Over the last few months, it’s felt like we’ve been homeless. Not “sleeping on the street” homeless, of course, but more on the “man without a country” sense. Or “man and woman without a state”, to be more precise.

It all started with our round of interviews to Gemini Falls and Arapaho. It was followed a week or so later with another trip to Gemini Falls. Then we had our trip back to Delosa for Thanksgiving, a couple weeks back in Cascadia, then another couple weeks in Delosa for Christmas. Coming later this week is another trip to Arapaho. If all goes well, we’ll be back here for a month or two packing to move. Otherwise, expect another spate of interviews.

Don’t get me wrong. I love visiting my family and have greatly enjoyed my time back in Delosa. I’ve also enjoyed our trips for the interviews and am looking forward to giving Dent County, Arapaho, a longer, harder look. And even the impending move, painful though it will be in terms of stress and headaches, will land us in our next and perhaps permanent destination.

But it’s all extraordinarily exhausting. Trips to the airport, multi-hour drives across the interior northwest and across Delosa. In cars without MP3 players, in some cases! I know, cry my a river, but you get used to certain things. I barely have time to get settled in anywhere before we’re about to go somewhere else. Even during our two-and-a-half week trip to Delosa, we split our time between Colosse, Beyreuth (where her family lives, on the other side of the state), Genesis (her ancestral home), and Ephesus.

It’s also created some logistical problems. I can’t really order things because I don’t know if we’ll be in Soundview when the package arrives. Further, anything I order may just have to be boxed up in a couple of weeks and so I’m disinclined to replace the faulty wireless keyboard, get new batteries for the laptops, and so on. Two of the really nice things about being unemployed was that it was easy to stay well-rested and that I could receive packages.

Assuming that Arapaho works out, it’ll be the case that Soundview will never be “home” again and that it will retroactively ceased having been so about four months ago. In the meantime, I got back from Arapaho earlier this week. Next week or the week after, it’s off to Arapaho.