Back to Blogging!

Soooo…. Hi? IntrovertedJen here. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Almost four years to be exact. I can’t believe it!

I blogged as The Introverted Reader from 2009 – 2016 but I lost that domain in 2017. That’s a long story about a lack of communication on my hosting company’s part and my own oversight, but anyway. It had been over six months since my last post and life was busy so I didn’t worry about it.

In 2015, my department essentially down-sized from two full-timers and a part-timer to just me. I stepped up and handled the load. In fact, I grew it. But by the time I got home at the end of the day, there was nothing left. All I wanted to do was veg out in front of the TV.

Traveling and a New Career

My husband, Luis, and I have always loved traveling. The bug got serious when we went to Hawaii on our honeymoon in 2004 and then St. John in the US Virgin Islands for our one-year anniversary. We were hooked. My family teased us about our “honeymoon” every year because we usually take our “big trip” around our anniversary in October.

My husband took a new job in 2015. He had been working as a paramedic, but that’s a career with a lot of burnout and he was so over it. He transferred into the hospital’s cardiac cath lab and fell in love. He’s always enjoyed cardiology but when he was working side-by-side with physicians to “fix” a heart attack, he was in his element.

Travel Job?

And then the hospital hired traveling cath lab techs. And our eyes were opened.

We met when we both worked in and around the hospital, so we knew that travel nurses existed. We thought it sounded like a really cool lifestyle! We just didn’t realize that his new job could be a travel job. So we talked about it and shelved the idea and then talked about it some more and shelved it again, until we talked about it and realized that if we were ever going to do this, it was time to make the leap. So we did.

That sounds so easy, doesn’t it? It wasn’t! I’m such a creature of habit! And I’m pretty cautious by nature! I need a safety net, and sometimes I even need a safety net for my safety net! With a lot of hand-holding and encouragement from our amazing friends and family, we did it. We hit the road in our travel trailer in February 2019 to spend the next three months in Florida. Aside from the pull of the Florida weather in February, that was far enough away that I couldn’t go home to Asheville, NC too easily, but close enough that if I got a serious case of homesickness, I could be home with a day of driving.

And we loved it!

Luis’s hospital assignments typically last three months. We started in Ocala, Florida; then went to Portland, Maine; Austin, Texas; Newport Beach, CA, and as of June, 2020, we’re in Portland, Oregon. We have had such a great time, exploring (and eating!) our way around the country!

My Life Now

I’m not currently working. I take care of all the chores so that we can have fun when Luis is off. I’ve done a lot of reading over the past year! But I found myself missing my blog. I would get distracted with some other project but I kept coming back to the idea of blogging again. So I decided that it was time to dust this blog off and revive it. And here I am. I have a slightly different name and I’ve moved from Blogger to WordPress, but here I am.

I believe some subscribers from my old blog automatically got pulled over here when I set up this new space. I hope you’ll stick around, but feel free to unsubscribe if you’d like. We’re all friends here.

I’ve tried to get this set up as well as I can before publishing new posts, but please let me know if anything looks weird or functions incorrectly or just seems broken.

I’m excited to re-join the book blogging community, check in on some old favorites, and discover new friends and books! I hope you’ll join me!