My 2024 - how I stress-bought a house, and moved to another country

The red house in summer. There‘s even a tiny little bit of blue sky peeking through the clouds.

I haven‘t written anything here in quite a while, but not for lack of things to write about. In fact, there were too many things happening. I was so busy with all these things, that I simply didn‘t have time, or energy, or both, to write about them as well. So here is my story of 2024 - beware, some of the events are sad and stressful, but it gets better. Saddest thing first: My beloved siberian husky, Aponi, suddenly died. A few days after Christmas - what a way to begin the new year. I was heartbroken, and still am. For 14 years, she was a fixture in my life. While still reeling from the shock of grief, there came trouble with our apartment - first broken heating in winter, then walls covered in mold. So my daughter Charlie and I moved to a different apartment. A month later, a bar opened right beneath the new apartment. This was an old building, without any soundproofing. The owner was uncooperative, and there wasn‘t much I could do about it. I felt like I was becoming untethered in the world. I‘m a single mother running her own business. There‘s only so much extra stress I can take. So here‘s how I responded to all of this: I spontaneously bought a house in Denmark. I got my driver‘s license at almost 40 years old because living in the danish countryside requires a car. And within a few months, my daughter and I moved to Denmark. Whoa. Do I speak danish? Nope. Had I ever been to Denmark before? Once! For a weekend! In Copenhagen, which is literally on the other side of the country. It was like one of these moments you read about in novels, where the main character feels like standing on a precipice of some adventure, and they wonder if they should jump (they always do, or there would be no book). Maybe I‘ve read too many novels, but I jumped too. I made a snap decision. I looked at two houses, I picked the second one, and just jumped into it. So here we are. A lot more stuff happened that is mostly related to the bureaucratic challenges of moving to another country, learning a new language, owning and driving a car for the first time ( in another country than the one you learned to drive in! Don‘t recommend). But we have made it to 2025. I still miss Aponi, and I recently discovered mold in the basement. But it‘s my basement now (my mold?), so I feel fairly optimistic about it all. Im not sure what the big lesson from last year is. I have no wisdom to share here. Sorry. I found out from old documents that our house used to belong to a sea-captain, so Charlie and I have been imagining a hidden treasure somewhere. So far, we‘ve only found lots of spiders, and a window in the attic I didn‘t know about. This is my plan for 2025: Keep looking for the treasure, fight the mold, and write about it all.