Two Months In...

It's Saturday night. Sunday morning, really. I'm sitting up alone, watching "Ghost Adventures." Christy has kind of gotten me into this show, but that's neither here nor there.
I've now been in La Center, Washington, for almost two months. La Center is a small town (population 2,576 as of July 2009) in Southwest Washington state where my cousin Christy and her husband Bill have lived for about 6 years. They've actually lived in Washington for 21 years. I plan on spending the rest of my life here, as long as God wills it, of course. After all, He is the one who orchestrated this whole adventure, first by changing my heart when I always said that I could never leave SoCal because everything I have is there. Here's the story in a nutshell:
When I visited Shawna in Oregon in September of 2009, I instantly fell in love with this part of the country. The following August, I drove up with Lisa and she dropped me off at Christy and Bill's place to spend a week with them before heading down to Salem to spend another week with Shawna and her family. I loved being here so much that after my originally planned two weeks were over, I wasn't ready to go home to SoCal! So I stayed another week and went camping with Christy, Bill, Mallory, Ray, and the dogs! I came up again this year at the end of January, riding up with Christy and Mallory after they drove down for Uncle Albert's funeral. I stayed with them for two weeks. While I was visiting, Bill made a comment that when I was ready to move up, I had a room waiting for me! What I didn't know was that he hadn't talked to Christy about it. She was kind of put on the spot when I brought it up in front of her one night, but she did say yes...and I almost cried out of sheer joy.
Fast forward to mid-March. I felt like my life was beginning to really fall apart, but what I didn't realize at the time was that God was using my trials to open the doors for me to move. I had a few options available to me and some hard choices to make, but I knew that if I didn't take this very obvious opportunity, I'd soon regret it. So I called Christy and explained my situation. She thought about it for a minute and then said, "Come on up...we're family, we take care of each other." This time I did cry.
I had an awesome crew helping me load my little truck: they did a killer job playing Tetris with my stuff in order to get everything to fit! Fern rode up with me on April 30th and we arrived at 5 pm on May 1st. Fern stayed for another three days and we explored a bit of Portland.
So here it is, still early Sunday morning. I need to get to bed so I can get up for church. Church...that experience is an amazing story in itself, but I'll save that for another time.
Nighy-night, y'all...