Theme changed, feeds appear fixed, WordPress upgraded

I switched to a very simple two-column theme for Free Range Librarian on the theory — correct, it appears — that the theme I was using had broken my feeds, probably when I upgraded WordPress a couple of releases ago.

So this morning after reading the Styles section of the New York Times — the first thing I do every Sunday morning is look for same-sex marriages in the back of Styles — I began upgrading. The theme (VeryPlainText) is a stopgap, but it works for now.

It’s a nice quiet time to be doing this. These days Sandy has the luxury of sleeping in most Sundays. We could go visit churches, and might be seen at services now and then, but I’m frankly enjoying the secular life for the first time in decades. I will resume church life again — most likely when we leave here — but I see why people use Sunday morning for Church of the Brunch.

I brought up the idea of leaving Tallahassee to a friend on Friday who shouted in a restaurant, “You can’t sell your house!”

Well, you can sell anything, depending on what you’re willing to be paid for it, and this isn’t Miami nor is this house a condo. But we don’t have to sell our house to leave Tallahassee. We can rent it out (it’s in a great area for that, in a pretty park district next to the Capitol) or we can leave it empty while we show it for a while and wait out the upturn. We’re both good at scrimping, and if that’s how it has to be, so be it.

The other thing we hear is that Sandy could get some other church or line of work in the area. (These are all well-intended suggestions.)

This idea is predicated on several misunderstandings. First, there are no other churches in her denomination — not for quite a few miles around. It’s not as if she can show up at the Methodist church and find a job.

Second, the suggestion implies that we want to somehow find a way to stay here.

I’m glad people love to live in Tallahassee. I don’t loathe it, and I hope my comments here don’t inspire some of the “Yankee go home” comments I’ve had on my blog in the past. But this isn’t our home, and we both feel that way.

We’re not supposed to be here.Â We get it.Â Before Tallahassee, Sandy had a string of good church experiences, I had jobs I liked (I again have a great job, but it isn’t tied to Tallahassee), and then we came here, and it was never a good fit.Â We tried; oh, how we tried. Some of it wasn’t bad, some of it was even very good (I think of my writing friend Lisa and the critique group I founded, and the string of friends I’ve made at two jobs in the area), and we’ll keep trying until we leave. But we’ve relaxed into planning a future away from here — wherever that may be.

It’s been a good lesson-learned about where we belong — or at least where we don’t belong. I no longer wake up with tears in my eyes missing California — my life is too happy and busy for that — but it will be all right when Tallahassee is in our rear-view mirror.