Homesick

I'm homesick.

"Home" is hard to define:

• The place where your feet are.
• The place where your wife and kids are.
• The place where you feel at...well....home.

I don't feel at home in Austin.  All the social and physical trappings of having roots here just aren't here yet:

• We don't have a real house.  We have an apartment with a yard.  It's nice enough, but nothing about it feels like 'home' except for the occupants.
• We don't have a church.  Realistically, we're not even close.  Everywhere we've visited, coming up on 10 churches at this point has been some combination of too.  Too loud.  Too small.  Too doctrinally unsound.  Protestantism, as ever, remains a mixed bag once you go somewhere else.
• The water here is genuinely terrible.  For one thing, tap water is hot, not cool or cold.  There seems to be mix of limestone and sulfur in that's just hard to take.  Everything reasonably potable is filtered or bottled.
• I don't have the friends and colleagues I left behind.  I knew this was part of the deal.  I felt called to come to Texas, but I guess I didn't appreciate having people who really knew me.

There are positives, of course.   My wife and daughters seem to be flourishing, amid the many homeschool groups and activities of Greater Austin (Cedar Park and Round Rock, in particular).  We're able to save for the first time in our life,.  Work couldn't be more stimulating.

Sometimes, I mope.  It's a thing for me to just hit a depressive cycle every so often and I guess just looking down and seeing no safety net beneath us has me homesick.  I miss being able to relax, though I'd suppose that's my own neurosis.