We arrived safe and sound back in Chania…. a mere 16 hours in the travel log this time (an improvement over the 20 hour trip out to NY). Got home just in time for a sunset swim. Ah, it’s good to be back.

Much love to all the family and friends back home, miss you already. See you soon we hope, here on sunny Crete.
- Kristy, Dave and Pita

Our life has suddenly turned into a Clash song. And really, this indecision is bugging me. Maybe you can help?

Kristy unexpectedly got a job offer here. The job itself is not as much a factor as is the viable opportunity it opens for us to stay in this incredible place for the long-term. Why wouldn’t we take it?

Well, there are lots of reasons actually, both for and against staying.

The Case for Going Back Home

We miss our family and friends back home, most obviously. That emotional aspect cannot be overstated. There’s also the not so insignificant matter of my professional path, which isn’t exactly blazing ahead out here.

Buying property, starting a family of our own, building the general financial groundwork for a secure future – these pragmatic goals are all certainly possible out here, just more difficult to reach than back home. This goes beyond any language barrier, which can be lessened with time. To a very real extent, we’ll always be outsiders in this country where being “in” is really the only way to get a fair shake (isn’t that true everywhere?).

Plus, we still call the US (and New York) “home.” That obviously means something.

Why We Should Stay

Honestly, is America still the land of better opportunity? The economy being what it is (we can hear that loud sucking noise, all the way from across the distance!), prosperity is not necessarily guaranteed back home.

We don’t exactly have all the dots lined up on where we’d live, finding jobs… nothing is really very certain after we get off the plane, actually. In many ways, we left our old lives nearly two years ago, and we’d be starting over from scratch anywhere we go.

Instead, we could keep building on the life and friendships (surrogate family, really) we’ve started out here. We could live on this beautiful Greek island – live a simple life, where people know the difference between working to live and living to work. No consumption-driven, rushed, workaday commuter life for us here. Yet most assuredly, life would stay very interesting.

Vote Our Future

We’ve exhausted more than a few pros and cons lists to no avail. Practical reasoning is at war with emotions and ideals, and the result is a stalemate. We are quite literally stuck between two places.

In short: we need some help. Third-party input. Yours! So come on and let me know…

Disclaimer: We retain the right to make a final decision regardless of any popular results. Feel free to make your arguments in the comments below. All views are appreciated. Seriously, though, TheKristyDave is not a democracy. Well, we are but we’re strictly a two-party system.

For those of you who don’t already know it, we have this great friend. This friend who reminds us all the time that we are all friends; sending out birthday notices and hosting parties to make it easy for us. And as far back as I can remember, she has sent each of us a birthday gift. Meg Mixes have become a phenomenon over the years, starting as mix tapes and evolving with the technology to CDs. And even overseas, without fail, each year I receive a CD packed with music to make me smile a lot, dance a little, and open my ears to something new. This year, it came a bit late…and due to no fault of Meg’s.

This morning there was a package stuck between slots in my door. When I saw the square shape and size I immediately knew it was my birthday mix. I grabbed it from its resting place thinking I would throw it in the player to accompany my morning breakfast. As I pulled the package from the door, I realized it crunched in my hands…never a good sound when it comes to anything plastic. A closer look revealed the package was covered in a layer of plastic with this message:

The USPS Mission

It is intriguing to me that the USPS immediately assumes the damage is the foreigners’ fault, but I was more surprised to read that I “can be assured that the country that [they] received this damaged mail from will be notified and will be asked to take steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.” Apparently, not only is the US “liberating” the oppressed in two separate countries, but the USPS is also compelled to bring “justice” universally to the postal systems. In any case, worried more about the CD than the mission of the USPS, I ripped off the plastic hoping the contents weren’t totally destroyed. I found this:

Thankfully, the CD was intact and plays fine…especially considering included in this year’s mix was an original by Christian Vaught (Meg’s husband and another long-time friend)! While there was nothing lost, I think the message from USPS was a little deceiving…from what I can tell by the damage, I think it got stuck in a genuine USPS machine. I can just see a postal employee pulling the totally destroyed package from the machine and saying “Yes! Foreign address! I can say they did it!”

Whether or not the CD made two trans-Atlantic trips, I am very happy it survived its obviously trying journey to bring me a little piece of friendship and home.

We have been blissfully absent of any major American brands (save Coca-Cola, of course) since we arrived here. I have heard there is a McDonald’s on the island, but it is only open for the tourist season and it is in the next town over. Our more “intellectual” city has shunned the presence of such American trash, until the American trash got a new more intellectual appearance.

I have been keeping an eye on the place, and it never seems as full as some of the other coffee shops in the harbor, so I am hopeful that the American invasion will fail. We, in distinct protest of the presence of this place, will continue with our happy adoption of the true Greek coffee: the Frappe.

Mostly, I will be writing about farmers and agriculture and the terrible state of the food system, so for those of you who are already yawning, maybe you can skip it. But Sustainable Table is a great website, run by a great organization that is responsible for a viral animated video that made all sorts of web history and is really entertaining! If you have never seen The Meatrix watch it.

And now that spring is on it’s way (for those of you in the northern hemisphere) go to a farmers’ market, join a CSA, or visit a nearby farmer! I can guarantee you’ll have fun (if you don’t, at least you’ll be thinking of me).

First off, a disclaimer. Yeah, yeah – I know it’s my fault that not much has been posted here. I still haven’t completed this site’s new design and we’re stuck with WP’s default “kubrick” theme. Therefore, we haven’t formally announced the site launch, because, quite frankly, it looks like goat turd right now. And who wants to take the time to write for a site that looks like crap and has no audience.

(This assumes, of course, that once we do complete the design and announce the site, then we’ll have an audience… and the site won’t suck and scare ‘em all away).

Anyway, in the interest of at least pretending this is a working blog, here’s an update on TKD.

After 6+ months living on Crete, thousands of miles away from home, we managed to take a long-awaited trip back to the states to see our much-missed family and friends. We were home for the entire month of November, and our travels included a week-long vacation with the Gowrie constituency in Florida. Then we bumped around between Tuxedo, Brooklyn, Cape Cod, and Rhode Island, visiting and staying with family and friends before returning on Dec 2nd.

Hmmm…. as far as posts go, this one is pretty boring, huh? Well, I’m not supposed to be the author. I’ll get back to the design portion, and somebody else is going to need write more about what truly was a fantastic trip home. And barring that, we will at least upload some photos (soon, real soon… really) and let them do the story-telling.

More words are out there. I can hear them…