I realized after the last post that it was exactly one year since I made my first trip down here to house hunt. Amazing to think that a year later, here I am in my house. I mean, that was the plan, but it was a much longer journey than I thought it would be. How did I come to remember? I was watching the evening news and they remarked on how temperate it was when a year previously on that date, it had been the first heat wave of the year and reached 100 degrees. And I remember how I came down on a hundred degree day and my agent and I could barely stand to get out of the air-conditioned car. When I checked my records, sure enough, it had been the first day of summer.

Anyway, some notes that I have been keeping in my mental notebook, working backwards…

1. Today, I did the first load of laundry! Clean laundry from my own place! It was actually slightly less wonderful than it sounds. First, the washer and dryer came with two different sets of delivery people. Each one had to take off my door and then the railing to my basement stairs. One actually rolled the old one down the hill with a push. Now that they’re all in, they make weird noises and exist in my basement, which has no super, just me. So it is filled with spiderwebs, insects, and assorted drops of stuff that I don’t know or want to guess what they are. Still, clean clothes without having to run into anyone!

(This was where I was going to post before and after pictures of my scummy washer and dryer with my new shiny ones, but the basement, if anything, somehow looks worse. So imagine shiny new appliances in this space).

2. I have air conditioning! This involved a repairman who almost didn’t show up but when I demanded it, he finally came, two barefoot little girls in tow. I gave them ice cream and chatted with them while he ran around fixing my A/C. He did find time to tell me that a man of his age (45) should not go marrying a young (now 28) woman who wanted children and what had he been thinking? But, cool air!

3. While at K-Mart last week, I had an epiphany. No one in Baltimore walks around in stores wearing headphones the way they do in NY. Why? You drove there and had music in your car. Why would you put them on to walk into a store? In NYC, I rarely shop without headphones. Shopping in silence is weird.

But also, I just have to say again, that life here, compared to there, is so easy! You need stuff, you get right into your car and drive there. You fill up your car. There is no walking from place to place, up and down stairs, with heavy bags. Then you come home and there is actually space to put things without reorganizing an entire cabinet, should you still have one where things will fit. When people would tell me that life in NY is hard, I would scoff. Now I really get it. It is hard.

4. Speaking of driving, I got hooked up with a parking space near Penn Station and went down to park there before my trip home last week. I got there early, just in case there was an issue and… I don’t know what to say. I wish I had a picture. It was on a hill with a sharp angle, such that the left side of your car was way lower than the right side. The entrance was between two telephone poles with little margin for error. The line of cars was about one car length distance from the other. I tried three times to get into this space but could not, and even those tries made me panicked that my car was about to roll over. So, no space at Penn Station. I’ll have to keep looking. Otherwise, it’s $35 in cab fares every time I come down; this the price of choosing the house near the park and not the one near the bus route.

(I ended up parking in the Penn Station lot – $45 for a week, ugh).

5. You know what I haven’t done? Go downtown. I mostly stay up here and shop: groceries, stuff for the house, etc. I need to do that soon. Next week I’ll be back in New York for some medical things, but after that, I’ll be here for most of the rest of the summer.

6. Lastly, I may be changing the color of the bedroom. Stay tuned…