed hats.  Thug Life, you're not fooling anyone.

Oddly enough, though, three states decided that New Years Eve should get some points for trying so hard for so long, and decided to make it an official holiday - Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

And speaking of Michigan, I think it's time to pull back the curtains and formally announce this. . .

The Houghs are moving back to Michigan.

I'll let that sink in for a sec.  Take your time.


Okay.


Years ago, when Kris and I first moved down here to America's Junk, we envisioned being down here for five years.  That was the initial plan, at least - move down to Florida, snatch a couple of teaching jobs off the local Teaching Tree, go to grad school and get a couple Masterses to become more marketable, transfer our teaching certificates back up north, and move home.  Maybe pop out a few sons along the way, who knows.  Five years seemed realistic at the time.

Jesus. . . let's take a step back and see what the hell really happened.

Camden Landings, 2007

Well, as you may or may not recall, in early January of 2007, Kris and I moved down here with a 26 ft moving truck crammed with every, last thing we owned, no job prospects a little under $3,000 to our name.  All the Florida jobs that were miraculously falling from the sky that we kept hearing about in Michigan were nowhere to be found, and the apartment we had selected (off the internet, back in Michigan) was terrible.  Small, dirty, and in a questionable neighborhood.

Still, we manned the trenches and dug in, and over the course of three months we pumped resumes and cover letters out to everywhere we could.  Our bank account dried up like the Sahara, and things weren't looking very good at all. . . but then, in mid-March, Yours Truly landed a teaching job.

The Houghs, pre-offspring

That started in August.

The light was at the end of the tunnel. . . we just had to get there.  We both worked two jobs for the next five months - Kris at 7-11, me in the garden center at Lowe's, and both of us working as part-time tutors at Huntington Learning Center.  We were broke, but we were paying our bills on time, and somehow always made it work.

I was drinking Miller High Life Lite, if that helps describe the level of poverty we were living at.

Hotwheels

I bought a flashy 2005 Ford Focus from Carmax, Kris got a job taking care of babies at Kindercare, we bought some fish, and the school year started.  Shortly afterwards, Kris got knocked up and we realized we needed a bigger apartment.  We also realized we should probably move closer to my school, since I was leaving my house every day at 6am just to make it to work on time.

(This was ridiculously overpriced)

In April of 2008, we settled in a ritzy, over-priced neighborhood a half-hour south of Conway called Hunters Creek, and moved into a three-bedroom apartment that was leaps and bounds above our old apartment.

Virgil Q's.  For life.

In June, we had Alayna. . . a girl.  Fezzig wasn't fond of her, but grandparents were, and we started receiving relatives on an increasing rotating schedule over the next seven years as a result.  My second year of working in a ghetto school started, and I decided to get grad school over and done with.  Kris went back to work, but at a different school called Primrose, which caters to the Hunters Creek yuppies and their spoiled children.  Things were looking up.

Then the recession hit.  And everything ground to a halt.

Every creature you see here died well before its time.

We were convinced we were going to lose our jobs.  At my school, a quarter of the staff was laid off, and as a second-year teacher, I was convinced I was next.  Our fish died off, but this probably had little to do with the recessoin.  We watched as more and more friends and relatives back home in Michigan lost their jobs and were forced to move out of the state in order to find work.  The idea of someday moving back to our homeland seemed more and more unrealistic, and the notion began to fade away in the distance.

Junk in the trunk.

Miraculously, the nation turned itself around.  I kept my job, and started my third year of teaching.  Kris got pregnant again, and we realized we were going to have to move again.  Around this time, her old car (her Chevy Malibu, that she had owned since college) died on her, and she was forced to buy a new car, eventually settling on a 2007 Chevy Uplander (a mini-van with an SUV front.)

Feeding a bird. . . some bird.

Fezzig wasn't fond of all the attention Alayna was getting, and was plucking all his feathers out and biting us constantly, so we regrettably gave Fezzig away to a couple of crazy bird ladies from Palm Beach, where they renamed him Ricky and gave him a better life.  In February of 2010, we moved into a problematic but affordable house in nearby Southchase, a neighborhood right next to Hunter's Creek that's just as safe and nice as Hunter's Creek, but half the price.

This house was a complete piece of shit.

Our house, however, had issues from the get-go.  The drier only dried if the exhaust pipe was stuck out into the garage, meaning we had to crack the garage door whenever we ran the drier.  The second bathroom tub leaked whenever we gave Alayna a bath, and consequently soaked the carpet in the adjoining Man Room.  Our refrigerator didn't refrigerate, our dishwasher leaked, our fence had fallen down, and there were termites. . . but we rolled up our sleeves, rallied our friends, and fought that house for the next year and half.  We painted, we repaired, and we made that house work.

Trouble brewing. . .

In May of 2010, Kris shot out Abby (another girl), so fast she couldn't get drugs to numb the pain, and consequently bellowed like a Balrog and peed all over the doctor.  A couple months later, I graduated from grad school with a Masters of Education (Arts in Teaching). received my Professional Teaching Certificate, having completed my third year of teaching under a Temporary Certificate.  This Professional Certificate guaranteed me a job for five years, and I was lucky to get it - I was the last year of teachers to which the state of Florida awarded tenure (all teachers who came in the year after I did wouldn't be so lucky.)

While my career was taking off, Kris' stalled.  She had been let go at Primrose and went on unemployment for about eight months, which provided her with plenty of time to raise two kids in our ramshackle house.  This may seem like it could've been an opportune moment to return to Michigan, seeing how I had achieved what I had set out to and Kris was receiving a steady paycheck for raising our girls, but the Rust Belt states were still feeling the wallop from the Great Recession.  There were no jobs at all in Michigan, and the future there was bleak.  We'd been in Florida for 3 1/2 years, and Kris and I realized we'd have to wait a couple more years before moving home.

Courtesy of two annoying, little girls.

Eventually, in 2011, Kris got a job at a much better childcare center - Sunchild Academy (also located in Hunter's Creek.)  I was still slugging away at my ghetto school, but had recently switched to 6th grade from 7th, making the change from teaching World Geography to the much more badass Ancient History (one of my passions.)  The following year, we realized that we'd had enough of paying rent for our current house, and decided to buy one of our own.  We snooped around and eventually found the perfect starter home for our family, which we bought from an elderly couple who more or less sold it to us because they liked our kids.

In May of 2012, on the 35th anniversary of the release of Star Wars, the Houghs moved into their very own home.  In doing so, we realized this meant pushing Michigan back a few more years.  Even though the economy was improving, we knew that we had to build up some capital if we were ever going to successfully make it back up in Michigan.  We bought our house at a time when the housing market was just starting to recover from the Recession, and over the next couple of years we saw the value of our home make leaps and bounds.


Alayna started Kindergarten that fall, and we bought a dog (a dachshund mix named 'Jigsaw') from a rescue center that we promptly renamed Watson, and in the winter of 2013, Kris and I sat down and decided that it was time to move home.  Of course, moving a family of five across the continental United States wasn't going to be an easy task - it wasn't going to be as easy as renting a 26 ft truck and setting off without job prospects.  No, we had to meticulously plan this move out.


And that's what we did.

Smitten with the Mitten

We started aggressively saving for the move.  Using Dave Ramsay's snowball method, we paid off both of our cars and started rolling our monthly car payments into a Michigan Move fund.  We began purging items in garage sales and getting rid of things we knew we weren't going to take with us back north.  When the 2014 school year started, as Alayna started 1st grade and Abby started VPK, Kris got a new job as an administrator at her school and I was elected department head of the Social Studies department.  We decided to move back to Michigan at the end of this school year (in June of 2015), and so I selected to not be paid over the summer, so I could condense the bigger paychecks into the school year and  put the difference into a Summer Readjustment fund, separate of our Michigan move fund.

JamMasters

To date, we've basically saved up around $9,000.   Mom and John are flying down in March and driving our first truck of stuff back up for us and keeping it at their house and my brother Chris' house in Midland.  This first truck will mostly be my library (as you know, I have an insane amount of books), closet clutter, seasonal stuff, storage items, crap from the garage and patio, and anything else we can live without for three months.  Then, when the second truck rolls out in June, it'll be furniture, clothing, and more regularly-used household items.

First arriving in Florida, January 2007

This has been years in the making, and it's going to be complete insanity over the course of the next six months selling the house, looking for work and a new place to live back home, orchestrating the logistics of the move, and severing all of our ties here in central Florida.  But this has always been the plan, since the very beginning.  Florida has always been temporary - we always knew we were moving back to Michigan some day.

And now that day has come.

- Brian