Well, it’s all out on the table. Cailin successfully defended her Ph.D. last week, and that was the keystone to all the thinking and planning that we’ve been doing for the past year or so. Now all the other decisions are clear: Cailin will start her post-doc in the UNC Geography department next fall, and I will begin working on an MFA in the Studio Art program at UNC in the fall as well! I’m taking my art full-time!

We are both really excited about the next step, but it is bittersweet. We both have a lot of friends at our workplaces, and we’ve really come to love Madison in our 5 years here. It will be hard to leave here for many reasons.

Of course, we won’t be moving for another 3 months, so it was a little weird to tell my workplace about it. But one of the principals at work wrote a recommendation for me, and there is another person from our Active Media group that will be leaving at the end of the summer as well, so it seemed only fair to let them know so they can start thinking ahead. (Which they did right away: I wrote an ad for my replacement yesterday, and it is on the site today.)

It is definitely liberating to not have to sit on a big secret like this anymore, but nothing was really definite until about 6 days ago. And I only got into school about 12 days ago. There wasn’t really anything I could say about it until the end of last week anyway. And now here it is only days later, and we’re having a garage sale this Saturday, our realtor is getting ready to list our house (open house on May 15th), we’re shopping around for apartments in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and we’re already stressing about how the heck we’re going to get all our stuff into a two-bedroom apartment.

On the other hand, we put in a garden two weeks ago, put in tomato plant starts last weekend, frisbee season is up-and-running, and we’ve got quite a full summer planned. We’re going to two weddings, getting a visit from my brother, Cailin will be teaching her first course as “Professor Orr” this summer at UW-Madison, I’ve got more than a summer’s worth of work coming my way at Planet, and I’ve got two gallery shows to get work ready for by the middle of the summer.

I’m ready to turn on the Zen switch because while stress is to be expected, I don’t want to make close friends with it. We will jump-start the Zen with a week in Florida, right after Cailin’s graduation ceremony.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Art, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.