Temporary vs. permanent

My sister-in-law has commented several times that she didn't know how we were surviving the move. To be living out of a suitcase for 3 weeks, to live in corporate housing for one month, to move to another apt, to live another month without furniture or our stuff, to not even know which town we were going to live in -- all that was unthinkable to her. And I just shrugged it off, saying it wasn't as bad as it sounds -- the trip was fun, the corporate housing was niiiice, no furniture meant more run around space, living minimally gets me motivated to purge even more "stuff", and not knowing where we were going to live was just a phase. 

When we first got our stuff in the apt, I realized how much nicer it is to live in a place that can pass as a "home" instead of being reminded every time I slept on the air bed that we are in transition. And when I got a taste of it (plus 2 months of fruitless house hunting, plus the thrill of the road trip was long gone), then the whole "being in transition" thing was starting to get old. I was also looking forward to the start of school for routine and the start of making real friends, among other obvious benefits to shipping your kids off to public school. :-) 

Through all this transition, the one part of all this transition that I never was in denial about was the missing of our friends. I started seeing all the places in my daily life that used to have a friend in it now had no one. We initially kept busy seeing a couple of old friends and seeing our realtor more than anyone else. But as the summer wore on and there was not much new to report to old friends and fewer houses to even see our realtor, then sometimes the more I'd catch myself thinking, "What have we done??" I never panicked that we made a mistake moving here. Just more that I had to remind myself that if it took 15 years to get all the friends we left behind in CA, then I've got to be a *little* more patient about how I'm going to get all those friends here.

And then we got this house.

All of a sudden, everything in my mind changes. For one thing, we are still excited -- GIDDY -- about the house. I am constantly thinking about how to make the place look ours, what furniture we'd need eventually, how we'd use which space for what purpose. It's FUN. I never had to think about that when we had an apt and I never bothered window or catalog shopping when there was no where to put anything. I never even bothered decorating the apartment, not even after we got all our stuff, because our lease was 6 months. The only decoration we have is the boys' bedroom walls plastered with their artwork from the summer. Otherwise, boring white walls. But now I can think in color again and I find myself combing Craigslist for deals on extra furniture or looking through catalogs gathering ideas.

But on a deeper level, my heart is finally calm about being here. There's no more, "What have we done??" because for the first time in 4 months, I can look forward and see something concrete, instead of wondering where, when, if ever. I don't have to wonder if we're doing this house hunting wrong, if we're in the wrong price range, if we're going to end up with a dream house or if we will end up with a fixer upper (we ended up with a little of both!). 

And how much in my mind have I put "on hold" because we didn't know where we were going to live: church, friends, neighbors...fun. Not that we haven't gone on fun day trips or explored the city because we have. But whenever we had a free weekend, it seemed like we had to do something towards finding a house, be it going to open houses or hanging out in prospective towns, not for "fun" but more for "research" to see if we like it there.  And on the few occasions when neither of those things happened, it seemed almost irresponsible to have fun when we didn't even have a house.

But now we can think about making friends with neighbors, getting involved with school (although I still have to figure out whether to try to keep Tobey at his current school or whether to switch to our new school mid-year). And even though church could have been decided on independent of house, it wasn't for us for various reasons (ethnic makeup and location of towns for one thing). But now we can think about where to go to church. I had asked Eli's preschool for flexibility in withdrawing if we moved away but now I don't have to worry about that. We can join community activities and not feel like outsiders but instead that we belong. 

We have a town to call our own. A house to call our own. And now, life may go on.

Welcome home

It's amazing to see how God has brought us this far. Upon leaving Sunnyvale, sad as it was, it was really apparent that God was paving the way for us. It started with Tom's job, just a couple weeks before he was thinking of asking his manager if he can telecommute from Boston, there was reorg done in the company and the opportunity to ask fell right into Tom's lap (with a favorable response). The sale of our house went better than we could have ever asked for and our realtor's advice to sell early really paid off. Now we hear about declining markets, even in the Bay Area, and we feel lucky to have just beaten it.

When we got here, we were pretty much settled on Lexington. The more I spent time here, the more I liked it. But the more we spent time here, the more we'd hear about disgruntled residents, often about the competitive schools. The house hunting, while somewhat fun, wasn't quite working out. We had one offer not accepted and another that we pulled out on due to water problems. On both houses we felt okay about not getting them, feeling like God will take care of us somehow. But there were certainly days that I wondered where our house was going to come from.

And then we expanded our search to Concord, which is 2 towns out. It's quaint, quiet and we bid on a house that we really liked. I was unsure about the quietness and the homogeneity, but on paper, there was much this house offered: cul-de-sac, great house, great school (newly renovated). We put an offer only to find that the sellers wanted a lot more and weren't in a rush to compromise. Fine, we'll wait. Then we put in an offer again when another family put in an offer. We were both rejected! Boy, couldn't say we didn't try!

We were really at a dilemma point. We liked both towns, they both had their pros and cons, neither are perfect. So which to choose? I definitely fel tlike we weren't just buying a house, we were buying a new life for us and our kids, what neighborhood they live in, what kind of school they go to and what kind of friends they have. The stress was a bit unbearable at times. I couldn't quite make a decision so I did the only thing I could do: asked God to make it clear, ask God to decide. In a way, whichever town we get a house in is where we would live and yet, how would we choose which houses to bid on if we couldn't decide on a town?

Then this house came on the market, just at the right time. Because we had already loved Lexington, tried Concord, and were open to either. Maybe had this house come on the market even 1 month earlier (which it would have except the selling dad wanted to do the handyman work himself), we wouldn't have been so sure we wanted to be in Lexington because we were in our "Concord phase" at the time. Had we gotten the first house we bid on, we would have been behind a noisy street instead of the lovely cul-de-sac we're on now. Had the Concord sellers not been so greedy, we'd be in a different town altogether, possibly always wondering if we really belonged. But because things happened in the order and timing that they did, we end up with a house that love in a town that we are really enjoying.

And all those pros and cons? We're trusting that God will help us through those cons and we'll remember to thank him for the pros.

And 27 houses later...

We arrived in the area May 16. And now, 27 houses later, we can say: we have a house!

We are super excited and feel blessed to have gotten this house. It seems like we squeaked in our just-good-enough offer just-early-enough. Within hours after our offer was accepted, we found out that they canceled two more showings and there was another family who was prepared to write an offer.

It's the right balance for us. The location is great, a cul-de-sac close to the town center, but not in a neighborhood with a name which raises the price sometimes by 100K. The house is not new (1977) but seems like over half of it is newly renovated (2004). Actually, if the house had been completely renovated or any younger, it probably would have been out of our price range. And now there's some updating leftover to do that I get to choose myself. 

More to come, including pictures and more commentary about how we got to this point in our house search. But just putting it on the record: we are homeowners again.

On the lighter side

I'm having a great time grocery shopping here in New England. Call me crazy but I've always liked grocery shopping. Out of the common add-ons to the stay at home mom job, grocery shopping is the one I don't mind doing at all. Once I get to know the stores, where I can find my staples, where I can find my deals, where I can find new and unique items, I am happy as a clam to go grocery shopping.

I thought it couldn't get much better until I saw that the big name supermarkets here all have self checkout. I don't think I've ever said this aloud but my secret dream growing up was to be a grocery checkout person. Especially back in the day before UPC scanners, I had this "thing" for the clickety clack of the register buttons. Whenever we'd go on MARATHON trips to Best or Bell (remember those showroom stores -- my parents would spend what seemed like hours there getting a vacuum cleaner or a new crystal bowl and it seemed even longer for our item to come careening down the conveyer belt), I'd just hang out in the typewriter section and pretend to check out groceries. Mind you, a lot of times the typewriters weren't even plugged in but all the better because those felt and sounded more like a grocery checkout register to me. Tack on the added expectation from my parents to always hold a white collar job, including high school summers, the grocery checkout clerk dream was even more elusive.

I was as excited to do self checkout as the kids so that I can scan my own items, although they always fight over who gets to scan next. But now there is no clickety clack, just the --beep-- of the scanner and the quiet touchscreen. I only go if I have a small number of items because I inevitably upset the system by not bagging at the right time. 

But now I believe we have experienced the ultimate in self checkout: Stop & Shop's EasyShop. I go around with a handheld scanner, a la bridal registry, and scan as I go. For produce, we use a special scale that will print out a scannable sticker. I bag as I go with 3-4 ready to go reusable bags open in my cart (the best bags are double paper w/ handles -- these puppies have lasted me for three months), testing my aforementioned bagging skills. I think it is the fastest way for me to shop when I have a big load. I solo tested the system while the kids were at VBS and then I took them for the first time last week with the self-scanning system. Granted with the kids, things took more than twice as long, especially because it was their first time. But boy will this keep them more than interested and occupied during grocery trips. They can learn a thing or two, like what the produce #'s mean, how to read money amounts (I make Tobey repeat the price back to me) and bagging items into the right bag (produce, meats, dry goods). 

The only downside to my grocery world right now is how hard it has been to get to an Asian market (drive into the city/almost or halfway around the highway). It's killing me to pay $3.79 for a small bottle of oyster sauce or $1.99 for a block of tofu. So I've heard the 99 Ranch equivalent here is Super 88 and my goal is to get to Super 88 sometime this week. I will stock up on sauce and lots of frozen convenient Chinese goodies that were a part of my cooking repertoire back in CA. And then my world will be complete.

Recent "down"

I mentioned the ups and downs of us having moved here. I think I'm currently navigating through a "down". We're amidst a negotiation (well, a lop-sided one, we are clearly not bidding high enough for the seller so it's almost moot) on a house in Concord. Since we had always been targeting Lexington as "our town", I am still getting used to our recent decision to expand our search to Concord. It has made be reevaluate aspects of picking a place to live that I didn't expect to, like ethnic diversity and proximity to errand shopping. I think I have come to a point for indecision for the two towns -- they both have different pros and cons that if we find a house in one town, I might at first feel disappointed that we didn't live in the other, but then I'll remember the "cons" and then be okay with living in the first. And vice versa. Maybe this is a good place to be because in my mind we can't lose. But there's also a weird feeling of we can't win either.

Through all of this is a fact that keeps hitting me square in the face: we have no friends. I make it sound much more pathetic than it is because we do have old friends around and have gotten together with some of them and for that I'm really grateful. It's just that without a routine and a permanent home base, there are no friends that I would see on a daily or even regular basis, like at school, a small group meeting, at the Y or at church. Especially for Concord, it's hard to imagine life there without knowing a single person who lives there. We know several people in Lexington and I figured if they live there, I could too. But Concord? I've only talked to a friend of a friend who just moved there last year. Otherwise, all other attempts to "hang out" in Concord have just left me wondering whether we'd fit in.

Maybe I really *need* blogging

Wow, I haven't been here since July 7? There have been many ups and downs and having just gone through a "down", maybe I need the outlet of blogging more than I think I do. Reading about the good times on our trip and anticipating being in our Newton corporate apartment makes me feel like that was ages ago. And yet it's a good reminder of how far we've gone and the promise of what's yet to come...

Life without TV

Yes, I'm still here. We've been out of town and we are starting to feel the need to settle. Since I've done as much as I can on Facebook without feeling like I'm completely wasting my time, I thought I'd better catch up on life in the blog.

So things are quiet around here so to speak. During the day, they are quite hyper actually. And after the kids are in bed then they are very quiet. Why? Because we have no TV. Eric & Chia-Chi were right -- we probably were the ones that got them hooked on watching TV at night after we stayed with them for a month. When we are tired and not looking to do anything in particular, we'd flick on the TV. And because we haven't gotten our stuff from the movers STILL, then we are without TV for another 2 weeks.

I used to rely on TV in "the witching hours", the half hour to hour before Tom comes home. I'm trying to cook dinner and the kids are getting a little hyper. TV was the Great Calmer. My laptop doesn't haven't a DVD player so I can't show them a movie. And we lent our portable DVD player to Dennis & Denise so I don't even have that to get myself some peace and quiet. So now I'm down to super simple meals anyway and we watch clips of Word Girl on PBS Online when Mommy wants a nap.

As for nighttime, Tom and I still revert to some screen time, but now on our laptops. If you've seen increased Facebook activity from each of us, there's a good reason: no TV. Good thing it's summer. If I were missing Dancing with the Stars or my canceled favorite, Men In Trees, then it'd be a little more painful not having TV. Apparently there's a Discovery Channel special on the changes in China as reported by Ted Koppel. But since none of our family has cable (NO ONE), we're usually the ones TiVoing for the rest of the family. So this no TV thing isn't just hurting us, it's hurting them too.

So when we get our TV back, I feel like the house will be a little noisier. When I was in high school and staying up late to finish homework, I used to like having the TV on in the background (be it Leno or Letterman) because it kept me company, as if someone else was awake in the house. I feel like our little apartment will come alive a little more when our little 24" TV comes back. But then again, our bad habits will probably be back too.