2002-03-05 - 10:24 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: The song from the opening titles of "Sling Blade", which won't be going away anytime soon.

This is a twofer -- go back an entry, too.

OK, OK, are you ready?

We found a place to live, and it was NOTHING like what we went up there looking for.

It's better.

Let me start at the beginning.

When we got up to Stacey's house, where we were spending the night, the Sunday Inquirer had arrived on Saturday. There was nothing good in it. Fortunately the local neighborhood paper had a promising ad in it, and we made an appointment for the next morning at 11:15.

After a restless night -- more on that in a later entry -- we got up and paced until it was time to go.

Well, we went to look at it, and it was clean, and a tidy neighborhood, but, well, it was depressing. Dark, cramped. I don't mind small, but I can't really take dark. And since I'll be telecommuting, I will be there all day.

We took applications, just in case, and left. We drove by another house in the area that was available May 1st, and that looked like more of the same. Depressing.

So we began the drive back to Stacey's house, and started re-thinking priorities. Again. We were not going to find a house this weekend. So, maybe we should look into the studio-in-a-high-rise idea and put our stuff into storage.

So we made a few calls, and set out to look at a studio about a mile from Poindexter's future office.

That, too, was depressing. Sigh.

But then!

The woman showing us the studio said that her company had another property at Street X and Street Y. (Sorry, I'm not giving away my address. ;)

Poindexter's new job is at Street X and Street Z.

"How far is Street Z from Street Y?" I asked.

"One block," she said.

ONE. BLOCK.

Oh my GOD. I don't know if I've mentioned before that commute is an important issue in the whole housing search -- Poindexter's preferred maximum commute is 20 minutes. One block is a commute beyond our wildest dreams.

Besides that, the place had just been renovated with "European-style kitchens."

We were both starving at this point -- it was 2pm and we'd had nothing to eat all day but half a peanut butter sandwich apiece -- but Poindexter wanted to go look at it before we ate and I was all for it.

It was nice! The bathroom is hideous (PINKETY PINK!!), but the main room is great, and the one whole wall is all windows, and it faces south.

We were dizzy with hunger at that point, so we walked down to a restaurant and sat and talked about it, and even after we had some food in our bellies, it still sounded like a good idea. We kept trying to come up with a reason we might not want to do it, and couldn't.

So we went back and signed up. Today we got our call -- the studio we picked will be ready on the date we wanted to move, and we passed the credit check with flying colors.

It's gonna be GREAT!!

Poindexter can walk home for lunch!!

We're five blocks from, basically, EVERYTHING!

Not only that, but the building is full of both old people (I've written before about my affection for older folks), couples our age (some with children), and hottie early-20s eye candy checking out my husband (bitch ;).

I still can't quite believe it. This is a WONDERFUL opportunity to find out for certain whether we want to live in the city and whether we can put up with cramped spaces and weird parking arrangements to do so. And even if we don't want to do this forever, at least I'll never have to regret that I didn't try it.

Happily, we know from 5 years' experience that we are quite content always being in the same room, so we won't get on each other's nerves in the cramped quarters. I think it'll be really nice. The only downside I can see so far is that we have no dishwasher, but I expect we'll be eating out a lot anyhow. We even have a small washer/dryer IN THE APARTMENT.

The night we got home, Sunday night, I was a little freaked out. I was terrified, actually. I've been talking for years about chucking all our crap and moving into a studio in the city, and now we are actually DOING it. Well, we're not chucking the crap completely -- though we are donating a household's worth of hand-me-down furniture I can't find anyone to hand it down to again -- but even the cost of storage plus the studio rent is about what we would have had to pay for a decent rental home, I think.

I'M SO EXCITED!!!!!!!

So, now we have to pack up the whole house in a week. Well, not really. We're going to put the furniture into storage and as much packing as we can get done, and then bring up the furniture for the studio. After that, we'll come back on weekends to finish the job and to rent out the house.

Poindexter's doing an amazing job, though. While I'm putting out fires at work and being useless in move-related activities, he's got everything all ready -- the storage space, the moving crew -- and he's already got half the kitchen packed, PLUS he's busy loading the pickup and making donations. I don't know how he does it. I'm going to SPOIL HIM ROTTEN when this is all over.

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