Blog: One Year Anniversary of Moving Down
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One Year Anniversary of Moving Down - Monday, July 21, 2025
It's hard to believe, but it's been a little over a year since Priscilla and I moved back to SoCal. July 4th of last year was when we finished packing the last of our stuff into our cars and drove down from the Bay Area. This year on July 4th, we went over to the Camarillo Premium Outlets and caught the nighttime fireworks show there. I guess we'll have fireworks every year to remind us of our moving anniversary!
I already wrote a summary for our six month anniversary, so I'll just mention the highlights from this past year.
We've seen Priscilla's parents and my parents about once a month on average. Priscilla makes it a point to have us visit her parents every month, whereas things are a little less formalized with my parents - we saw them more frequently towards the beginning.
On hold are getting the gym room and master bedroom set up and making room in the garage for a second car, but I expect that we'll start in a few months. I've been prioritizing other things like infrastructure improvements and quality of life enhancements. On the infrastructure side, I had a plumber fix a valve that was causing us to not have hot water, got our sewer lateral replaced, roof vents installed, downspouts piped out to the street, and recently got our dishwasher fixed through our home warranty. For quality of life, we've gotten new furniture for the common areas and a daybed for Priscilla to use in the backyard. We got solar torches for the front and back, and we got the water fountain (included with the house) up and running. I also hired a company to clean and set up the hot tub, and I've been maintaining the water ever since. Having a hot tub is a luxury that we never imagined we'd have, but Priscilla makes time to enjoy it about once a week (I don't care for it).
We do a fair amount with our church. Our small group meets weekly for study, except the last week of the month in which there's a dinner outing (we usually skip those). We've been helping out with worship about once a month, including at the retreat last week. Speaking of which, this was our first retreat with this church. It was an all-church retreat at Pepperdine University, though we barely interacted with the other congregations (the main purpose of having all the congregations at the same retreat, we were told, is to save on costs). We enjoyed our time there except for the dorm housing; there's a certain level of comfort that we've come to prefer, and Priscilla had neck pain when sleeping there. In future years, maybe we'll take the commuter option (it seemed like a good number of attendees did). We enjoyed the food and the conversations over meals, and the preaching was great. One of the things the speaker said is that if you've done your Bible reading for the day and you haven't been moved, then go back and read again. Words to live by.
It also looks like I'll be helping to redesign the church website. Previous efforts had kind of fizzled out, and the English congregation's elder (we only have one, and he's also in my small group) had mentioned recruiting me for the website not long after Priscilla and I joined the group nearly a year ago, but only now did I get connected with the main guy in charge of the site, so I guess it hasn't really been a priority for the church. There seem to be some basic goals that we need to get consensus on, so we'll see.
Finally, I've been learning things across various domains, including trying to learn piano. I took lessons for perhaps a few months early in grade school, and I didn't have the interest or the discipline to make it very far. Since then, I would infrequently take a peek at my grandfather's old music books, and in high school, I learned how to play Canon in D using the lesson mode on my electronic keyboard. But I never really had a grasp of the basic fundamentals. So now I'm going exercise by exercise through my old primer books (the ones with illustrations for kids), and I also learned to play Minuet in G Major from a YouTube video. I wish I had realized as a kid that piano could be so fun. I'm still terrible at it, of course.
All in all, though things could always be better, I think we've had a meaningful year. My strength (and also weakness) is that I focus on one day at a time. I feel like I've mostly been purposeful with each day, but Priscilla has been challenging me to think about what my purpose looks like five and ten years from now. I think it's largely the same as what I'm doing now, but it's always good to keep one eye on the horizon.
I already wrote a summary for our six month anniversary, so I'll just mention the highlights from this past year.
We've seen Priscilla's parents and my parents about once a month on average. Priscilla makes it a point to have us visit her parents every month, whereas things are a little less formalized with my parents - we saw them more frequently towards the beginning.
On hold are getting the gym room and master bedroom set up and making room in the garage for a second car, but I expect that we'll start in a few months. I've been prioritizing other things like infrastructure improvements and quality of life enhancements. On the infrastructure side, I had a plumber fix a valve that was causing us to not have hot water, got our sewer lateral replaced, roof vents installed, downspouts piped out to the street, and recently got our dishwasher fixed through our home warranty. For quality of life, we've gotten new furniture for the common areas and a daybed for Priscilla to use in the backyard. We got solar torches for the front and back, and we got the water fountain (included with the house) up and running. I also hired a company to clean and set up the hot tub, and I've been maintaining the water ever since. Having a hot tub is a luxury that we never imagined we'd have, but Priscilla makes time to enjoy it about once a week (I don't care for it).
We do a fair amount with our church. Our small group meets weekly for study, except the last week of the month in which there's a dinner outing (we usually skip those). We've been helping out with worship about once a month, including at the retreat last week. Speaking of which, this was our first retreat with this church. It was an all-church retreat at Pepperdine University, though we barely interacted with the other congregations (the main purpose of having all the congregations at the same retreat, we were told, is to save on costs). We enjoyed our time there except for the dorm housing; there's a certain level of comfort that we've come to prefer, and Priscilla had neck pain when sleeping there. In future years, maybe we'll take the commuter option (it seemed like a good number of attendees did). We enjoyed the food and the conversations over meals, and the preaching was great. One of the things the speaker said is that if you've done your Bible reading for the day and you haven't been moved, then go back and read again. Words to live by.
It also looks like I'll be helping to redesign the church website. Previous efforts had kind of fizzled out, and the English congregation's elder (we only have one, and he's also in my small group) had mentioned recruiting me for the website not long after Priscilla and I joined the group nearly a year ago, but only now did I get connected with the main guy in charge of the site, so I guess it hasn't really been a priority for the church. There seem to be some basic goals that we need to get consensus on, so we'll see.
Finally, I've been learning things across various domains, including trying to learn piano. I took lessons for perhaps a few months early in grade school, and I didn't have the interest or the discipline to make it very far. Since then, I would infrequently take a peek at my grandfather's old music books, and in high school, I learned how to play Canon in D using the lesson mode on my electronic keyboard. But I never really had a grasp of the basic fundamentals. So now I'm going exercise by exercise through my old primer books (the ones with illustrations for kids), and I also learned to play Minuet in G Major from a YouTube video. I wish I had realized as a kid that piano could be so fun. I'm still terrible at it, of course.
All in all, though things could always be better, I think we've had a meaningful year. My strength (and also weakness) is that I focus on one day at a time. I feel like I've mostly been purposeful with each day, but Priscilla has been challenging me to think about what my purpose looks like five and ten years from now. I think it's largely the same as what I'm doing now, but it's always good to keep one eye on the horizon.