Moving to Milwaukee Was the Best Chaotic Decision

In July 2025, we loaded everything we owned into a moving truck, put two kids and two dogs in a minivan, and drove from Long Beach, California to Shorewood, Wisconsin. We had a house we’d bought sight-unseen (well, Mike saw it — I trusted the FaceTime tour). We had no friends in the area. We had no plan beyond “let’s try something different.”

People thought we were insane. Honestly, we might have been.

Why we left California

We loved Long Beach. It was home for years. The weather is perfect. The food is incredible. The beach is right there. But the cost of living was eating us alive, and we’d hit a ceiling on what our life could look like there.

We wanted a yard. We wanted space for the kids to be loud without annoying neighbors through shared walls. We wanted to be able to afford the life we were already living without both of us working constantly just to cover rent. That’s not a California-specific problem, but California-specific prices made it feel impossible to solve.

Mike’s from the Midwest. He’d been talking about going back for years. I’m from California and had never lived anywhere else. The idea terrified me. But at some point, terror and excitement feel the same, and you just have to pick one.

The first month was brutal

I’m not going to romanticize it. The first month in Milwaukee, I cried a lot. The kids were adjusting to new schools. I didn’t know where anything was. The house needed work. I missed my friends. I missed Target on 2nd Street. I missed knowing which taco place was the good one.

Miles had the hardest transition. New school, new routines, new everything — and for a kid on the autism spectrum, “new everything” is basically a full-body alarm system going off nonstop. We spent weeks just trying to get the basics stable.

Zelda, on the other hand, made three friends on the first day and informed us she was never leaving Wisconsin. She’s nine. She’s decisive.

Then it started clicking

Somewhere around month two, I stopped comparing everything to California and started seeing Milwaukee for what it is. And what it is, honestly, is really good.

The coffee shops here are exceptional. I’m not saying that lightly — I’m from Long Beach, where third-wave coffee is a personality trait. Shorewood and Milwaukee proper have shops that hold their own against anything on the West Coast. I found my writing spots within weeks.

The lake. Lake Michigan is not the Pacific Ocean, but it’s also not trying to be. It’s enormous and moody and beautiful. The kids are obsessed with it. I run along the lake path and it clears my head in a way the beach never did, maybe because there are fewer people and more space to think.

The community is smaller, which means it’s warmer. People actually know each other here. Shorewood feels like a small town that happens to be next to a city. The librarians know my kids by name. The guy at the hardware store asks about our dogs. I didn’t expect that to matter to me, but it does.

What it did for the work

This is the part nobody told me about. Moving broke my routine, and breaking my routine broke everything loose.

In California, I was grinding. Working for other people’s companies, building other people’s marketing systems, too busy to build anything of my own. The move forced a reset. We had savings. We had lower expenses. I had time — maybe for the first time in a decade — to figure out what I actually wanted to build.

That’s when I went all in on teaching Claude Code. That’s when the books started. That’s when OohBae Kitchen went from “the kids bake cookies sometimes” to a real business with a website and orders. That’s when hazelq.com happened.

I don’t think any of that would have happened if we’d stayed in Long Beach. Not because California is bad for building things — obviously it isn’t. But because I needed the disruption. I needed to be uncomfortable enough to stop drifting and start choosing.

Nine months later

Miles is settled. He has a school that gets him. Zelda is thriving. OohBae Kitchen is real. I’m teaching, writing, building, and actually enjoying it instead of surviving it. Mike is happy in a way I haven’t seen in years.

The winters are exactly as bad as everyone says. I’m not going to lie about that. January was a personal test of character. But you buy a good coat, you learn to layer, and you find out that cold weather makes you productive because there’s nothing else to do but work and drink coffee.

Was it chaotic? Yes. Was it scary? Extremely. Would I do it again? Every single time.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is blow up the comfortable version of your life and see what grows in the rubble. For us, it was everything.

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