Our career break came with a happy ending

Today is the end of an era.  The dawn of a new age.  The chocolate of a new chip.

Today was Jen’s first day at work.

It’s been awhile since our last update, so I’ll take a step back…

Jen’s first day at work:  How did we get here?

As previously mentioned, Jen started looking for a real job once we got here to Seattle.  This went well.

She interviewed with 3 companies and got 3 very compelling offers before deciding to halt the process with a few other companies to accept what seems like a perfect-fit opportunity.  I won’t say the name of her new employer (yes, you know of them), but I will say that it seems like a great role for her, the company itself has an awesome culture and it’s the kind of company/job that she can get excited about going to work to in the morning.

As you know, our biggest goal on post-career break re-entry has been to design our new lives with an emphasis on balance.  Long nights at work or working at home on our laptops are a thing of the past for us–especially since Daphne (our new puppy) is now the boss of us (completely and totally) and she would not approve of us working late (and would punish us severely).  In truth, she disapproves of anything other than 100% of our attention being focused on her 24 hours a day – now that I think of it, I guess she is kind of like a consulting project in that way… except much cuter.

Daphne yellow lab puppy asleep image

Reminds me of late nights in conference rooms (except replace the bone with a laptop)

Anyway… so, it’s too soon to tell how Jen’s job will work out, but we take it as a good sign that she was the last person in the office today at 5:20pm.  Yes, I said  5:20 pm.  And, they even pay her!

So, it turns out that you really can go take 6 months off to travel around the world with no negative impact whatsoever on your career – actually, I’d say the career break had a hugely positive impact in differentiating her in the recruiting process.  Equally surprising, you can apparently also find awesome jobs that pay well, are exciting and challenging and offer real-deal work/life balance.  Who knew?

What about me?

I’m currently working on no less than 8 different entrepreneurial projects and advising on a few others.  I’ve started writing code again… pretty crazy, but really fun – so rewarding to actually make something real again after such a long time.  More details to come in the future on what these projects actually are, but suffice to say, I’m having a blast.

Also, as of today, I am now a stay-at-home puppy dad.  Daphne is great.  She will be even greater when she is a little lower maintenance 🙂

What about Daphne?

She’s awesome.  Sometimes we want to kill her, but mostly she’s awesome.  In the last 3 weeks she has gone from 15 to 23 pounds (>50% increase!!!).  There are still some potty training challenges, but for the most part she’s got a handle on it.  We actually were able to apply our consulting skills to this problem and created a pretty fancy and super useful spreadsheet model to track her ‘schedule’ – stay tuned for a future post where we’ll share it in addition to some other thoughts we have on puppy parenting.

Daphne yellow lab puppy image

"it's a good thing I'm cute!"

She loves to play with her cousin Murphy (my sister’s dog).  And, even though he is more than twice her size, she can take him down (sometimes):

In Summary…

This is the (happy) end of our career break and the beginning of the next phase of our lives.  Life is great.  We are living pretty much exactly the lives that we had wanted and it is spectacular.  We highly recommend it.

If any of you are out there wishing you could take an extended career break but are concerned about what will happen after, our advice is to just go for it.  Who knows, things could turn out even better than you could imagine.

p.s. Now that Jen is at work, I will have more time to do some blogging, so stay tuned!

Meet Daphne… our newest and furriest family member

This morning we met Daphne and her brothers and sisters.  This afternoon, we took her home.  She is pretty cute.

Yellow-lab-puppy-face-image

This was the car ride home - she slept pretty much the whole way

We explored the rescue option for awhile and went back and forth on it quite a bit, but ultimately decided to go the 8-week puppy route and found a fantastic local breeder that’s only 15 minutes away.  We actually found them by meeting a beautiful dog hanging out at our neighborhood Peets coffee and talking to its owners who directed us to this breeder:  http://www.himoonlabradors.com/ Great breeder and great dogs.  We went this morning just to check it out, but we were so impressed that after picking up a bunch of supplies, we went back to bring Daphne home.

Yellow-lab-puppy-alert image

Sometimes, she's awake and alert...

yellow-lab-puppy-sleeping image

...but, so far, usually she's sleeping

yellow-lab-puppy-smiling image

We like it best when she smiles

We are thrilled to be new parents.  And ecstatic to have our very own furry and demanding reason to never work crazy hours again.  This is a key part of our rehabilitation.  Should be an interesting first night…  We’ll keep you updated.

p.s.  More first-day pics here:  https://www.consultingrehab.com/photo_gallery/?album=Daphne

Stuff overload

For 7 months we lived out of 5 suit cases (2 roller boards and 3 duffels).  We went from short-term apartment to short-term apartment; hotel to hotel and later, after returning to Seattle, family guest room to family guest room with only the things in those 5 bags.  That all changed on October 11th.

On October 11th at 8am PST, we were reunited with our storage unit and all of the stuff within it.

City storage sign image

Stuff don't live here anymore

We put said stuff into a big yellow truck and drove it from San Francisco to Seattle.  By the way… there are a surprising amount of mountain passes on highway 5 in northern California and Southern Oregon – they aren’t big, but they are big enough to make it impossible to faster than 45 MPH in a 22 foot moving truck.  Expert tip:  it takes WAY longer to drive long distances at 45 MPH than it does at 70 MPH.

Penske truck image

Surprisingly less powerful than it looks

We now are settling into our new apartment (which is even more awesome than we had anticipated) and are thoroughly overwhelmed by the unbelievable volume of stuff that we now have.  There is stuff everywhere.  It is unclear why anyone would want or need so much stuff – and keep in mind, that we got rid of a lot of stuff before we left for Argentina!  We are thankful that we have so many closets in which we can put all of this stuff… we have 10+ more boxes full of stuff that we see absolutely no point in unpacking.

Closet full of boxes image

What's in them? Who cares?

It seemed commonplace before we left, but after 7 months of living with very little, we are now on stuff overload.

This reminded me of a blog that I started following awhile back about “the art of minimalism” called Far Beyond the Stars (I originally found this blog through the post “27 Reasons why you should never have a job” which is worth reading).  This guy quit his job awhile back and decided to live life as minimally as possible.  Apparently he has been able to live with just having 57 things (this includes each article of clothing!)… check out the list of what his 57 things are.  I’m impressed.  And, I can absolutely see the kind of freedom that this type of lifestyle would bring.  Our closet full of unopen boxes probably has over 1000 things in it.

Anyone else experimented with minimalism?  How many things do you have?

p.s. Anyone need a 5 piece bedroom furniture set in Seattle?  I’m not kidding…

And… we’re back

Coming back after a long trip can be an experience in itself.  We’ve been back in the US for 2 weeks now after spending 6 months in Argentina and Chile.

Buenos Aires is a drama queen–she cried the day before we left all day (AKA it rained).  Seattle welcomed us in the only way it knows how:  5 straight days of rain.  Awesome.

Luckily, things have improved since then and so far, we really like it here.

It’s a little weird being back in the US…

Probably the weirdest thing is how big the cups are when you order a drink and just general food portions – not hard to understand the underlying cause of the obesity problem here.

The second weirdest thing is that pretty much everyone is speaking English all the time.  Even after 2 weeks we still have to stop ourselves from speaking in Spanish when encountering strangers (e.g., “permiso” instead of “excuse me”).  Not an issue when in a real conversation with someone we know, but we’re just so accustomed to assuming that all strangers are Spanish speakers that it may take awhile to adjust.

Also, it’s quite a bit more expensive here, but we expected that.

Good news:  It doesn’t really feel like being ‘back’…

There are several reasons why it feels like we are basically still on our crazy adventure despite being back in the US:

  1. We’ve never lived in Seattle before, so are really enjoying exploring a new city together (it doesn’t hurt that Seattle is pretty great)
  2. Much like in South America, we still don’t have our own place to live and are bouncing around in temporary housing (special thanks to my sister and Jen’s parents for giving us places to stay!)
  3. We are still wearing the same clothes and living out of the same suitcases – due to poor planning, all of our other clothes are still in storage in San Francisco
  4. We are still gainfully unemployed – unsurprisingly, this makes quite a big difference in one’s daily schedule and level of stress
  5. We decide what we do each day – We still get to spend tons of time with each other, wake-up whenever we want and do whatever we think we’d enjoy each day

It’s pretty cool actually… While we will obviously need to address the unemployment thing in the near future (or at least the income thing) and would like to have our own place to live and some clothes without holes in them, our goal is to keep the general feeling of freedom and enjoyment of life going indefinitely.  I wasn’t sure what to expect upon return, but at this point, I’m extremely optimistic that we can make our change in mindset and lifestyle permanent.

So what have we been doing….?

We spent the bulk of the last 2 weeks driving around, getting to know the different neighborhoods of Seattle and looking at apartments.  At first we were looking for short-term furnished apartments, but we quickly discovered that for the most part short-term furnished options are either very, very expensive, or very, very crappy and sometimes both.  So, instead we started looking at real apartments and we found one that we absolutely love.

Living room image

This isn't even the whole thing

As of Oct. 12th, we are excited to say that we’ll be living just off Green Lake – only a block from my sister!  My sister and I haven’t lived in the same half of the country since high-school, so it should be really fun to be neighbors.  She just moved to Seattle in August, so we will get to explore the city together.

Stove image

Also, we will cook things on this beast

Did we mention that housing in Seattle is like half the cost of San Francisco???  This super-modern 2 bedroom right off of the lake with a patio and washer dryer in one of the pricier Seattle neighborhoods will cost significantly less than the small 1-bedroom we had back in SF.   I understand the value proposition of living in the Bay Area less and less (though ask me again after it rains here all winter).

Other than looking for housing, we’ve really enjoyed spending time with Jen’s parents and my sister and her new puppy Murphy.

What about getting a dog…?

We’re still absolutely planning on getting a dog and having lives that allow us to keep it alive (was a major consideration in our housing options).  That said, spending as much time as we have with Murphy has altered our perspective on it a little bit…  Murphy is a 5 month old Golden Retriever puppy and is unbelievably cute and fun.

Murphy sleeping image

You have to take pictures of him while he's sleeping... otherwise he is in constant motion

Murphy is one of the most gentle and well behaved puppies we’ve ever met.  Nonetheless, Murphy is an unbelievable amount of work and we have the utmost respect for my sister who works incredibly hard every day to keep him healthy and happy.  After some puppy-sitting, our view on getting a dog has changed in two primary ways:

  1. We no longer feel the same degree of urgency – we’ll still get a dog sometime in the next several months, but no longer do we feel the need to get one immediately (it helps that we will only live a block away from Murphy)
  2. We are no longer dead-set on getting a puppy – while Murphy is unbelievably cute and it seems like a really cool thing to be able to be with a dog as he/she develops, spending more time with Murphy has also opened our eyes to the many potential benefits of getting a slightly older and already somewhat trained rescue dog.  We’ll see…

What about job stuff…?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Actually, Jen has been having lots of networking meetings and even had her first interview earlier this week (ironically, it was for a consulting firm… but a very, very different type of consulting firm – more on that later).

I will continue to play with start-up ideas at least through the end of this year and will likely write more about some of them as things progress (which will be much, much easier once we have our own place to live!).

What about friends/social stuff…?

So far so good.  We haven’t been super focused on this yet as we’ve been mostly running around trying to find a place to live, but we’ve reconnected with a few old friends that live here and are already making some new friends.

We were lucky enough to get an email from Warren and Betsy from http://www.marriedwithluggage.com who read our last post that we were coming to Seattle and wanted to connect to introduce us to some folks here before they left on their own long-term trip (after 2 years of planning, they are finally leaving today for 3 years!).  It turns out that they were the Seattle hosts of Meet, Plan, Go! which you may remember from our earlier post.  They had been running weekly happy hours for people that are interested in getting together and talking about career breaks and/or long-term travel and we were able to attend one.  It was great meeting Warren and Betsy (and we look forward to keeping in touch while they are on the road and following their great blog) and it’s also really exciting to get in touch we such a dynamic and eclectic community of people interested in travel here in Seattle – a great first step to making sure we have a diverse social network.   We are eager to attend future happy hours.

What’s next…?

We continue to enjoy life while we settle ourselves into Seattle and co-create our new lives here together.  Exciting stuff.

p.s. stay tuned – we promise to get back to a more regular blogging schedule and still have tons of stuff to say about Argentina and Chile and Career Breaks and long-term travel and other stuff too.