Monday, December 10, 2018

Oh, hey, look what's still here!

My old blog! Hello, blog! It's been... good heavens, more than three years. Well.
.
Things are different! We have moved twice -- we left Melrose, MA, reluctantly, after our landlord abruptly decided to sell the house our apartment was in. We had 30 days to find a new place to live and pack up a place we'd called home for more than 10 years. The main complication was that we couldn't afford to stay in Melrose -- the rents there have gotten so expensive that even a studio apartment was several hundred dollars more a month than we could afford. We ended up moving north, to southern New Hampshire -- we found a nice, affordable condo to rent, where we could keep the cats and guinea pigs. Yay! The landlord was a youngish guy who owned the unit -- his girlfriend had just bought a house, and he was moving in with her. It was a great situation! Until... a few months later, when he broke up with his girlfriend, and needed to move back into the condo. Greeeeat. Luckily, he didn't want to break our lease, so we had six months to find something else. The rental market here is crazy -- rents are lower than Massachusetts, but affordable housing is still pretty scarce, so the competition for places to rent is really stiff. We tried to find an apartment to rent, with no luck, and finally decided to see if we could swing buying a place of our own. Luckily, we found an excellent realtor, who was patient and kind and helped us navigate the whole terrifying process, and as of September of this year, we are homeowners! Well, condo owners. We found a nice unit in a four-condo building, in a nice quiet little neighborhood just off the main street through the historic part of downtown, less than a mile from my job (which also changed! But I'll get to that!) and we really like it so far. It's spacious, and full of sunshine, and has an excellent kitchen with a dishwasher, and we can have our own washer and dryer (and after years of sharing, and having to trudge down to dingy basement laundry rooms, having my very own washer and dryer right in my kitchen is heaven). The neighbors are nice! It's still sinking in that we actually own this place! And I never want to move again! Twice in less than a year was plenty, thanks.

And yeah, the job -- I left the Melrose library in January of this year, after getting a job at the library right here in our new city. I miss Melrose a lot -- I enjoyed the job, and loved the people I worked with, but a 45-minute commute each way was not fun, especially since I worked the evening shift. The new job is more hours, and actually has paid time off -- something the old job did not have -- and it's working out well.

Now. let's see if I can manage to remember that this blog is here, and write more often...