City box

On September 30, 2009, M and I closed on our very first home, a midrise condo in a major metropolitan downtown area. Even as recently as June 2009, I was deeply skeptical about our ability to purchase a home in the area where we live, defined by any given statistic as one of the highest cost of living places in the United States. However, once M and I started seriously discussing our options, we realized that home ownership was in fact possible. The stars sort of aligned last year. We were able to take advantage of the First-time Home Buyer's Credit, the decrease in interest rates, and the fact that our home was pre-approved by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) which meant we could have a very low down payment (still comparable to a very reasonable down payment for homes in say, most other parts of the country, but that's a rant for a different day).

We came across our home in one of those fateful moments of chance. We went, we saw, we totally loved. We did not visit too many other places in person, but we looked at listings online for what I can only estimate to be hundreds of homes/condos for sale in a relatively wide range of zip codes within an hour's distance of where we lived at the time. But nothing came close in what that first place offered -- location completely commute-friendly, two bedrooms and two baths, and a new construction. Both M and I have this dream of purchasing a home (house-home, not condo-home) with a yard (or several acres), with lots of do-it-yourself projects that we'd take on and sweat over, but right now we are not at that place in our life. He is working full time and at the time had two years left of grad school, which means we have no time to dedicate to things like mowing lawns, raking leaves, gutting bathrooms, building sheds, and so on. These all sound dreamy for one day, but that day was not now. After many conversations, we decided to go ahead and take the plunge, and commit ourselves to the place we had first considered. That was the easy part. Then came several weeks of insanity.

You hear that there are lots of papers to sign, contracts to read, people to call. You have no idea until you go through with it. They make you feel like you are about to sign away your soul and your first born. You also start doubting yourself as you have to explain every little bank transaction in the last upteenth months. "Sign here, initial the next 43 pages, make 4 copies, fax to this number, email to this person, and meet with so-and-so four times this week." Huh!? It was crazy.

Our initial lender was nice enough but rather sloth-like, so we switched to a different bank and completely lucked out by working with a woman who I can only liken to a blond bulldozer. She promised us we'd close in thirty days, and by golly, she made it happen. August and September of 2009 are a blur comprised of nightly calculating and re-calculating of budgets, and emailing and calling our lender. I think both and M and I were incredulous at first when we realized that we could afford to buy this home, and yet once we decided to do it, the sacrifices we'd have to make in order for it to work started sinking in. There goes my boot habit, his Starbucks addiction, our movie date nights, Thai every week, our gym (I still miss you, Equinox!), and the little insignificant expenses that really add up every month. But, we hankered down, and on September 30, 2009, we became home owners!

Now, you might wonder about the title of this post. Well, "city box" is what I call our little home. You see, we have no yard, no balcony, and we are on the equivalent of the fifth floor. So, literally, we live in a box. An 1,100 square foot box. The first thing we did before even moving in was paint each room. This was the first time either M or I had lived somewhere we could paint the walls, so we went color nuts. A red kitchen, a half-red bedroom, green living room, blue bathrooms (there was a gray situation in there as well but it was recently redeemed).

One thing we learned about being home owners is that you don't have to have everything right away. So what if we lived for nine months with no window coverings in our living room windows? Our view looks out to the hills so no one can look in, and we really enjoyed the view. That is, until I nearly started breaking out in hives at the thought of looking at the black metal window frame for ONE. MORE. SECOND. So, Bed Bath and Beyond, we spent way too much money on your curtains! But, we now have lovely curtains.

So what if we (still) have tension shower rods holding up an amalgamation of shower curtains and old curtains in both bedrooms? They keep out the sun, and they are a vast improvement to the first couple of nights when, I kid you not, we blew up our air mattress and stuffed it in our bedroom window to keep out the light and noise from the train (Oh, have I not mentioned Pete and Bob yet? They will get their own post, I am sure).

So what if it took months and months of internet searching and penny saving until we finally bought our shag rug in the living room? Every day I step on it and smile, happy to have found him for half off at Macys.

So what if we searched high and low for the perfect duvet (who knew there's a word for that?!) until we finally found it for $29 in the clearance bin at Bed Bath and Beyond?

So what if for the first six months, I never stepped foot in any other department than the "HOME" department at Macy's? I didn't even realize it, and frankly, didn't miss it (I miss it now, because my boot habit is starting to rear its ugly head again).

So what if for the first ten months we only had a tiny little round bar table and no real chairs? We waited til the perfect moment and finally have our beautiful seats-8 table with high-backed chairs, from World Market.

It was an incredible feeling purchasing each of our big items, and even our little ones, like our plants.

We've also learned a whole lot. For example, hard water is a bitch. Yes, I said it, it's a bitch! But a $5 purchase of Lemi Shine from Target has literally changed my life. Or that Whirlpool service people might be in the same category as postal office or DMV workers who wish to suck your soul. Or that you should always be very careful about what you believe to be "real" hard wood flooring. It seems like all we have to do is breathe hard, and our hard wood floors dent. Or that black granite counter tops look lovely, but are a ginormous pain to maintain. Every drop shows, so M is constantly wiping them down. I call him "Cinderelly." Or that having a washer and dryer in my own home makes me happier than I could have ever imagined. Or that when you see how many tens of thousands of dollars have gone no where NEAR the principal, and are all in interest or taxes, no one is there to make it be just a bad dream. You also learn all sorts of fun acronyms like FHA, HOA, PMI.

I will be honest, it took a while for our city box to feel like home. But now it has, and I can't imagine not living there with the love of my life -- at least for the next few years, by when, God-willing, our property value will go up and we can upgrade, and start this crazy process all over again!

Update Edition

After much popular demand (one very loving boyfriend), I have decided to come out of my writing hibernation and continue with this blog. I think after two years of intensive reading and writing, I was, what you may call, "over it." Mainly, "over" over-analyzing things to the degree that I felt compelled to write about them, but I have come to terms with and embraced the fact that I shall forever be an over-analyzer, and thus must reconcile with my bitty blog.
Today, I want to catch up on some of the things that have happened in the past couple of months that I have very much wanted to write about, but difficulties arose because I do not want to think about them. To write about something that you do not think about is pretty difficult. (I am realizing as I type that I am channeling the style from "The Princess Bride." Which would be ok if I didn't find the book's style really annoying... perhaps a stylistic rethinking is in order).
First of all, I had to say goodbye to my student status (though, my ID still comes with me in case a theater, any theater, offers a student discount -- and not a dang one around here does!!!). This was difficult for me. I love being in school, I love being stressed for time working on a paper, I love the comraderie that comes with school, and now the "real world" is loudly knocking. Actually, it is a combination of it and myself knocking alternatively. It seems that at times I am more than willing to join the real world, but it does not seem to want me. At other times, the real world is so much in my face that I want to call a time out. Well, school is over and I have a feeling that it is over for a while. I know that eventually I will get the itch. It is inevitable and I foresee it clearly. But the itch to prove myself outside the classroom is much stronger, though vague in where it really lies. With school behind me, I walked foot in front of foot into the real world, and the real world had one big time-sensitive plan for me -- to pack.

I swear, I feel like after I finished school, I did nothing but pack and unpack, pack and unpack for a month and a half straight. Graduation weekend I drove up (in my parents' car, as mine decided it did not yet wish to leave Orange County, and instead decided to break down on me) and came to look for an apartment. Within a week, we had picked out place and signed a lease, and whoa Nelly, was that a big moment! I had signed a lease before, I had in fact signed several leases before. And I had signed a lease with roommates before, but this, this was the first time I was signing a lease -- with a BOY! A BOY that would be there day in and day out, day after night after day after night. So, as any responsible lease signer would do, I left. Well, no, not really, I merely came back to Orange County to begin the loooong packing process of 2008. I packed my clothes. I packed my books. I packed some more books. I packed my toiletries, my linen, my posters, my shoes, and a few more boxes of Penguins (I have many. They are very pretty and shiny on my shelf, sitting side by side, little penguins all in a row). Then, my parents said, "pack this" so I packed some plates and some pots. Then, my parents said, "pack this too," so I packed some towels and some vases. Then, my parents said, "this too, pack it" so I packed some blankets and some patio chairs. Then (well you get the picture). Then, my friend Kristin said, I have a futon for sale, and I thought, we have no couch, nothing to sit on, I must have that futon. So Allie and I drove and packed that futon in the car. More stuff to be packed away. My dad and I got a truck. We filled that truck. We filled that truck with some dexterity that it not a damn thing could move around in there. And on Saturday morning, we set out early on for the drive, me in my now-fixed car (also filled with stuff), and my dad in the Budget truck. We drove and drove and drove, and finally, arrived in Palo Alto. We arrived at my new place. My new place where a BOY also lives. (The novelty has not yet worn off).
For the first few days, all I did was wake up, unpack, store, clean. Wake up, unpack, store, clean. Soon, the apartment was not quite as covered in boxes, not quite as crazy. So, I did what any other person in my position would do -- I left! Well, I had to! I had to go back to Orange County to begin a new cycle of packing.

My parents decided that with retirement would come a slight relocation. Oh, not that far. Only a hop skip and a 12-hour plane ride, a stopover, and another 3 hour plane ride away! They were moving back to Romania, and taking the whole house with them. SOooo everything had to be packed. Organized, packed, tallied, kept score of. All the plates had to be bubble wrapped. All the photo albums had to be sorted. All the trinkets, the toys, the treasures, had to be put into boxes. For a week, I packed. Then, their big ol' container came, and everything had to be put inside. So for three days, we lugged. Then, it was gone. Then, the house looked --- well, it looked full, to be perfectly honest! The couches had stayed. Nearly their entire bedroom had stayed. My piano had stayed (coming back to this later). I was supposed to return to Palo Alto, but I too, stayed. I could not leave yet, could not say goodbye to the place I had called home for the past 15 years. So, another week went by. I slept on the couch (not pleasant), I ate my mama's food (quite pleasant), and I got to see my parents for another few days. But, then, it was time for me to return to my own new home, laden with more things to unpack once I arrived.
Then, the visits started. When Marcello's family came, they brought with them much to be later unpacked. Then, a couple of weeks later, my parents came, bringing their truck (now, my truck) full of things to be likewise unpacked and stored. But two things I could not unpack, and store, were my parents. They only stayed for a few days, then we were off to the airport and I had to watch from outside the security line as they walked away and disappeared into the crowd, without shoes, without me.

This was the packing and unpacking saga of the summer of 2008.

Some more exciting things have happened since school ended. I went to the crazyness that is the Camp Pendleton Mud Run (as an observer, not a participant). I witnessed thousands of people running and sloshing and crawling through mud, and actually agreed that it looked like a grand ol' time. Then, last weekend, I went (also as an observer) to the Wharf to Wharf in Santa Cruz, where even more crazy people ran their butts off for over 6 miles. With all this running frenzy surrounding me, I decided that I too shall run. When I read Sharone's blog about the Disneyland triathlon, I got super inspired to get my big booty off the couch (though in all honesty it is not there that often) and give this running thing a shot. At first, I could barely run for 30 seconds without almost keeling over. This was harder than it looked! But Marcello gave me a good running plan, and after following it for three weeks, today I ran for ten minutes non-stop, and including the warmup walk before I started running, I did a 16 minute mile. Stop laughing! It is damn impressive, for me. Besides the joys of running, M and I have just joined a gym. It is lovely and shiny - and expensive! But I think it will keep me going there, and I am very excited to go all the time. Plus, too many people keep insisting on having weddings this summer, and I must look at least presentable, especially for one particular one. I am actually considering going tanning. (It came with the gym package! I SWEAR!) If you saw how pasty I am, and considered how good I have to look for this wedding, you'd understand. Stop judging!

Besides the running and the potential tanning, my life has pretty much been as domestic as it comes. I am still looking for a job, and it did come as a slight shock when hundreds of employers did not call, come knocking, or sent messenger pigeons, begging me to work for them. Alas, as CNN informed me today while I was on my very shiny treadmill at my very shiny gym, this is NOT the time to be looking for a job. So, while I wait, I have honed my skills at domesticity. I have to say, there is something VERY appealing about being able to go to the mall at 2 in the afternoon after having done the laundry, the grocery shopping, and watched back to back Golden Girls.

I have also had time to catch up on some "fun" reading, though someone may want to update me on what "fun" reading is, as two of those books have included Wharton's "House of Mirth" and Radcliffe's "The Italian," which are not exactly light summer reading. I also read (finally!) "The Godfather" (rave!!!) and am now finishing "The Princess Bride" (eh, half snore, half smile). Next on my list, "Good in Bed."

Ok, my first return to the blogosphere has turned into a marathon, so I shall call it a day.