Austin

It’s been over 6 months now since I left Austin and moved back to Seattle – how time flies (when you’re having fun or not?) – and I can reflect on my brief fling with Texas.  Whatever my thoughts are on my current situation, I can definitively say that I am doing a lot better back here than I was in Austin.  Austin was an immensely and frustratingly disappointing experience in every aspect, and I’m not in the least bit sorry to leave it behind.  I don’t necessarily regret giving it a go there, but the combination of terrible living experience and the worst job environment I’ve ever worked in meant that I was desperately unhappy and that it was not going to work out for long.  Which is a shame, because I had such high hopes – Austin is always ranked highly as one of the best cities to live in the US, and it has a relatively affordable cost of living (at least compared to the West Coast) that meant I could have afforded a great first home.  Perhaps if a few things had been slightly different I might still be there – but that doesn’t really change the fact that Austin offered (and offers) very little of interest to me, and I struggled adjusting to the new environment and climate.  So perhaps it just wasn’t meant to be.