Flashback Friday: Apartment Hunting in the Bronx

I have basically spent all afternoon trying to find apartments in Phoenix, which has had me thinking about the last time we looked for apartments.  It was the fall of 2005, and Jason had just moved to New York.  I was living with a friend at the time, and things between us got kind of tense, so Jason and I needed to find a new place to live pretty quickly.

Our budget was $1,000 a month, which, almost anywhere else in the country, seems lush for a 1 bedroom apartment.  However, it was actually quite meager in NYC.  We considered Queens and Brooklyn, two far more hip and happening boroughs, but ultimately decided to limit our search to upper Manhattan and the Bronx.  I felt comfortable with these areas, as I had been living in the Bronx for the past 18 months and commuting through upper Manhattan.  Plus, we figured that we could get more for our money in both space and proximity to the train in these areas.  

Flashback Friday: The Great Christmas Baking Fiasco

I've been doing a lot of holiday baking so far this year.  Well, really, I've baked one particular dessert several different times, and I'm not done yet.  That dessert is cheesecake.  I have a recipe that my mom developed over several years of testing and trying, and I happen to think it is one of the tastiest things I have ever eaten.  It has become my holiday staple, and I pretty much make it for any holiday gathering occurring between Thanksgiving and New Years.  This year, I made one for Thanksgiving, one for Cy's Blessing celebration, and one for Jason's office holiday party.  I am making four for this Tuesday's Relief Society Enrichment Meeting, and I am making at least one for Christmas Eve dinner.  All of this cheesecake baking reminds me of the first time I made this recipe all by myself.

It was the year 2005 and it marked Jason's first Christmas in New York.  We were engaged and sharing an apartment in the Bronx.  We were unable to fly home for Christmas because we had to fly home in January to plan our wedding in April.  It was admitedly depressing to not be with any other family, so I wanted to bring some of my family's traditions to our little Bronx Christmas.  There are two things that make me think Christmas - homemade cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning and cheesecake for Christmas Dinner.  So, never having made either before, I set to make them both on Christmas Eve.

I began with the Cinnamon rolls at about 1:00pm in the afternoon.  I mixed all of the ingredients, rolled them up, put them in the pan and left them to rise.  And left them.  And left them.  They didn't seem to be rising the way I thought they should, but I baked them anyway.  They came out small and hard, and they smelled oddly of play-dough.  I took one out and took a bite and was disgusted to discover that they tasted of play-dough as well!  After examining the flour bag, I realized that, not being a regular baker, I was using extremely old flour! I think it had expired like 6 months prior or something.  So, I started all over.  I don't remember exactly how long the cinnamon rolls take to rise and bake, but it is quite some time.  It was at least evening by this point.

I then began my cheesecake.  After several phone calls to my mom, I had it all mixed and ready to go. The way her recipe works is that, after making the graham cracker crust, you then make the rich, cream cheese filling.  You bake that for about 30 minutes, let it cool for 10 minutes, then put on the sour cream topping and bake for another 10 minutes.  I guess with eating dinner and what not, the process took quite some time.  When I pulled it out of the oven the first time, I was extremely pleased with the results.  Beleive me when I tell you that it was perfect.  There was not one single crack, it was smooth, and the perfect consistency.  I mixed the sour cream topping, and put it back in the oven.  While it baked I took a shower, as I had been baking all day and was tired and dirty.

It was about 1:30am Christmas morning when I went to pull the cheesecake out of the oven for the final time. Oh man, it's hard to talk about even now, four years late.  I pulled the cheesecake out, and as I did, the bottom of my spring form pan popped out of the ring, rose into the air (with the cheesecake on top, of course), turned over and landed with a splat on the floor.  I believe my response went something like this:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I then ran into the bedroom and flung myself on the bed in a fit of tears.  I had been baking for 12 hours and all I had to show for it was one lousy batch of cinamon rolls!  Jason ran in from the living room to see what was wrong, sure I had burnt myself or cut off a limb or something.  When he saw the disaster, being the thoughtful guy that he is, he immediately grabbed a camera and snapped a picture.

Yes, my friends, that is what happens when hot cheesecake, which has not yet had time to set, is thrust to the ground by gravity. It really did flip exactly upside down in the air.  Kind of amazing, really.

That is the splatter effect up the dishwasher.  What you can't see, is that it also splattered clear under the dishwasher.

A close up.

To his credit, Jason sent me to bed and cleaned up the whole mess, after getting photographic evidence, of course.  The worst part was that I was going to miss out on my Christmas Cheesecake!  Fortunately, our good friend Jean was also unable to go home for Christmas and was planning to join us for ours.  I called her first thing Christmas morning and asked if there was anywhere in her neighborhood that was open on Christmas day that might sell cream cheese and sour cream.

Lucky for us, there was, and so I made my second ever cheesecake fewer than 24 hours after making (and killing) the first.  Though not quite as perfect as the first, it was still mighty tasty!

Cheesecake #2

Fortunately, I have yet to have a repeat of that disaster; however, I have been permanently scarred.  While I am fine to remove the cheesecake from the over after it's first baking, I am so terrified of a repeat performance that I insist that Jason remove it after it's second baking, just to be on the safe side.

A Tribute to the Low Man (or Woman?) on the Totem Pole

In our house, there exists a kind of hierarchy of priorities when it comes to those who can't take care of themselves. At the top, of course, is Cyrus. I don't even really think I need to go into detail as to why - he is, after all, our child. Next comes our dog, Jager. Before Cy was born, she took top priority. (Some time, I'll tell you just how much of a priority she was as illustrated by her $1,000 doggy hospital visit - that's another story though). And then, at the very bottom, as a sort of afterthought, is our cat. Even her name suggests little attention or care - we simply call her "Cat". Hers is a story of accidental ownership.

Jager was adopted by Jason the day I left for New York, and she moved with him across the country (and back again, come to think of it). Cyrus was painstakingly planned and tried for. The cat, on the other hand, was discovered by me one December night when I was walking Jager through our Bronx neighborhood. It was snowing and she was huddling in a box. I didn't even rescue her the first time I saw her. I went back home with Jager, and then told Jason about her over dinner after he got home. I suggested we go back out to see if she was all right. We both knew, of course, that if the cat was still there we would be bringing her inside - neither of us is so heartless as to leave a cat outside in the snow. Well, she was there all right and so we brought her in. She was completely emaciated, and most definitely wouldn't have survived the night. She was so weak she couldn't walk. We fed her and made a little bed for her in a box, and then the next morning Jason set to work finding her a shelter. He called nearly every shelter in the NY-metropolitan area. Each shelter's response was the same - "Oh, you say she's inside your house? Well, congratulations on your new pet." The shelters were so overrun that they wouldn't accept an animal that had been taken in. We tried for two weeks to find her a home, and then finally accepted the fact that we had a new cat. That's how she got her name. We didn't want to name her officially when we thought we were getting rid of her so we just kept referring to her as "the cat". By the time we finally decided to keep her, the name had stuck and there it was - "Cat".

Now, some cats are quite fun and endearing...but this one is a little odd. She isn't skittish, by any means, but she can be territorial of spaces and extremely fickle - one minute she loves you and is purring loudly, and the next minute she's ripping your hand to shreds. I still kind of like her, but I'm a cat person - Jason merely tolerates her, on some days more than others. She claws the furniture and can be extremely needy in the most annoying way. She wasn't even supposed to make the cross country trip, but we couldn't find her a home with someone we knew and I just couldn't turn her out on the streets. So she still belongs to us, but kind of by default.

However, despite all of this, she has some cute moments. I realized today that I don't think I've mentioned her on this blog except for as part of our retched subletter experience. Obviously Cyrus is going to get more press time than either of our animals, but Jager at least has a label. So, I thought it might be time to give the cat a little attention, even if only via my blog. One of her few endearing qualities is that she creates some fantastic photo-ops just by chance. Here are some of our more amusing pictures of the cat:

Cat doing Su Doku

For some reason, nothing is as enticing to her as a pile of freshly folded laundry. Now, I didn't place those items on top of her - they were neatly stacked. She wedged herself underneath them for some reason.

Though I think most cats like bags, this one has an obsession with them. She seems to find it her personal responsibility to investigate any bag lying around, and sometimes she finds herself caught up in it. She dragged this bag all over the kitchen for about 20 minutes one night.

We had this bag of plastic bags hanging in our closet in the Bronx so that we could grab a plastic bag for Jager's walks. The cat decided that it made a nice bed. You can't tell in the picture, but it is suspended about four feet off of the ground.

Apparently we didn't feed her fast enough, because she sought out the food herself.

Maybe if she keeps doing cute things, we'll keep her a little longer.

Five Things I Miss About New York

You may remember a few weeks ago that I wrote about reasons why I was glad I no longer live in New York. In that post, I did promise to write about some good things about New York, and that time has come. I supposed when you live somewhere for five or so years there are certain things that you get used to. As I was making my list, I actually realized that there are quite a few things that I miss (not surprisingly, several of them center on food) so perhaps I will consider this just part one of a series of posts. As a disclaimer, some of these things are not particular to New York, and some may even exist to an extent in Portland, they just aren't as readily available to me now. So here they are:

1. The Corner Store. This is a great little phenomenon that I came to rely upon while in New York. We had one within steps of both of the places we lived in New York, and fact had two or three to choose from within a five block radius. The corner store is kind of like a 7-11 or a mini-mart but less clean and with more character. Some were as tiny as a cubicle but still stocked several hundred items. Most were large enough to include a deli with various meats and cheeses and a hot griddle for Delicious hot sandwiches and breakfast items. They aren't really a place to do a large grocery shopping, but they are indispensable when you are in the middle of cooking dinner and realized that a key ingredient is missing. Of course, it's always kind of a crap-shoot whether or not they store will have your particular item. And, the items stocked definitely reflected the neighborhood and specific population where the store is located. Some stores were open 24 hours, but those that weren't almost never had consistent hours. The one closest to us was open as late at 1am and closed as early as 9pm, all depending on the whim of the owner. The stores were independently owned and the owner usually worked the store most of the time. Since we frequented them, they all knew us by sight. (I suppose it helps that Jason and I were two of maybe 5 white people who lived in our neighborhood). We actually have a version of a corner store near where we live now, but it lacks the character and charm of those in New York, and it just doesn't seem to afford the same level of convenience.

2. The Breakfast Sandwich. I guess this is more of an East Coast thing, but I just don't see it much around here. In New York, nearly every deli or corner store, or even restaurant that served breakfast offered some form of egg and cheese on a roll. While this was the basic, you could get it with bacon, sausage, ham or turkey and on different forms of bread. My personal favorite was a bagel. The eggs are fried on a flat-top griddle (not microwaved as in chain establishments) and everything is made to order. The cheese is almost always American (think Kraft singles) unless you request otherwise, but really, why would you? The American cheese melts and makes the sandwich all delicious and gooey. I admit, not the breakfast of champions, but oh so fantastic. And cheap - depending on your location, the basic breakfast sandwich was $1.50. It used to be my little treat once or twice a month to help me on my walk to the Subway. Once or twice I've ordered some form of the breakfast sandwich only to find that it is about three times as expensive and not even half as delicious. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to save my breakfast sandwich cravings for my next trip to NYC.

3. Lizzy's Fajita Seasoning. OK, this one is going to seem pretty silly, but you have to taste this stuff to understand. We found this by chance in one of the less-than-stellar Bronx supermarkets when we were looking for something to season our fajitas. It is a very simple blend of garlic and onion powder and salt and pepper, but the ratios are perfect. We didn't just use this stuff for fajitas - it was the perfect seasoning for all meats and veggies. I don't know why, but it made pork chops mouth-watering. Just last week we used the last of our jar. It cannot be found anywhere in the Western United States, and even when we were in New York, we could only find it in a few sub-par supermarkets. Just to prove how much we love this stuff, I will tell you that we have asked a few of our New York friends to buy us several jars and we will reimburse them the cost plus shipping. It's just that good.

4. Dunkin' Donuts. Another kind of silly one, I realize. (Remember when I said that most of these things are about food? I wasn't joking). Here's the thing: You can find Dunkin' Donuts here and there around Portland, but they are as prevalent as Starbucks in New York City - maybe even more so. Their coffee is better and cheaper than Starbucks (according to Jason anyway) and their hot chocolate is also fantastic. Plus, every now and again you just want a good donut, and Dunkin' Donuts doesn't disappoint. Jason mentioned the other day that all he really wanted was a Dunkin' Donuts so he could get cheap, good coffee on the way to work. I'm not really sure why there is such a discrepancy in the number of these stores between the two coasts. I guess East Coasters just like their donuts and coffee a little more old school.

5. Pizza. Yep, food again. It's true what they say about New York pizza being different. I didn't really get it until I lived there and now have moved back. Other pizza is all bread - the crust isn't so much crust as it is bread with toppings. The cheese is sparse, as are the other toppings. The slices are puny and are kind of greasy. Now, NY pizza is still kind of greasy, but not nearly as noticeably. The crust is think and dense and there is tons of cheese. Yes, tons. The toppings are generous, too. We used to order Canadian Bacon and Pineapple where the Canadian bacon almost covered the top of the pizza. The slices are hefty and usually one slice can serve as a meal. It is just all-around delicious. However, although I miss it, I'm kind of glad the pizza here isn't as good because now I eat a lot less of it!

Wow, I haven't even finished half my list. I guess we missed more about New York than I thought. We'll explore more of NY another time.

Oh How Much Can Change in a Year

Exactly one year ago yesterday Jason and I found out that we were pregnant with Cyrus.  It probably seems a little strange to remember the exact date of that kind of thing, but I do. And I know the date because I remember feeling cramps on October 8, which was the due date of our first baby, the one we miscarried at 10 weeks.  And I remember thinking on October 8th that it was only the 17th day of my cycle (you keep track of these things when you are trying to get pregnant) and how cruel of a trick for me to be getting cramps on the very day that I was supposed to be giving birth.  And then nothing happened. I took a pregnancy test on day 26, and lo and behold, I was pregnant!  It was pretty much the perfect time because I think that if I hadn't gotten pregnant that month, I may have gone just a little crazy - in fact, I'm pretty sure I was already headed down that path.  As I'm sure is the case with anyone trying to get pregnant, it can be torturous every month that you aren't, and I think this is especially true if you've suffered a miscarriage - or at least it was for me.

So anyway, that blessed day came and suddenly our whole perspective changed.  We began making plans and before we knew it, our whole life had changed, and that was even before the baby arrived!  It is a rather interesting sequence of events that have led to where we are right now, and as I've been reflecting on it, I thought I would share.

We pretty much decided right away that raising a child in New York, and especially in the Bronx, just wasn't going to work for us.  Now I know lots of women who do raise kids in the Bronx, and I admire them greatly, but if you don't have to, why would you?  It's just hard in many, many ways.  Plus, we realized pretty quickly that we couldn't pay for child-care on our non-profit salaries, and we couldn't afford for me to stay home on just Jason's salary, while still living in New York.  So it was settled - we would simply have to leave New York.  The first question was where would we go and the second was, when would we leave.

Sometime at the end of October, well before we had told any of our family that there was a baby on the way, my dad called to tell me that the person who had been living in and managing the room rentals in his Portland house was leaving and that if we were thinking about coming to Portland in the next year or so, that we could take over.  Well, that pretty much answered the first question. Portland was where we wanted to live anyway, and now that we had housing it was a no-brainer.  However, we were still thinking we would wait until the end of the summer/beginning of fall to move - it just seemed a more convenient time for Jason's job.

Well, as a kind of side note, we decided to drive to Kansas for Thanksgiving, as that was where our closest family lived and we couldn't really afford to fly anywhere, and, we really didn't want to spend the holiday alone.  (Another key reason why leaving New York was bound to happen).  As we left our family and began the 20-hour drive back to New York, we both realized that we just really, really, REALLY didn't want to be going back there.  We were done with New York, and the sooner we could get out of there, the better.  So on that drive we decided that summer was far too long to wait, and instead, we needed to move before the baby was born.

We put things in motion right away.  We set a "Leave NY" date of February 28th.  We called my dad and told him he was going to be a grandpa and that we wanted to move into his house.  We gave our notice at both of our jobs and at our apartment.  We cautiously started telling people that a baby was on the way.

And then we were off. There was no turning back.  Even as we realized that the job market in Portland was somewhat abysmal. Even as we realized that the cost of moving across the country was going to be astronomical.  It didn't matter.  This just seemed to be the right thing to do.

So we somehow made it work.  We traded in our money-guzzling Saturn Vue (that is another story altogether - one that I may or may not have the stomach to tell) for a mini van with "stow-and-go" seating that would help facilitate our cross-country move.  We sold most of our furniture and cleared out more than half of the random crap that had accumulated over the five-plus years we had lived in New York.  And on February 28th we packed our van and a trailer, pretty much filling them to capacity, and headed west.

We arrived in Portland with a place to live and that was about it.  We had practically no furniture, no job, no plan, really - just a good feeling.  And fortunately, it worked out. Jason found a job that paid enough for us to pay our bills and included insurance (a big deal, I discovered, when you're about to have a baby).

Sometimes, it's hard to imagine that just a year ago our life was very different.  We definitely had more money, but we also had way, way more stress.  Life in New York is stressful, or at least it was for us.  When I saw the word "pregnant" pop up on that little test, I of course knew my life would change (how could it not with a baby) but I don't think I could have imagined it changing this much.  And yet, I'm glad it did.  It now feels like this is pretty much where we're supposed to be, at least for now.

Flashback Friday: The Subletter from Hell

All right, I'm not sure what the blogger protocol is for starting a post series and then interrupting it...but I'm going to do it anyway. It is, after all, Friday, and it's time for a Flashback!

The summer after Jason and I got married we both planned to work at the camp I ran in New Jersey, and therefor would be leaving our apartment empty for the summer. Now, I don't know how common the practice is in other parts of the country, but if you're a New Yorker and you plan to vacate your apartment for even a short time, let alone three months, you better believe you're going to try to capitalize on that and sublet it! So, that is what we set out to do. We posted on craigslist and even offered to pay utilities if the potential subletter was willing to keep our cat for the summer and take care of her (we took our dog with us to camp, but couldn't accommodate the cat).

New York is a pretty hot spot for subletters, and although the Bronx is slightly (or more than slightly) less appealing than most of the other boroughs (except Staten Island...no one wants to live there), we did get a fair number of responses. We showed the place to a few people, but it was a pretty long commute to Manhattan, so no one was interested so far. Then we met Kerry*. She was a law student with an internship in upstate New York and so our Bronx apartment was perfect for her. She came to take a look and immediately wanted the place. We were less sure about her. I couldn't put my finger on it, but there was just something about her that didn't sit right - she seemed a little awkward in kind of a hostile sort of way. Oh, if only I had heeded my gut instinct. But, it was very close to summer and we desperately needed a subletter, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt and we decided to go ahead and sublet to her. I mean, she was law student, after all, how bad could she be?

Despite our hesitation, our good nature and assumption that others are also of good nature took over, and we didn't even write up a contract. We did ask for a security deposit, equal to one month's rent, and then asked for each of the three month's rent to be paid on the first of the month. We packed up our clothes and some of our more valuable items and left them with a friend, scrubbed the heck out of the apartment, and then left our cat and moved to New Jersey for the summer.

Fast forward to August 15th and we haven't received August's rent yet. I called her and e-mailed her several times, but got no response. By sometime around the 25th of August the kids had left camp, but I was staying for another week to close things up, and I still hadn't heard from her. I feared the worst. I had visions of scenes worthy of Law and Order running through my head, and at the very least I was worried about my cat. So I grabbed a friend and drove the 2 hours back to the city. I remember distinctly sitting in the car outside of my apartment, feeling nervous. What would I find? Would she be alive? Dead? Tied up? What other solution could there be to not getting rent and not hearing back from her? Or would I find my apartment emptied of all of my possessions?

Well, I still had a set of keys, so we went up to the door, knocked several times, and finally entered with my key. I cannot describe the scene before my eyes. I literally pushed the door open against a pile of clothes and shoes and the pile continued all the way down the long hallway to the bedroom. The living room was also a disaster. And then I saw my cat. My poor, street-rescued cat had more than doubled in size! She was so fat her head almost disappeared! Before I walk into the kitchen to further inspect the damage, Kerry popped her head out from the bedroom, clearly only half-dressed. And this was the weird part - she didn't say "Hang on a minute let me put some pants on" or "I'm just in the middle of getting dressed, give me a minute" she just proceeded to have a conversation with me while she poked her torso out of the bedroom. I told her I hadn't received rent and that I had been worried because I hadn't heard from her and all she said was, I sent a check, sorry. I was so taken aback by the state of the apartment and by her oddness, that my only response was "I'm taking the cat and going back to camp." My friend still laughs at that statement. It had a ring similar to "I'm taking my toys and going home!"

I went into the kitchen to grab the cat's food and discovered why my poor animal was so obese - there was container after container of cat food sitting on the counter. It was like an all-you-can-eat buffet, 24/7. Now some cats might know when to say when, but not rescue kitty - oh no, she always ate in survival mode. If it was there, she consumed it just in case it wasn't there the next day. So she had been gorging herself on cat food for who knows how long! Then, we left and drove back to camp.

A week later, on Labor Day, Jason and I returned to our apartment for good at about 8:30pm, not sure what we would find. On first glance, it didn't seem to be too bad. But as we looked closer, we saw just how disgusting this law student was. Oh friends, it was ugly. Let's just say we cleaned for three hours before I felt Ok going to bed, and then spent the entire next day trying to get our apartment back. Words are good, but pictures are better. Below, please observe the grossness...

The Kitchen floor, before we even had a chance to sweep up the rest of the stuff on the floor. (No, that's not a real tomato, it's a timer, but still)

Our bed, with a mysterious, scary stain on my Egyptian Cotton mattress pad. That stain went through the mattress pad, the foam egg crate and the mattress! We threw the top two out and got a new mattress a few months later.

The buildup of cat hair on the area rug in the living room.

Where the cat box usually sat. It looked as though it had not been cleaned out once. Then we picked it up and saw this beneath it. Clearly, the cat litter that went over the edge of the box had not been swept up. It took me over thirty minutes to clean this 2 square feet of tile!

I wish this was all. There was pot ash on the coffee table, strange stains on the wood floor that took off a few layers of finish, she had taken our laundry basket and our bathmat, had gotten bleach on one of towels, left an air conditioning unit on a windowsill and turned it pink with water damage, and had left various sundry clothing items, books and jewelry. And it didn't stop there. We continued to find evidence of her damage and presence long after she left. Part of the deal was that we paid utilities. When we got the electric bill for the month of August, it was $200 more than it had ever been, due to the running of the air conditioning unit 24/7. When we got our cable bill, she had ordered pornos on our TV.

Now for the worst part. Remember that last month's rent that I never received? Well, I never received it...ever. I e-mailed and e-mailed and called. Her number had been discontinued and she never responded to my e-mails. We had her security deposit, but there's no way she would have gotten that back after the damage she left, and we still ended up losing money because of the things we had to replace. She also hadn't returned our keys, which started to freak me out. I finally got kind of urgent in my e-mails regarding the keys. A few days later, the keys showed up in several layers of envelope, with no return address.

Some of my friends and family wanted us to pursue her, try to get her to pay her last month's rent. But honestly, I was just so sick of the whole thing and was so glad to be done with it that I just wanted to close that chapter and forget about her. Annoyingly, we continued to get mail for her for several months, and even found an old package addressed to her when we were packing up to leave, nearly three years later! She just would not be forgotten...

We had all kinds of ideas about what we would do differently the following summer - collecting the whole summer's rent up front, drawing up a contract, having a friend in the city just drop by every now and again, trust our gut instinct, etc. However, Jason ended up getting a job he couldn't and didn't want to leave for the summer, so we never had to deal with that again. Which is good, because I'm not sure I would have had the stomach for it anyway!

* Name has been changed to protect the guilty.

Five Reasons why I Don't Miss the Bronx

In the months leading up to our move out of the big apple, Jason and I spent quite a bit of time discussing all of the things we were looking forward to about moving to Portland. Now that we've been out of New York City for a full seven months it's sometimes too easy to forget just how much better life is out here in the Northwest. So, just to remind myself, here are five reasons why I'm glad we don't live there anymore!

1. Parking. I have my own parking spot, and it's all mine! I no longer have to weigh how much I want to go on a particular outing (grocery shopping, the gym, etc) with how willing (or unwilling) I am to give up my current parking spot. I no longer have to worry that if I return home later than about 6pm, I may have to circle the block for anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour and a half. (I wish this was an exageration, but it really isn't - on more than one ocassion we clocked an extra five miles just looking for a parking spot within a five bock radius). And, in order to get a gauranteed parking spot, I don't have to pay $250 a month!

2. Street Cleaning. Related to point #1, but most definitely deserving of it's own point, is that we no longer have to move our car a minimum of three times a week for street cleaning. Yes, that's right, once we found a spot, even if it was right outside of our building and we didn't have anywhere to go for several days, the longest it could possibly stay where it was was four days, and only if it fell over a weekend. Too many times we would find a perfectly good spot after circling for 20 or 30 minutes, only to have to get up at 6:30 or 7 the next morning to find a spot on the opposite side of the street, which could again result in another 20 or 30 minutes of circling. (Wow, I'm feeling all kinds of stressed out just remembering the parking hoopla!)

3. Laundry. I can do laundry any old time of the day I want to, and I can do it in my pajamas! In my first apartment in New York, there was no laundry facility, so I had to take my clothes to a laundromat. In those days, I did not have a car, so I had to haul my stuff around the block. I couldn't very well leave my laundry there, so I had to sit and wait for it to wash and then dry. In our second apartment, we had laundry facilities in our building, but it was almost as if we didn't. See, for some reason, the building managers locked the laundry room at 7pm. Now this might not seem terribly late in the grand scheme of things, but the thing is, we rarely, and in fact, most people in New York rarely, got home before 6 at the very earliest, and an hour is just not enough time to wash and dry your laundry. So, we had to do it on the weekends with every other person in the building who also worked too late to utilize it during the week. Which means, we had to fight for washers and dryers, which wouldn't have been so bad if all six of each worked all of the time - but they almost never did! In fact, the building managers seemed to have a policy that four of one machine had to be broken before someone could come in and fix them. Jason and I seriously considered breaking a fourth machine when we were down to three just so that they would all get fixed (we never did, but we came close). Again, the stress is building at the mere thought!

4. The Subway. Actually, more specifically, the walk to the subway. We lived about 10 minutes from our subway stop, which isn't such a bad walk when the weather is nice...However, the weather is often not nice, and bad weather is just made worse when you have to walk through it! Though it doesn't rain in NYC nearly as often as it does here in Portland, when it rains in NY it rains hard! And, remember, we then had to walk to work in it! There's only so much waterproofing you can do while dressed in work appropriate attire. Then sometimes, it was bitterly, bitterly cold. So cold, in fact, that more than once I actually wimpered while walking to the train! Then there was trying to dress for the weather outside while taking into account the temperature on the subway. For some reason, even though nearly everyone walks through the elements to get to a train, the trains were never set to a temperature that took into account what we had to wear on the walk. So if it was bitterly cold outside and we were bundled up in layers, the subway car would be set to a living-room-appropriate temperature of 75 degrees! Ugh. Yuck.

5. Having control over the temperature of my living quarters. In our Bronx apartment we had radiator heat. Now, with most radiators, you can adjust them with a little nob on the radiator. However, in our building, the super had decided that those nobs were too easy to break, so he just removed them. This wouldn't be so bad, except that the heat was routinely set to about 85 degrees during the winter! So warm, in fact, that having the windows open did nothing. Yeah, those windows that let in that same bitterly cold air, did nothing to the temperature of our apartment! We finally had to simply shut off our radiators all together - it was all or nothing.

Wow. I have a renewed gratefulness for having left New York! There were good things about living there, and there are actually things that I miss, but I'll save those for another post.