update of Things
So, um ... we bought a house!
After we got outbid on the house we made an offer on in June, we looked at some more and then some more places - we were quite taken with a beautiful 1898 farm house that has been well preserved and retrofitted for air conditioning - not that it hardly needs it, because it's got plenty of shade trees and it was constructed with air flow in mind, unlike modern places, so opening the windows and running the fans was doing the job okay the couple of times we went to see it. (Mind you: the same features do not keep such a place warm in winter.) We ended up not staying with it, for a variety of reasons - it was further away than we wanted to be, for one (and the same house in a location we'd have liked better would have been waaay out of our price range); we weren't utterly enamored of the school district, for another (though some conversations with my mom and other current and former public school teachers made us a little more sympathetic to schools with lower performance ratings on paper); but mainly, it's the only house like it in the neighborhood. On the - literally - other side of the train tracks, there are neighborhoods with whole streets of well-looked-after Victorian homes; but in this neighborhood, it was this one and a lot of two- or maybe three-bedroom ramblers on what used to be the farmland. We're not like besties with our neighbors now, but it's nice to be at least friendly and feel like a community, and we began to feel uneasy about the idea of being Those People in That House, as though the neighbors would be unlikely to warm up to us; and we could be prepared to work on ways to overcome that uneasiness of ours, and find ways to do it that didn't seem like we thought we were some sort of manor-dwelling landlords or something - until a friend we were talking to about this feeling of ours and about the schools combined the two hesitancies and said something about our kids being the only ones in their school to be going home to that kind of house. That night I had a really upsetting nightmare about the way schools and whole communities can fail kids who don't fit in, and by the end of the next day we had decided the sum total of that house wasn't for us. Which was a pity, but we knew it was the right call.
Since then, we put in an offer and were accepted (with a slight counter-offer) for a place in the district where Himself went to high school (and had a ridiculously positive high school experience), and other good features - so we're closing on it in a little less than two weeks and moving in by the end of August, and having some expansion work begin on it almost immediately because the one thing that is not awesome about it is that it's a little small for how we already live, and a lot small for hoping to put a couple of kids in there eventually. Bonus (really): about six blocks from his mom's place. :-) Another bonus: walking distance to the metro. \o/ Himself will walk to the station and then take a free shuttle to work, on the days when he has to go in to work. I myself will walk to the station and then take the train to work, because the other big news is -
I got a new job!
About six weeks ago, a friend contacted me to ask if I was interested in a job at his office. I said "tell me more" and went and interviewed - and then they decided to hire a social media specialist instead. But not long ago it turned out that they had sort of retroactively decided that the social media-er would be as well rather than instead, and they made me an offer and I gave my notice and I'm starting there on Thursday. (Insurance takes effect the first day of the first month after you start, so getting in before the end of July was a thing.) Bit more of a pay cut than I'd have hoped for, but not impossible (or I'd have had to turn them down), benefits about the same, leave approx. the same as the current job but oddly more reasonable, telework an occasional possibility because I am out from behind the clearance, which makes me so happy I can't even tell you. I never used to particularly mind that I had to maintain the clearance, but a lot of that must have been down to the fact that I almost never used to actually need the damned thing - the work I was doing wasn't intel-related at all. My work still hasn't been, at the new job - I mean, I move commas and semicolons and apply MS Word document styles, for heaven's sake - but the documents have been documenting different things than I used to work on, and I liked it less and less. Plus there have been changes in both policy and procedure since the Navy Yard shooting and the Edward Snowden thing - utterly understandably, in both cases, but they combined with the nature of the stuff I was working on to add up to my day-to-day life becoming a lot less relaxed and groovy than it used to be, and of course I could never work from home for any reason, and in general the job was not a good long-term fit for me. I don't mind most of the people I've been working with and actually do like a few of them, but I will be so glad to get out of there, I may in fact dance and sing.
And for the new gig I'll be able to walk 3/4 mile one way to the train instead of driving 21 miles one way to work. BLISS.
Preparing for the move is, of course, hard. Because the house in its current condition is Too Small, and because there are going to be men working on it for several months right away, we're moving some stuff to the house but some stuff into pod storage until we're ready to have all of it with us. So this weekend we've been taking inventory and deciding what we Really Need and what we can crate up for a while. I think these assessments might shift a little bit once we get a firmer idea of how long the whole process might take - but not much, because we'll have to do the podding and moving before the plans are really set and begun. So. Inventory has been taken, some decisions have been preliminarily made, and I know I have to spend next weekend really getting down to clearing out my closet and shoe racks - there are some things I wear seldom or never because they don't fit (at the moment), but there are some things I should admit to myself I'll never wear again no matter if they fit or not, and get rid of them. This is really hard! A small number of such things can be saved for reasons of nostalgia, but not many. Ditto shoes. I have to just do it. I did it last spring at the old apartment - and I can do it again. Honest!
I did look in one box in our basement that I didn't know what was in there, and right on the top I found a scarf Himself's grandmother had made him, which we had looked for and looked for in the winter and couldn't find, and he'd more or less resigned himself to the sadness and guilt of having lost it. So that was genuinely awesome.
Corn on the cob for dinner. Hurrah.
After we got outbid on the house we made an offer on in June, we looked at some more and then some more places - we were quite taken with a beautiful 1898 farm house that has been well preserved and retrofitted for air conditioning - not that it hardly needs it, because it's got plenty of shade trees and it was constructed with air flow in mind, unlike modern places, so opening the windows and running the fans was doing the job okay the couple of times we went to see it. (Mind you: the same features do not keep such a place warm in winter.) We ended up not staying with it, for a variety of reasons - it was further away than we wanted to be, for one (and the same house in a location we'd have liked better would have been waaay out of our price range); we weren't utterly enamored of the school district, for another (though some conversations with my mom and other current and former public school teachers made us a little more sympathetic to schools with lower performance ratings on paper); but mainly, it's the only house like it in the neighborhood. On the - literally - other side of the train tracks, there are neighborhoods with whole streets of well-looked-after Victorian homes; but in this neighborhood, it was this one and a lot of two- or maybe three-bedroom ramblers on what used to be the farmland. We're not like besties with our neighbors now, but it's nice to be at least friendly and feel like a community, and we began to feel uneasy about the idea of being Those People in That House, as though the neighbors would be unlikely to warm up to us; and we could be prepared to work on ways to overcome that uneasiness of ours, and find ways to do it that didn't seem like we thought we were some sort of manor-dwelling landlords or something - until a friend we were talking to about this feeling of ours and about the schools combined the two hesitancies and said something about our kids being the only ones in their school to be going home to that kind of house. That night I had a really upsetting nightmare about the way schools and whole communities can fail kids who don't fit in, and by the end of the next day we had decided the sum total of that house wasn't for us. Which was a pity, but we knew it was the right call.
Since then, we put in an offer and were accepted (with a slight counter-offer) for a place in the district where Himself went to high school (and had a ridiculously positive high school experience), and other good features - so we're closing on it in a little less than two weeks and moving in by the end of August, and having some expansion work begin on it almost immediately because the one thing that is not awesome about it is that it's a little small for how we already live, and a lot small for hoping to put a couple of kids in there eventually. Bonus (really): about six blocks from his mom's place. :-) Another bonus: walking distance to the metro. \o/ Himself will walk to the station and then take a free shuttle to work, on the days when he has to go in to work. I myself will walk to the station and then take the train to work, because the other big news is -
I got a new job!
About six weeks ago, a friend contacted me to ask if I was interested in a job at his office. I said "tell me more" and went and interviewed - and then they decided to hire a social media specialist instead. But not long ago it turned out that they had sort of retroactively decided that the social media-er would be as well rather than instead, and they made me an offer and I gave my notice and I'm starting there on Thursday. (Insurance takes effect the first day of the first month after you start, so getting in before the end of July was a thing.) Bit more of a pay cut than I'd have hoped for, but not impossible (or I'd have had to turn them down), benefits about the same, leave approx. the same as the current job but oddly more reasonable, telework an occasional possibility because I am out from behind the clearance, which makes me so happy I can't even tell you. I never used to particularly mind that I had to maintain the clearance, but a lot of that must have been down to the fact that I almost never used to actually need the damned thing - the work I was doing wasn't intel-related at all. My work still hasn't been, at the new job - I mean, I move commas and semicolons and apply MS Word document styles, for heaven's sake - but the documents have been documenting different things than I used to work on, and I liked it less and less. Plus there have been changes in both policy and procedure since the Navy Yard shooting and the Edward Snowden thing - utterly understandably, in both cases, but they combined with the nature of the stuff I was working on to add up to my day-to-day life becoming a lot less relaxed and groovy than it used to be, and of course I could never work from home for any reason, and in general the job was not a good long-term fit for me. I don't mind most of the people I've been working with and actually do like a few of them, but I will be so glad to get out of there, I may in fact dance and sing.
And for the new gig I'll be able to walk 3/4 mile one way to the train instead of driving 21 miles one way to work. BLISS.
Preparing for the move is, of course, hard. Because the house in its current condition is Too Small, and because there are going to be men working on it for several months right away, we're moving some stuff to the house but some stuff into pod storage until we're ready to have all of it with us. So this weekend we've been taking inventory and deciding what we Really Need and what we can crate up for a while. I think these assessments might shift a little bit once we get a firmer idea of how long the whole process might take - but not much, because we'll have to do the podding and moving before the plans are really set and begun. So. Inventory has been taken, some decisions have been preliminarily made, and I know I have to spend next weekend really getting down to clearing out my closet and shoe racks - there are some things I wear seldom or never because they don't fit (at the moment), but there are some things I should admit to myself I'll never wear again no matter if they fit or not, and get rid of them. This is really hard! A small number of such things can be saved for reasons of nostalgia, but not many. Ditto shoes. I have to just do it. I did it last spring at the old apartment - and I can do it again. Honest!
I did look in one box in our basement that I didn't know what was in there, and right on the top I found a scarf Himself's grandmother had made him, which we had looked for and looked for in the winter and couldn't find, and he'd more or less resigned himself to the sadness and guilt of having lost it. So that was genuinely awesome.
Corn on the cob for dinner. Hurrah.