Off-off-piste

In June 2008 I started this blog, which I called Off-Piste as a nod to taking a different road, or rather, paving an totally unknown road, into the next chapter of my life. I ended my very first blog post with:

So there I was: jobless, newly certified as an Ashtanga yoga teacher, shacking up with a guy I've been dating for about 5 minutes in a sublet we can't afford next to AT&T Park in San Francisco, and I've just decided to move from Washington DC where I've lived for three years to see what sort of life I can make for myself in San Francisco....

What happened next has been well chronicled in the posts that followed: we found a place to live in which we urban camped for a while, I started a company with a guy in DC, which failed shortly thereafter, leaving me unemployed again. In spite of being unemployed, Eric and I lived a full and celebratory life: we took a number of wonderful trips including Joshua Tree National Park and a week in Maui, we went skiing in Tahoe several times, we climbed Mt Shasta, and we explored the city and surrounding areas by bicycle, on foot, in kayaks and even on a motorcycle. We spent more than our fair share of time in wine country. I did eventually get a job, my 'dream job' in fact, and I rejoined the working world this past March, which has brought adventures of its own.

One evening in July, as Eric and I were enjoying "retirement" (we try to take at least a few minutes of our retirement every day just in case we don't get to retire later in life for any number of reasons), I commented to Eric that life at that moment in time was as easy as it will ever get. It was so simple! So blissful, so peaceful, so easy.

God or some other deity or universal life force with a mischievous sense of humor must have overheard me because the very next day I found out I was pregnant.

It was without a doubt the most exciting and wonderful news I have ever received and it was also perhaps the biggest single shock of my life.

Apparently, this is what living Off-Piste is all about: we're doing this a little differently. And the remarkable thing is that, while this wasn't "the plan" (possibly because there was no "plan") it is actually probably the best way to start the next chapter of our lives together that we could have come up with.

Telling friends and family has been a lot of fun, and many have been as caught off guard by this news as we were. When Eric told friend Anne from grad school that he's going to be a Papa her response was:
"You're getting a dog?!"

When I shared the news at work, it disqualified me for a long-term project they had been moments away from staffing me on. The colleague who would have managed me on that project told me:
"I have had a lot of people do a lot of things to avoid working with me but you are the first one who has gotten pregnant to stay off my team."*

And so, we continue Off-Piste. If I were starting this blog today, it might read something like this:

So there I was, not much more than six months into my dream job and already nearly four months pregnant, two weeks away from getting married in a hot air balloon, and seriously questioning the wisdom of becoming parents in our teeny fourth floor walk-up apartment in a neighborhood where the sidewalks often feature human poo, among other things...

This is going to be interesting!


*My response: "If having unprotected sex is what I need to do to stay away from you, I'm willing to do it." I think this made him uncomfortable.