It’s been a little quiet here on BJJCaveman.com for the past few months or so and I haven’t had the chance to keep up with my posts because things have been all sorts of crazy.  I wanted to share a brief personal update just to let you guys know what’s been going on.

We Moved Back to California!!!

I grew up in California and did all of my training in California including college, med school, internship, residency, and fellowship.  In 2012 we moved to Cleveland, Ohio to take a job that gave us a lot of time off.  I used the time off to travel with the BJJ Cavewife (the BJJ Cave-Fiance at the time), get married, self-experiment, and start this blog (here’s my first post from 12/12/12).

The main drawback of the Ohio job was that it was all overnight work, and despite the time off, my sleep schedule was getting destroyed and I was having a hard time recovering.  I tracked my sleep with different gadgets, tried all sorts of supplements, and diligently wore my blue blockers, all of which helped… nominally.  Eventually the costs of the job weren’t enough to outweigh the benefits, so I fixed my sleep issues by finding a new job with normal day time hours in Virginia.

For various non-health related reasons it didn’t work out there and a new opportunity presented itself back here on the West Coast, so here we are!

 

 

We prepared for the move by reading Marie Kondo’s, Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and getting rid of a bunch of crap.  Unfortunately, we still had a lot of crap left, and therefore had to spend time packing and prepping and organizing.  Then once the house was empty we had to make sure it was properly cleaned before we handed the keys back to the land lords.

We also had to arrange the transport of two cars which was a pain in the ass that I won’t get into here.

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We Are Now First Time Homeowners!!!

The BJJ Cavewife and I bought our first home.  We’ve both been renters ever since we moved out from our respective parents homes for college so this was a pretty scary process.   We came out here planning to rent.  Then we saw how bad the rental market was and made a spur of the moment decision to buy.  We had to scramble to get everything lined up.  At one point we literally walked left our realtors office where we signed our offer and walked directly to the lenders office across the street to get pre- approved for a loan.  All without any prior preparation.

When I realized that I literally spent more time researching the next phone I wanted to buy than I did for this house… the biggest purchase of our entire lives, stopped everything else we were doing to get educated.

We found ourselves drowning in research about the housing market, learning about mortgages, flying back and forth for the home inspection, and signing stacks upon stacks of papers.

For people who are used to buying something with the click of a button and having it show up on our doorstep in 2 days (thank you Amazon Prime), purchasing a house was a completely alien experience.  Luckily everything went smoothly.

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I Have a New Job!!!

Once we got to California, I was occupied with getting oriented and acquainting myself with my new job.  The first few weeks were overwhelming.  I juggled learning new protocols, processes, and computer systems with familiarizing myself with all the new sites, colleagues, and ancillary staff… while simultaneously trying to appear competent and collected, despite being completely frazzled on the inside.

We’ve also been trying to learn the ins and outs of our new community, discovering new restaurants and grocery stores… and of course places to train.  We found a Crossfit gym 5 minutes away and a BJJ gym 25 minutes away that we can now call home.

After all these major life events, the BJJ Cavewife and I are mostly settled.  We’re 95% unpacked and have some semblance of a routine going so I can finally get back to self experimenting, blogging, and training!

*Images found here, here, here, here