We found a place!  We are moving to the country this Thursday, yup, that’s right this city girl is going to be living in a house with a septic tank and well water. There’s an authentic turn of the century (late 1800’s) town a few miles away and it’s darling. It’s a nice balance, we are only 21 miles from downtown Raleigh which is the ‘big city’. When I start to hyperventilate because I will be living in the middle of nowhere I remind myself that NYC & Miami are only an hour away via an airplane and that this is what we (okay, what I ) wanted. My wonderful husband is willing to do pretty much anything to make me happy, even if that means moving 2500 miles from our home to a remote town in the South (granted he will complain about it ad naseum), he must be crazier than I am. Since we signed the lease today I have been mentally decorating our country house. I can’t wait to get the Besotted studio set up, I am dying to get back to work and I am feeling mighty inspired about now. This weekend I will shoot around the property and give you a glimpse into my new (very rural) world!

We were lucky enough to be able to stay at a sweet home in the little town of Carborro, North Carolina.  The town has an awesome co-op with locally grown produce and meats (sorry to my vegetarian friends) and is just really cute.  The other day when we were out house hunting we saw roosters (which I mistook for chickens) on a front lawn.  A front lawn?  We are so not in L.A. anymore. We looked in the area but we couldn’t find anything available before July, which is obviously a little too late for us. We came back to the house early evening last night and it started to rain, it’s been unusually warm and even though it was raining it didn’t seem to get cooler. We left the porch door open so we could hear the rain and let in a cool breeze.  I love how we are surrounded by nature everywhere, even the highways are pretty.  We did see a dead wild TURKEY in the middle of the road the other day, I wasn’t sure, it kind of looked like a vulture, it was not the best looking bird I’ve ever seen. Everything is so new and I’m trying to take it all in.  I keep telling myself, ‘the journey is the reward’, but I would really like to find a place and start our new life.  We applied for a little house in the country, a mile walk to the lake.  It’s six miles to ‘civilization’, but feels a 100 miles away. We aren’t sure if we will get it, but the crazy thing is it’s a huge house, with 4 acres of land behind it and  the rent is less than what we were paying for a tiny, cramped, one bedroom (off a very noisy street) in Los Angeles. The couple’s house we are staying at this week pay the same amount of rent for a house (and a darling one at that) as they did a studio apartment in Brooklyn.  It’s all so surreal.  I promise to keep talking your eyeballs off about this little adventure!

This was taken in Oklahoma, it was more green than I imagined it to be, I suppose I always thought it would be wheat color; I don’t know why, it’s not like I have ever seen an image of Oklahoma from the highway before in my life.  I also thought I’d see more cows and horses, but I didn’t.  I was worried that not seeing any mountains for such a long stretch might make me agitated as it is such a part of my life to look out a window and see a hill or mountain top, but I liked taking in the vast stretch of land all around. Of course, that stretch went on and on. We did not take the scenic route, we took the route that got you cross country in three days route and had miles upon miles of really not much of anything to see. If we didn’t have the podcasts to listen to, I am convinced we would have just bickered the entire way. Someone may have lost an eye, but not anything too serious. Bella only violently vomited over the entire back seat of the new car once. I knew we should have gotten the leather/pleather interior instead of cloth. Coupled with her innate Frito/sweat sock smell the car was a rolling chamber of stink. I may never get the stench out of the vehicle. Tomorrow the quest for a home continues. We are both tired and irritable and just want to find something before the movers arrive. I had my heart set on one place that was above our budget by a few hundred dollars, I pleaded and I reluctantly got my way, with a resigned, “If you want it then it’s ultimately your decision and I just want you to be happy.” Okay, that totally translates to– “If you make me take this I will move here, but will never let you live it down and will bring it up every moment I can.  If it turns out to be a terrible decision than you will be to blamed.” I don’t know about you but I so don’t need that extra pressure, right? He is so stealth with his guilt, it’s almost Ninja like. I am praying that we find something tomorrow, I’ll keep you posted!

I once read that when you hear about a celebrity being hospitalized for exhaustion that it’s a complete fallacy, that it would be near impossible to be hospitalized for exhaustion–I beg to differ. I am more tired than I have ever been in all my life. If I could sleep for a month straight I may still not get back to ‘normal’. We looked at half a dozen places today they ranged from ‘okay, if you paid me to live here I might’, to ‘no way in heck would I live here’. I mentioned to my husband at the end of the day that I was disappointed that we didn’t find anything today. He said he wasn’t, he informed me he anticipates this being the second longest week of his life (the first being the drive here). He thinks I’m a little picky. Whatever…

I didn’t get to see much of New Mexico, being on the highway going 80 mph and all made it a little difficult for sight seeing. What I did see I was quite taken with. The mountains (or were they hills?), had beautiful striations and the colors were magnificent, even the sky seemed more blue. I want to make sure that I get a chance to go back one day. The ride has been oddly exhausting, who knew sitting on your rump for 11 hours at a stretch, Twittering and listening to podcasts could be so draining?  I have been trying to take snap shots as we are driving and have been uploading them to Instagram.  I rarely use Twitter or Instagram, but I usually work from home and find that I don’t have a lot to Tweet whilst sitting at my desktop, ‘oh, just spent 8 hours on Pinterest, uhm, just kidding, kinda.” You see not as exciting. If you want to see what it looks like in Mayflower, Arkansas or off the highway in Memphis, than I’m your girl. You can visit me on Instagram here. Speaking of Instagram, I could be a little late to this party but I found these very cool Photoshop actions that mimic the filters you get from the Instagram app. It’s fun to play with and I especially like that you can use on non-square images.  I used the ‘Earlybird’ filter on the images above, I think it does a pretty impressive job of replicating the app  You can get your own set of Photoshop actions here. I’m in Memphis tonight and believe it or not will be in North Carolina tomorrow.  I can’t wait to start looking for a place to live!

P.S. Yesterday in Amarillo the food options were pretty scarce, we could have eaten at a Chili’s (or Denny’s), I opted for a restaurant called Fiesta something or other–totally inedible. Tonight though Memphis had a P.F. Chang’s I felt like I was at a 5 star restaurant, I have never ever been happier to see a chain restaurant in my life. To say the food was delicious would be an understatement, it was like a delicacy, ambrosia from the Gods. After two days of eating suspect food a P.F. Chang’s was like finding a gold bouillon bar on the sidewalk, just rapturous. Just wanted to share.