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Hi folks - apologies - it's been a long time since my last post. A lot has happened in the last couple of years. 2021 was extremely busy for us as we finally completed our move from Colorado back home to South Dakota. I "retired" from my job in Colorado, albeit a bit earlier than I had planned. I could tell you of horror stories of a toxic workplace. Let's just say that I, along with many of my colleagues, made a mass exodus and headed for the door. Myself and one of my teammates simply got up and retired. A few found other jobs. My boss had even left by the time I retired. When all was said and done, there were something like 35 vacancies in our department alone. Some folks who I had known to be long-time veterans and staunchly loyal to that organization had just had enough and moved on.
The main motivation to retire early, however, came from the fact that I felt like God had been putting on my heart for months that He had other plans for MJ and I, and that it was time to turn the page and move into a new chapter. The level of urgency that I felt in doing all of this was so overwhelming that I just couldn't ignore it. Then in early 2020, the C0V1D epidemic hit, and our entire country turned upside down. I do believe that God gives us messages in all sorts of ways. It might be a sudden thought, or it might be in a vivid and startling dream. And this was one of those times. So, at the end of 2020, I said goodbye to my former profession as a Cyber Security Analyst, and our journey into the next chapter had begun.
Truth be told, I think there was more to this retirement and move than simply doing something on a whim and "hoping" it worked out ok. Shortly after retiring, I got a part time "hobby" job as a Range Safety Officer at a local shooting range. I had long joked with one of my buddies at work that when I retired, I was going to just be a shooting range bum, and maybe get a job as a Range Safety Officer or firearms instructor. The thought of hanging out all day and watching people shoot, watching out for their safety, perhaps give some shooting tips, or just swapping stories about building guns or whatever really appealed to me. I found it to be an incredibly fun and easy job. But by this time, the cost of gas had risen significantly, however, and this job was about 15 miles from where I lived.
Very shortly after starting work there, and aside from the cost of getting to work getting awfully expensive, I woke up one morning in a cold sweat, having had a very startling dream in which I was told that we had to leave Colorado and move closer to MJ's family. I immediately told MJ that "we had to move back to South Dakota immediately." Her only remark was "Well.. it's about damn time!" Colorado had turned extremely blue and progressive by that time, and we just had the feeling that things were about to get worse for liberty and gun rights than Colorado had already become. I was as active as could be in trying to help Colorado elect good conservative candidates, but I had just found it to be a lost cause, and pretty much just gave up. Conservatives in Colorado are now severely outnumbered. Besides, we had family back in South Dakota, so we thought that the move back was the right thing to do.
Now mid-way through 2021, the C0V!D epidemic was in full swing, and the state of Colorado was getting even more draconian than it already was. The lockdowns were ridiculous, and many people lost their jobs and businesses. Definitely not the Colorado in which I grew up. The liberal transplants from California were coming in by the thousands, presumably to escape the mess that they had created there, only to vote for the people who would give them the same failed policies which made them escape California. Taxes went up; the cost of living went up; housing costs went up; crime went up; and more frustrating of all was that gun control was getting incredibly out of hand. Another shooting brought in ever more knee-jerk reactions and dictates of "We gotta do SOMETHING!" By the time we left, Colorado was successful in passing useless magazine restrictions, a poorly executed red flag law that deprived an accused of any due process whatsoever, gun storage restrictions that only hurt someone's ability to protect themselves in a home invasion scenario, and the repeal of the state's firearms preemption law. After that, local towns and municipalities started passing any and all gun control measures that happened to catch their mood at the time. Our own city of Fort Collins elected a mayor and city council that was full-on a clone of the city of Boulder with their progressive and anti-liberty policies. That's when he had just had enough and knew it was time to get out.
So we began planning. Every now and then, I would sometimes just sit and contemplate what it would take to get our house in shape to sell if we ever thought we would move, and the thought of the amount of work that would have to be done was actually quite frightening. I had even considered one day having to contact one of those "We Buy UGLY Houses" outfits because our house really needed some work. Plus, we had so much "stuff!" We still had unopened boxes from our move back to the states from Japan decades ago, the move from California to South Dakota the first time we moved here, and from our move from South Dakota to Colorado for my job. Some of this crap was decades old! When all was said and done, we had to sell, give away, or simply throw away what amounted to about a third of our household clutter. We had to do what seemed like some large-scale repairs, lots of painting, and a ton of yard work just to get the place presentable for sale. When I counted up all the trips we had to make to the land-fill just to throw away all the trash, I had loaded up our SUV and our son's pickup truck something like twelve times!
But we had help. It was never clearer to me that we have Someone bigger than us, with a plan that is much bigger than ours who can make the seemingly impossible and overwhelming happen. As we started to have yard sales, we thought that this attempt to sell our no-longer-needed items would turn out a total bust like all the others we had done before. But the people came and bought our stuff! We put a lot of furniture up for sale, and people swooped in and took it off our hands immediately after posting the ads. One by one, things just started falling into place. Day-by-day, we were getting more done and making excellent progress. Then in the summer of 2021, we both caught C0V!D. We thought this would severely delay our plans, but we both had pretty mild cases, though, and we were back at it within a few weeks. When it came time to finally put the house on the market, we had a sudden plumbing issue, but it was fixed in no time, and we got our house to market. One of our neighbors across the street is a real estate agent, and she got our house sold in about a week after listing it. Everything happened as if it was truly meant to be.
Then it came time to buy a house in South Dakota. Right after our house in Colorado went under contract, we made a quick trip to South Dakota to meet with our real estate agent and start earnestly looking for a place to live. To say the least, it was a challenge. The real estate market was extremely wild, and it was really a seller's market. What benefited us in one end (the sale) was now our biggest challenge on the buying end. House after house on which we put an offer was swooped up by a cash offer investor. But I am convinced again that God's plan is much bigger than ours. During this entire time of having several offers turned down, we put an offer on a house in a small town, which also had several offers (one being a cash offer from an investor). We had to cut our house-hunting trip short and quickly return to Colorado to avoid an approaching storm. So we put an offer on the house we ended up buying, and even had to pull over at a rest area to sign the agreements and send them back to our real estate agent.
Back in Colorado to continue packing and trying to look for houses online; the next thing we know, the real estate agent in South Dakota was calling us to tell us that our offer was accepted! We weren't going to be homeless after all! The majority of the houses that we were trying to buy were in very remote areas, but they had acreage, which is what we thought we wanted. But in retrospect, I am glad we ended up where we did. This house ended up being exactly where we needed to be for a multitude of reasons that I will write about later. It's an older house, and a fixer upper. But we love it and are extremely comfortable here.
At the end of November 2021, our house that we sold in Colorado finally closed, the movers had come to take all of our stuff, and MJ and I hit the road to make our final trip to South Dakota. Since we had two vehicles, MJ's car, and me towing a U-Haul trailer with our immediate need items, we used walkie-talkies to communicate during the almost 700 miles drive to our final destination. We departed very early in the morning, and I joked to MJ over the radio that "...it feels like we're sneaking out in the the middle of the night to escape a communist country..." A little exaggeration, perhaps. But Colorado had gotten so bad that we feel like we just had to leave. We felt like we were indeed "escaping" something.
Here it is the end of 2022, and we have been here exactly one year. We love it here. South Dakota has a wonderful Governor, and we absolutely love our new neighbors. South Dakota is deep red, and very much in line with our own political ideas. We live in an older neighborhood in a small town with a large veteran population. The VFW and American Legion are mainstays in this community, as is avid support for the local schools and students. We no longer live under draconian gun laws, and we live with people who clearly support our values of pro God, pro-life, pro-family, and pro liberty. We feel like we are truly home again.
You will be hearing a lot more from me now. Even though we are living in a deep red state (and I intend to help keep it that way), the rest of our country is still going to hell in a hand basket! Must be bad, even the traditional Democrats are losing their own members! The progressives have taken hold of our country and are doing unspeakable things to the values we once held dear. I am bound and determined to speak out against these atrocities and try to help get our country back to the principles on which we were founded.
In Liberty - "The Gonz"
Epilogue: In 2022, the U.S. economy went to crap. Inflation rose to historical levels. Interest rates were at a high not seen in decades. The real estate market became a nightmare for both buyers and sellers, as it became more difficult to sell a home, and the amount of home that the average person could afford had shrunk significantly due to the higher interest rates. I honestly believe that if God had not put the thought in my mind to retire early, we would not have decided to move back to South Dakota much earlier than we had originally planned. Had He not planted these thoughts with us, I firmly believe we would not have been able to sell our house in Colorado or afford a mortgage even in South Dakota on my small retirement pay. Within mere weeks of us obtaining a mortgage interest rate on our new house that was extremely affordable, the interest rates shot up and are now more than twice what they were when we made our move. But God is good all the time. And all the time, God is good. He had a plan for us which was much bigger than our own plan, and I passionately believe with all my heart that he put us where we needed to be.