Getting closer

... to having one of these!

I'm sure you're asking, "Hey, weren't you looking for a house?" and yes, we still are. Today, we checked out several of the ones D and I screened from the list he saw two weeks ago (remember the Valentine's Day viewing marathon?). And we have prospects. Real, honest-to-goodness potential places with price points we're willing to consider, with some negotiation.

The next month could be very, very interesting.

But what about the kitty? Well, we promised ourselves that when we finally got a house, we would get a cat, and now that we may actually have a home in our near future, I can almost feel its little paws kneading my lap. In fact, we're hoping to adopt two cats at the same time so they'll have companionship when we're not home (which will certainly be the case for a good part of the day since D and I hope for both of us to have jobs after I finish this degree).

So the details. Without giving actual identifying information away, of course:

The first place we saw today was one D really liked because of the detailing in the molding (baseboards, crown, bordering the doors and windows, etc.). Most of the places that were built in this area lack molding in some if not all of these spots. So D was quite taken with the quality of the construction and the materials used. I agreed that it was nicely done, but the kitchen had some problems -- a glass-topped electric stove (troublesome for cooking because the heat isn't well maintained) with poor ventilation and no way to install a fume hood without going through some serious renovations. The family room also needed a built-in bookcase to be knocked out in order for us to be able to put our couches and TV in a formation that makes sense (not blocking main pathways, doors, etc.). The master suite was fine, as were the numerous other bedrooms, but overall, the layout didn't feel right to me. "This isn't home," I said as we headed to our next location.

The second place had fewer bedrooms (one less) but had a lovely kitchen. The master bathroom needed to have its carpet replaced by tile, which also led us to think about other improvements we might prefer in that space -- redoing the shower, perhaps. The entire home smelled a bit diapery too, but that's because the family living there has two very young children not yet toilet-trained. I imagine that'll go away (not like pet odors). All in all, a nice space laid out in a way that flowed well. Even the office attached to the master bedroom didn't seem odd (even though it sounds a little unusual). The space is separated by French doors that we can put curtains over -- it could become a nice library nook, I think.

The third place is kind of fuzzy to me, which is not the best sign -- if you can't picture yourself in the space, it's probably not "home" either. This one is located on a nice cul-de-sac where our kids would eventually be able to play, and the back of the house opens onto an enclosed yard as well. Good kitchen, decent master bedroom, despite some slightly odd window placement. What feels weird in the layout, though, is the living room and family room. They're side by side, with a large picture hole cut into the wall between them. This means there's an openness to the space (good) but the areas are in some ways required to coordinate visually (limiting). I kind of imagine my living room being more formal than the family room, so to solve this problem, I'd probably just use the family room for sitting and turn the living room into a library (line the area with bookshelves and maybe one smaller sofa?). Blocking up the hole would make the two spaces feel tight, so that's not really an ideal fix. Anyway, because of this, it feels like I'm trying to force my lifestyle to fit the home, which is not what I want.

The fourth place is a townhome. It is new construction, and the floor plan makes incredibly good use of space. But I'm having a hard time picturing children in it. The main floor is great for entertaining -- the kitchen is open to the living and dining areas, which are fluid. But where would kids be able to play while D and I are cooking? Not feasibly around the good furniture. There is a small office on the main floor behind the kitchen, which could be used as a playroom, but it's small, and I imagine it would be confining for any active kid. There's a bedroom in the basement of the townhome that could be used, but again, it's not where kids can be supervised when they're young. There's no good place for them to play outdoors either as the community will have traffic going in and out of it (no lawns or yards adjacent to the property). So, as I said to D, the place is a phenomenal retreat for us, but it would delay when I'd want to have children. I'd want to put it off until we were ready to buy our next house.

The fifth place we saw is also new construction, but it's priced higher than the range we'd been looking in -- D just likes the builder. The home we're considering there is larger than anything else we've looked at, so the price is justified, but we'll still have to see how much it can be talked down. The house's layout is also a bit busy -- living, kitchen, and dining open to each other in ways that are a little disorienting as you're walking through the space. As D put it after we left, "You need to feel grounded wherever you are in the house." We both certainly had moments of "What space am I occupying and where should I be going next?" as we were touring.

The last place under consideration isn't one we saw today. It's in a great neighborhood but is a bit smaller than the other places we've been looking at. We'd have to buy some sort of butcher block to add counter space to the kitchen. Other than that, no real complaints. This home has been on the market for a very long time now, though, which makes us wonder if there's something we don't know about it.

Our next step is to meet with our realtor when I come back for spring break and come up with our strategy for putting in bids. I think we'll pursue House No. 2, then Nos. 6, 3 and 5 (in that order). In the meantime, we need to get a loan preapproval letter, which D is shopping around for. I'm in disbelief that we may actually have a home before I come back from Little U. on the Prairie. What a dream that would be! Oh, let the housing gods be with us.

Time for dinner now. D is trying a new recipe for chicken stew, and he insisted that I should blog so he could do the cooking as a treat. Whatever's on the stove smells delicious ...

Things that are hard to believe

So about time slowing to a crawl -- it sped back up again on Friday and continued to move at Mach 2 until I finally finished teaching today. Holy SMOOK, as my mother would say (rhymes with book because she has a slight accent, which is really cute). When we were driving my car to Little U. on the Prairie a little over a year and a half ago, we got passed by a semi, which startled her and elicited said phrase.

My students are done with their first papers, after much last-minute consultation. I was a wee bit cranky after office hours yesterday because I had students sending me drafts to look at, less than 24 hours before the final versions were due (I sent them back, telling their owners that it would be impossible for me to provide reasonable feedback in time for them to revise). I also had students dropping in asking me to tell them if their work was "good enough yet." I make no grade wagers, people! One student, after I began reviewing his draft with him and making suggestions, even had the nerve to ask me to write down what I was saying. I was so incensed that I didn't respond -- nothing good would have come out of my mouth at that point -- and merely underlined a word or two as a reminder of what we'd focused on (also to keep me from launching into a diatribe on Kids These Days and Their Issues of Entitlement). I'm still reeling from my disbelief. I'm not that much older than they are -- how is it that I (and my peers of similar age) inherently understood when we were undergrads that this is a completely inappropriate request?

Okay, enough of that; I hate saying things that put my students in a poor light, but this one was just too much.

I turned in my own essay on Wednesday (cannot believe I got it done in the midst of all the paper craziness). So now I can finally think about packing! And indeed there's quite a bit -- D and I have more or less decided that I'll do most of the boxing for the move in May as it will save us a lot of money. I'd like to transport what I can in the next few visits so there's less to deal with in the middle of finals week. Clothing seems like a good idea. Also all the foods I can't eat but don't want to waste. We have friends coming to visit from Idaho during part of my spring break who will love the Honey Bunches of Oats and cinnamon streusel Frosted Mini-Wheats I've stashed away.

I'll leave you with this series of photos from a tulip plant a friend of mine brought me when I had her over for brunch last weekend. I took these over the last four days as they bloomed just to mark the progress of something else besides my essay. Here's to a quick end to winter!

Guess what time it is?

Well, actually, now I don't have to.

Lately, I've been especially busy working on a research paper for one class, writing my essay for the other, and grading. Most often, I do all of that on my laptop, and it's easy to forget to look at the clock -- well, less so for that last item, but I do occasionally get mired down trying to understand what some of my students are trying to say in their papers. So I'll miss the specific time after eating a meal when I'm supposed to check my blood sugar to make sure it hasn't done something bad.

Enter the desktop alarm clock gadget (above) from the Windows Live Gallery. D found it for me yesterday, and I'm completely smitten. You can choose what music it plays when the alarm goes off, and you can put it anywhere on your screen. So now I have the perfect little reminder, and I don't have to worry about forgetting to test -- or be preoccupied with remembering while I'm supposed to be concentrating on work.

Also on the subject of time and distractions: I will be packing to go to Seattle again in exactly one week, and it feels like the earth's rotation has suddenly hit a very slow crawl. I got home today after teaching and felt enormously blah thinking about the wait. Maybe it's because of the weather (freezing with no end in sight); maybe it's because I experimented with another soup recipe that I ended up liking only marginally (but I don't want to waste food, so I've been eating it for dinner over the last three days). Either way, I'm cranky and want a change. Tonight, I did make some improvements on the soup -- it's another cauliflower-based one that was supposed to be seasoned with curry powder, but since I realized at the last minute that I didn't have any, I went with celery seed as well as ginger and garlic powders instead. The ginger didn't quite work out (I thought it might be all right since there were carrots puréed into the mix). Anyway, it turns out that a generous grating of parmesan cheese cuts the ginger flavor down to size. And tomorrow, I can move on at last to something different.

Sigh -- I want to take the night off but I can't even think of anything I'd rather be doing (besides the impossible, curling up on the couch with D after dinner to talk or just sit in happy silence). Arrgh.

On endurance

I know it's been a while since I last mentioned the house hunt D and I started this past summer. We've been watching sales in our area since the economy took its nosedive after September, and it's been unclear what the local market is doing. Sales are generally slower in the winter, yet homes are still selling at more than 95 percent of their list price in the neighborhoods we're considering.

Of course, the percentages are fudged a bit as they're calculated on what the most recent price was -- not what it was before it was lowered and relisted. So we're still trying to get a handle on how much negotiating room we have. It is a buyer's market, but if there's something we like, we don't want to lowball our offer so much that we get shut out and end up losing to someone else's bid. Supposedly, if we come back too quickly with a higher offer, we'll be setting ourselves up for tougher negotiations. Says my dad: "Just don't blink." Sounds like a game of chicken to me.

We've been checking in on the market every few weeks, by which I mean that one of us sets up a time to look at properties with the realtor from the listings she's been sending us, and then we evaluate what seems to be available at the price we're considering. What you get for your dollar seems to be improving somewhat, but it's not ideal yet. I went out during my Thanksgiving break while I was in town and saw seven places in about five hours. A bit tiring, trying to remember floorplans and construction quality, etc., for each site. Or so I thought. This past Saturday, D went out again and saw eighteen homes in eight hours. And then he reported everything he saw to me in amazing detail, drawing maps and diagrams to boot! "I think I wore her out," D said (referring to our realtor). This is a first -- she's a dynamo. He was unfazed, though, and went looking at seven more places on his own on Sunday. The plan is to go back to our top picks when I'm in town at the end of the month.

It's been a couple days of digging deep for willpower on many fronts. I'm working on an essay that's due in a week, one I'm actually excited about for the first time in many months, but it's slow going. My workshop is being led by a really excellent visiting professor, which is helping a lot with the motivation. She's been terrific at guiding discussion on other essays so far, which wasn't my experience during the fall under someone else (and I wasn't alone in that). I'm glad to have a fresh start this semester and a sense of hope for this particular piece -- I just wish I could see the structure for it more clearly. For now, the work is more of a meditation. I guess that's all right as long it finds some sort of ending point.

I also knocked out comments and grades on my students' latest writing assignment over the weekend. Thank goodness for enrollment caps! It's definitely more work having two sections, but it does mean I get to teach my lessons twice. Since I see my classes back to back, I get to figure out what worked well and what I need to tweak after the first run. It's nice to have the chance to do that, especially when you can see marked improvement in how students respond the second time around.

As for things health related, I'm making some progress there too. I used to do 45 minutes of cardio at a pretty decent clip each day on the elliptical machine, with intervals of high resistance to make it more challenging. Needless to say, after the switch to low-carb foods, that wasn't something I could maintain anymore (no quick energy available). It was frustrating -- I had to cut my workouts to 30 minutes on low resistance the whole time (and even that was tough to get through). But in the last week, I've been able to raise the resistance by one level, which means my body is adjusting. Perhaps another notch up in a few weeks? We'll see.

Okay, break time's over. Time to get back to the essay.

Quotes for the day

End of the week at last. It's been a particularly tiring one since I've been holding extra office hours for my students, who are consulting with me on their first formal papers for the semester. The time spent will be worth it, I know, as I've already helped a good number of them focus their work (which will mean better papers in the end and a nicer grading experience for all involved). But now I'm exhausted!

After I got home today, I did manage to schedule a survey of my apartment for next week with a moving company, which is very exciting. One little bit closer to being back with D! The person doing the assessment will be here Wednesday morning to see what I've got at my place and to run some estimates on the cost -- with or without packing services, with or without shipping my car, etc. The ballpark quote the company gave me isn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be, and if I can save money by packing things myself (all but the really fragile stuff), that will be good. I don't mind that part; I just hate the heavy lifting.

I think we've decided that I won't be driving the car back unless I can find someone to do it with me. It's very tempting to go it alone anyway, though. There's something attractively symbolic about the idea of that journey back to Seattle through the mountains and across the Continental Divide. The picture I've had of this homecoming for the last year and a half is an earthbound one, an arrival that allows me to pass beneath the sentinel gaze of the Cascades -- not the airport's TSA. The image at left is one that D took about 80 miles east of home as the crow flies (it's more like 120 miles by highway). How lovely a welcome that would be, to be shepherded home in the end by the firs I've missed. As much as I've enjoyed seeing Seattle from the window of a plane, I'm not especially taken with the idea of a reunion at Sea-Tac. It feels too transient: everyone there is going somewhere else and the jets momentarily on the tarmac are really denizens of the air. The trees, though, are rooted -- willingly.

D and I have had what feels like too many years of wandering from one corner of the U.S. to another, with career shifts to match. I'm ready for an end to that, especially when it comes to choosing a profession to stick with for more than 24 months. At the same time, I think the work it took to get us to where we are is important, and I don't want to negate that. I'd probably be much less certain about my job interests without having had the graduate school experience and the chance to take another crack at teaching. The first attempt (seventh graders in the Bronx) was a near disaster, and I ran away into editing (at a newspaper in Texas) but didn't feel challenged enough. So here I am.

I had to read Mary Catherine Bateson's Peripheral Visions for one of my classes this semester, and there's a really great passage in it that addresses the idea of indirect and broken trajectories. I'll end with it here, just because it makes these last few years feel like they've had purpose, even if they've been hard.

In my recent work on the ways women combine commitments to career and family, I have been struck by how commonly women zigzag from stage to stage without a long-term plan, improvising along the way, building the future from "something old and something new." For men and women, résumés full of change show resiliency and creativity, the strength to welcome new learning, yet personnel directors often discriminate against anyone whose résumé does not show a clear progression. Quite a common question in job interviews is "What do you want to be doing in five years?" "Something I cannot now imagine" is not yet a winning answer. Accepting that logic, young people worry about getting "on track," yet their years of experimentation and short-term jobs are becoming longer. If only to offer an alternative, we need to tell the other stories, the stories of shifting identities and interrupted paths, and to celebrate the triumphs of adaptation.

On the elasticity of time

Mmmm good visit. It was over too soon, but we filled it with so much that the weekend actually seemed longer by the end than we expected it to be. Definitely a positive thing, but talk about messing with your body clock (and never mind the jet lag)!

There were several new things to see. First, the latest addition to our living/dining area:


This is an original scroll painting that a good friend of mine brought back after she visited China last year. We took it to the local frame store (the same one that provided something fun for one of our other decorating projects back in January) and had it mounted in a shadow box. This is the first piece of large-scale original art we've ever owned, so it was exciting to have it finally ready for proper display. Apparently, D had to borrow a coworker (and the coworker's truck) to get the painting back to our place and up on the wall. Now our space really is starting to look like a home and not a temporary residence!

Next, the birthday project, as I mentioned in an earlier post. Back when we were getting the painting mounted, we also ordered a frame to use for a jewelry board, which D offered to help make as a gift to me. The frame I chose arrived last week, so we went shopping for fabric to cover the foam insert that goes inside. (The idea is to stick sturdy pins into the board so you can hang necklaces, bracelets, etc., on them instead of having everything get tangled in a jewelry box.) We found a wonderful store that specializes in material for home decorating and quilting, so the fabrics were really luxe and just the thing to use as a background for displaying pretty baubles. There were so many options at such good prices (especially what we pulled from the scrap pile) that we ended up picking out several swatches. So now the jewelry board has its own wardrobe:


The fabric currently in the frame is brocade and the other samples are dupioni silk, the majority of which were D's finds. I think D was almost having more fun than I was digging through the offerings -- it's the artist in him that I love.

There were new things to taste as well over the weekend. D and I hadn't had Indian food for a long time, so after he picked me up from the airport on Friday, we went out for lunch at a place D discovered not far from his office. To my delight, it seems that most curries are not a problem for my new diet (have to watch the rice and naan, though).

In our own kitchen, we tested out a cornish hen recipe on Saturday and a Hungarian goulash on Sunday; both were excellent. They also require significant cooking time! The hen has to be slow roasted and the goulash requires a lot of simmering. Maybe this is why we felt like we had a longer weekend than we'd anticipated -- watched pots and all that. But we were certainly never bored, so it was a good sort of time stretch.

There were some old things I got to revisit on this trip too, several of which I hadn't seen in years. I flew on United this time because I had a voucher I had to use -- it was from last March's flight fiasco -- so that meant connecting through a completely different terminal in O'Hare. When I was little, my family did most of its traveling on United, and often this required us to use the underground passage to get from one concourse to another. If you've ever been through this tunnel, you'll recognize it now:


I used to love the rainbow of neon lights zipping along the ceiling with the moving walkways below (I thought those were as much fun as the rides at Disney World). Going through the passage this time was a reminder of that. In Seattle, too, I got a little nostalgia jolt -- I landed at a gate that requires you to take an underground train to get to the main airport building. I had completely forgotten that I had been there before until I saw the waiting area. Something about the floor tile pattern (strange, I know) and the dim lighting dredged up the memory: my family had come through this part of the airport en route to Vancouver when I was thirteen. Funny to look back and see myself then, a kid with no idea she'd be returning to Seattle years later, married and hoping to settle there for a long time.

All this because of a travel voucher ...

My return trip didn't evoke such old memories, but it did have a surprise for me and D when we stepped outside this morning: snow. We knew it was in the forecast, but it wasn't supposed to arrive until Monday evening. So the blanket of white on our mountain was a bit unexpected (though certainly not unfamiliar to me this winter on campus). I guess you might call this an old experience in a new context? It's the first time I got to see a fresh snowfall there, and with the lightly coated branches of the trees arching over the back roads we took to the airport, it was quite lovely. I thought I was sick of frozen precipitation -- enough to believe I didn't want to see it anywhere at any time for the remainder of the winter -- but I guess I was wrong.


So anyway, I'm safely back in my other place of residence. It's after 11 p.m. in Seattle, which means it's way past my bedtime here. If only I could make the next few hours of sleep feel like more than they'll be ...

An early valentine

Four years ago, D and I got engaged in a little stone pavilion overlooking Central Park. The day was warm, so the weekend crowds were out in force and the snow on the ground was turning to slush. D still bemoans the latter effect -- he wanted to kneel when he proposed -- but I'm very glad he didn't. I'm shy, and we would have had quite the audience.

Romantic that he is, D had managed to acquire a rose (he still hasn't told me from where), which he then concealed in his jacket while we were out and about in Manhattan. When the moment was right, he pulled the flower from its hiding place. I think I was so distracted by the magic trick that I didn't realize D had tied the engagement ring he'd chosen to the stem. (And there was also the whole "Will you marry me?" bit that had me slightly giddy!)

Since then, oddly enough, we haven't really had this day together to commemorate -- after I finished teaching that June, I moved to Texas and worked on the night desk of a newspaper for two years, during which D and I never had a day off in common (his job was Monday to Friday; mine was Friday to Tuesday). Then I got into graduate school, D got his job offer, and here we are. Fortunately, I'll be on a plane in a few hours for a long weekend in Seattle, which will make up for having to give up today. I think a celebratory date is in the works for Saturday. Whether it's a night out or a night in, I have no preference; it will just be nice to have the uninterrupted 24 hours together. How I've forgotten until now those awful seven-day work weeks in Texas. Compared to that option, I think this commute is actually more manageable, which is saying something.

Packing calls. More from Seattle (or after it)!

Process vs. outcome

Just to show that personality tests can be a source of interesting contradictions, let me direct you to these results from another quiz I came across. Apparently, on the spectrum of famous female icons, I rate as a Marilyn Monroe. I won't quote at length about what that entails -- see the profile for all the specifics -- but I will say that despite my more "masculine" brain, I definitely experience the "constant push and pull involved in trying to make up my mind" and "procrastinating because of fear of failure" that they mention. More often than I'd like! Well, I guess the previous quiz wasn't testing for how I came to my decisions ...

Speaking of choices, if you're ever wondering whether to use low-fat cheese instead of the full-fat kind in soups that call for them, don't skimp. I had my first not-so-great results from a recipe I tried last night for a cauliflower-cheddar soup. After you've puréed the cauliflower (enhanced with onions and fresh garlic), you're supposed to add the cheese and let it melt into the broth and vegetables. Low-fat cheese -- as recommended by the cookbook I got this out of -- doesn't quite melt into those gooey ribbons of comforting deliciousness you expect. It curdles, or something like it. Don't get me wrong; it's entirely edible and tastes absolutely fine. But it looks a lot less palatable. Oh well, something to remember for next time.

Four days and then Seattle! D and I are trying to make plans for our little weekend. We have a Netflix movie all lined up for delivery and a small craft project we want to work on -- we're making something that's a combination Christmas and birthday gift for me, and the first part we need has arrived. Pictures to come, of course.