HJ Waxing Moon

I can't say I'm ENJOYING moving as often as we have been, but I will say that it's been informative. This time thankfully we have officially 6 weeks to move. We get our keys to the new place Dec 20, sadly have to pay double rent for January (and let me tell you how stressful THAT is), but by all rights have access to our current apartment through January 31st. We still intend to finish moving in a timely manner and cleaning up our "old" place so that wall repairs & carpet cleaning can happen to rent it out as soon as February 1st. But at least we can wait until the Christmas Crush is through at Mr. Moon's work to worry about packing & moving in earnest. It also has the benefit of giving us time to snag boxes from food & liquor deliveries at his work and local businesses. No paying for boxes this time! And since we're not paying for boxes, a) I feel less inclined to keep them sitting around awaiting our next move; and b) I got to splurge a bit...

When we were moving in, the landlord did a walkthrough with us. He assured is the bathroom tub/shower area had been thoroughly scrubbed, and the faint brownish color on the one wall of the shower was staining from over the years. You probably already know where this is going, but we're going to take a detour first. The previous tenant also apparently had a fruit fly problem. Not having proper refuse disposal or cleaning supplies, Mr. Moon being here for a week before these systems were in place only made the fruit fly issue worse. IT WAS BAD. There are no pictures. Just me freaking out for weeks. We ended up putting out bowls of vinegar with a drop of soap, and after a few days of less-than-entirely-proper cleaning and refreshing the vinegar, the fruit flies seem to have died off. Thank goodness. We did scrub the cabinets in the kitchen. The area around the handles was nasty, and the shelves were dusty and dirty. We also wiped out the fridge, though that had pretty clearly be...

Mr. Moon has finished unpacking the kitchen, though there are already some rearrangements I want to make when we have the rest of the boxes unpacked. The dining room is still not done, and yes I realize they're the same "room" but for our sanity we needed to check something off. Having the kitchen done means no more eating takeout, which is obviously the financially responsible decision. We're still eating some packaged foods that I would typically make from scratch, but I'm hoping we can wean ourselves off them next month. Right now, we're just being gentle with ourselves and honest about our capabilities. Since Mr. Moon finally caught up on the backlog of dishes, that's been our main focus aside from unpacking: keeping up with the habit of emptying the sink every single night and putting away the dry dishes first thing in the morning. The bedroom is our next priority, since we have a new mattress coming in on Wednesday and must have a path cleared to ...

Moving was a fiasco. The sticker idea didn't work, the stickers were too small. Next time, use the tape.  Very detailed labels are a lifesaver. It takes an extra few seconds to write roughly everything that was in the box, and those seconds add up. But at least include anything specifically important, like NIGHTSTAND FAN or LOCK BOX or what pieces of kitchen equipment are in each box.  The idea of packing things with clothes worked awesomely. Do that!  Have someone in charge of packing the truck who is well-rested, patient, and good at real life Tetris.  Take lots of breaks. It is OK to sit down! Sitting down to pack something doesn't count as a break.  Make sure everything is packed into boxes before the day you pick up the truck. Leave as very little as you can get away with until the last minute.  Standard-sized boxes are a life-saver. Even if you are using non-standard sized boxes, as long as you have a LOT that are the same size and shape, th...

Well after two weeks of apartment hunting, we are ecstatic to announce that we were approved for an apartment today! It was a bit of a nerve-wracking experience, as we are not the most predictable renters. A year and change of "not really renting" + Mr. Moon's former landlord being no longer of this world + my lack of rental history and crappy credit score + Mr. Moon just starting a new job = skittish landlord. But he approved us and that's all that's important right now. We pick up the keys tomorrow! Now that we have a Place in mind, it's on to strategizing the long-distance move. This is where my organizational skills come in handy, but my lack of body capabilities makes things difficult. Thankfully we have a number of good friends who are caring, strong, and follow directions well so it's just a matter of getting them into the right places at the right times and knowing what I want them to do. Of course, there are some things I want to do better for...

This announcement is a bit sullied, but Mr. Moon and I are ecstatic to announce we will be moving back to Seattle. This of course comes with apartment hunting, not the most exciting of activities and worse yet from 200 miles away. The mister and I may have gotten caught up in a Craigslist scam. There were a couple red flags along the way, which made me ensure I asked a lot of questions, had solid answers for everything, did some research and recon, and didn't reveal too much personal information too soon. Well, we still may have gotten caught. I don't know if there will be any identity theft issues, they didn't get much information. But we did waste two days and a LOT of emotional investment to potentially getting an apartment we really wanted, and now we have to start all over. I AM happy to be able to say that we did not exchange any money. The worst blow right now is to my pride. It's frustrating. I'm grateful to my dad for being another pair of eyes to go ...

First let me start by saying: The lot this house was built on was the rock pit for the subdivision, and if you dig more than about 2 inches into the dirt, you get rocks. Solid rocks. There's not much dirt to speak of, and tilling the "earth" for planting is a pain in the--well, everything. Plus, when you add dirt, it just filters into the rocks further to fill them in. As you can imagine, the entire yard got VERY dry this past summer! So, raised beds are the way to go here. Combine this with the old lady with bionic joints, the younger lady (that'd be me) with old lady joints, and kneeling on the ground to plant a garden is simply out of the question. We need raised beds to be at least 18 inches tall (preferably closer to 2 ft) just to be able to reach them from a chair, which means extra wood and dirt expense to build the 4 ft x 48 ft raised garden we want in the side yard. I mean it's literally two to three times what we NEED, since we only NEED a raised bed t...

I made it 14 days which is admittedly the longest I've ever made on these kinds of challenges. I'd love to say there were lame excuses like the ones Nony blogged about all month for why I fell off the face of the planet and didn't post my menu plan or any of my dinners for two to three weeks. Really I was struggling with a major bout of depression, the weather changes plays havoc on my joints, and I had doctor's appointments two to three times a week for the whole month. Whew! For once I'm not beating myself up about having made a goal and failing at it. There were days I COULD have taken a picture of my dinner and posted it, but I decided that I needed to be gentle on myself, give myself some time and space to just be in the moment, to accept the situation. It was oddly clarifying. Mr. Moon and I took a trip to Seattle for Halloween to see some friends. We'd been squirreling away our date-night money for a few months in anticipation of this trip, and we mana...

for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another." - Anatole France First there was packing, then moving, and the last 10 days have been a trial as half the time I spent in New York and the other half I spent wishing I had moved some things and not others. The packing process got so crazy that I didn't quite think everything through, because every time someone came over to help I wanted to give them something to do. It resulted in a few things--like the cleaning towels!--getting moved and promptly LOST. I am struggling with the fact that I didn't pack so many of my own belongings. Things got moved that weren't ours and had to be brought back. I have no idea what is in what boxes for half of what I own, so I can't even find a lot of things. It's making me very anxious. My first goal has been to just accept it as a state of being. I'm anxious. Recognize it, acknowledge it, accept it. I'm frustrated. ...

The packing process is really testing my commitment to eating whole foods, and not eating out. I decided -- ahead of time! knowing this would happen! Yay forethought! -- to do the best I can, and not to beat myself up over my food choices between this past week and this next one. Also any time we are away from wherever our kitchen is set up. Once moved completely and not bouncing back and forth between Portland and Seattle, I will make an effort to do better. In the meantime, I think I've been doing very well. We have a meal plan set up and all the dry ingredients necessary for the next few days' meals. The kitchen being trashed on Wednesday so that I couldn't even make myself lunch, I went to Chipotle--besides being a not-so-guilty pleasure, at least most of what they have there is natural and organic. The ingredients are identifiable, at the very least. But we got back on the home-eating bandwagon as soon as that evening and have been doing very well since. I'm proud ...

You can find more detailed information about grocery shopping price books at Get Rich Slowly and Organized Home (both links take you straight to their price book articles) so I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, as a kitchen manager and chef, I have been sold on the concept of price books--they're imperative to costing recipes. I haven't really used them outside of work, though. Not because I don't think you should, but a) because I did it at work and didn't want to do that at home too; and b) because I have a head for numbers and am obsessed with getting the best deal, so I do very well with that without writing things down. When I moved from Michigan where I knew all my prices (and had determined that Shop At Meijer was the best way to save money) to Seattle where I didn't know the prices and had a lot of other projects on my plate, I didn't pick it up then either. Nonetheless, I think it's a good idea. I have heard a lot of peopl...

For the past three weeks, my partner (who needs a nickname!) and I have been getting ourselves together for The Big Move. As the more organized of the two of us (and the one who manages the household finances anyway), I have taken on the responsibility of a lot of logistics management. This is something with which I have a great deal of experience in my personal life and especially my career, so it comes fairly natural. "Natural" doesn't make it any less stressful or exhausting though, and it's been a struggle to keep everything together. Still, I have learned a few things that would be worth sharing for anyone trying to move longer distances. Set a date and stick to it. The best piece of advice I ever received was from the friend who helped me decide to move to Seattle. He told me to set a date, make myself financially (or socially) responsible for it if I can, then just stick to it. It helps to relieve the uncertainty of The Unknown, and a lot of plans can't...

I spent the first 18-and-a-half years of my life in one home. Then the week I graduated high school, my parents bought a house and we moved (a whole .7 miles, the trauma!). After that, it seemed I was constantly in a state of flux. I was back and forth around town between the dorms or various apartments and back to my parents' house a few times until I was 23, when I moved in with my Grandma after a bad break-up and urgent move. The plan was that I would be back out on my own pretty quickly, but who can give up living in a house where you have your own sitting room in the basement and cheap rent? Especially when it comes with peace of mind for the family that Gran was getting checked in on regularly. Well, when you feel the call of the Unknown, you go. And that's how I found myself deciding a couple days before Christmas one year that I was moving to Seattle. In three weeks. I had all the "right reasons" in the world. The Michigan economy was still tanking with no e...