Where did July go?

Tim and I went on a date to the California State Fair! Riding the ferris wheel brought back such tender memories of when he proposed to me on the ferris wheel at the San Diego county fair four years ago! 

 I truly can’t believe it is almost August! Exciting things are happening in August like my 27^th birthday and the start of my law school career. August also means that summer (what semblance of a summer we had) is over and it is time to, as my dear friend Ed Pogue says, hunker down. Gone are the relaxing summer days of unpacking boxes. Gone are the evenings refurbishing furniture in the 100 degree central valley heat. Gone are the afternoons spent reading insurance policies, calling banks, changing addresses and finagling other first world necessities. Ahh, how I will miss those summer days…..Okay, yeah, so our summer wasn’t exactly traditionally relaxing. But we did get a lot done in a little amount of time!

We are moved in, almost completely, to our new house. Tim has completed two weeks of teacher orientation and professional development at his new school. Today was the first day that the students arrived! His school starts very early for high school (that’s part of their no nonsense, inner city charter) and so he was thrown right into teaching again! I am so amazed by all the work he has done in the last month. In the span of four weeks, he applied to over 15 jobs, got interviewed at one, was hired, went through orientation, taught himself the California standards for teaching 10^th grade English (which had changed over the last two years), planned for his first few weeks of school, cleaned and set up his classroom, and started teaching! He is resilient, strong, courageous and wonderful! I am SO proud of him!

I think it is good to a certain extent that he will be so busy at this demanding school since I will have my hands full learning how to be a law student! We will both be working hard in our parallel lives and I think that together we will help each other find balance and stay strong without burning out.

I start my school orientation next week and I am excited and nervous. But mostly glad that I will be dusting off my academic brain and relearning how to be a student. I have homework already and today I read and briefed my first case. It took me 3.5 hours for two pages of reading and note-taking. The assignment is just to practice reading and briefing cases and it certainly takes more time and effort than reading silly novels, like Harry Potter, which I was all the reading I did in the last two years! I know that with practice I will get faster at this but I am starting to see that I will have my work cut out for me, especially at first!

In the meantime, I am enjoying the last week of freedom by visiting and reconnecting with my dad’s side of the family; specifically my cousins (well second cousins) who are conveniently close by in Modesto and San Francisco! I never had the chance to spend much time with them growing up so we aren’t very close but we do stay in touch over the interweb. In Guyana I learned to place a higher value on family and connectedness and so I am making it a priority and am truly looking forward to getting to know them better, meeting their children, and being more involved in each other’s lives! I can’t state enough how happy I am to be closer to my family! 

Here’s to the last days of summer! 

My desk (where I will be spending a lot of time in the future!). The office is finally set up and feels very good!  

The built-in is one of my favorite things in the house.  I am enjoying decorating it with art, bowls and pretty things I like.

I took a walk downtown on Sunday while Tim was getting a haircut and look where I ended up! The Governor's Mansion! It is hard to believe that this is where I live now!

On the same walk, basically just around the corner I found myself at the Capitol building! Sacramento is hot in the summer, but it sure is the center of things in California. I forget that sometimes!

Nesting

In Sacramento, while Tim has been off at work at his first week of New Teacher Orientation, I have been nesting in our cute two-bedroom rental house. For a organization freak, list making Virgo like me I thought this would be a ton of fun. At first I thought that days of unpacking, painting, cooking and cleaning sounded like just a bowl of cherries, but the process of moving into a new space post-Peace Corps has actually been a tad stressful for me for a few reasons.

First off, we had only a very vague recollection of what we put in storage so unpacking the boxes was confounding. I found myself saying so very many times, "What the heck is this and why did I think it was worth saving." Examples of the things we stored for two years that we must have thought we would desperately need when we came back are: unopened packets of glow bracelets that we were gifted at Burningman in 2007, Riccola cough drops and Vitamin C that were 2 years expired and an entire medium sized box of toilet paper (granted I will actually use the toilet paper but why in the world did I think that it was valuable enough to store it for two years?!?).  Also, most of our furniture is hand-me-down or we had it before Peace Corps we bought when we were in college and our tastes have drastically changed. I am confident that most of our things can be refurbished with a coat of paint or varnish or otherwise repurposed to update them to our more mature sensibilities. However, that brings me to point #2: 

Responsible budgeting. I believe myself to have a modicum of creativity and do-it-yourself-ability when it comes to nesting but most of my project ideas require at least a small amount of money. I have a wish list of projects that I think would make the house so cute, comfortable and conducive to the healthy, studious lifestyle we want to adopt. Yet all of these projects require moohlah, even for refurbs I need paint or varnish and brushes and rollers, not to mention shelves and rugs and curtains and, and, and.... Well, we have spent the minimal readjustment allowance that PC gave us. So, I just have to keep reminding myself that I have to make do with what I have and build our nest slowly, project by project when we have saved up enough for each task. I know that a home isn't built in a day and that comfortable, organized homes are organic and ought be be flexible and change overtime but I, like Violet Borregaurd of Willy Wonka, want it all NOW! 

Nonetheless, though money and resources have been stress factors in this moving in process I have been able to do some things that make me very, very happy. There are the positive things about our house and neighborhood that I love to focus on to keep things in perspective: 

1. Our house has tons of built-ins and storage space. I know that we will have room for everything we have in the many closets, cupboards, built-ins and garage plus room to expand. This makes the compulsive organizer side of me very happy! 

2. Our neighbors are, as far as we can tell, generous, friendly and kindred spirits. We knew we would all get along when we noticed that their wireless network is named Middle Earth and ours is Winterfell (geek alert!). One family brought us tomatoes from their backyard garden and we, in turn, brought them blueberry cupcakes (which I made from scratch with local blueberries from the Co-op). Another woman down the street is a local winemaker who has a vineyard outside of Sac and makes the wine right in her home on our street! And we hear, although we haven't met him, that there is home brewer on our street too. Tim is looking forward to making friends with him and getting back into the bee scene. There are our people! 

3. I have an oven! I know this isn't a novelty to most of you but after living (and cooking) in Guyana without one for 2 years, I am so excited to bake! As I mentioned, I made blueberry cupcakes from scratch and apple cinnamon muffins and we have only been living here for a week. I know when I start school I will have less time for baking so I am living it up now, while I can. 

4. We can walk to the grocery store. Not just any grocery store but a natural food co-op! Within a 20 minute walk down tree lined streets, we can arrive at a store that sells mostly organic, local, healthy foods, has a killer deli with fresh food ready to eat and a super-freindly staff! Again, we found our people! 

5. We can also walk to: Tim's work in 10 minutes, my school in 15, our bank in 20, a homebrew supply store in 15, a huge medical center in 5, a Starbucks in 10 and who knows what else. We are basically just excited to live in an area where we don't have to get on a freeway (or even in the car) on a daily basis! This will keep us healthy and in touch with our community in a much more personal way and we are stoked about it! 

6. I have gotten crafty with what I have and $150 at Lowes and the dollar store. So far my biggest projects have been painting over the horrid baby blue walls in the bathroom to a tolerable grey, lining all the cupboards with contact paper, turning the funky, chipped built-in cutting board in the kitchen to a work space we can actually use, building a peg board chalk board organizer in the kitchen to hold all our pots and pans (since we don't had room in the small kitchen cupboards for all our cooking gear), making a magnetic dry erase note board for the fridge and finally mounting paintings, mirrors and shelves all around the house. 

7. My favorite thing of all: proximity to family! Santa Cruz is only 3 hours away, Santa Rosa is only 1.5 hours and Oxnard is a slightly more intense 6 hour drive (but that sure as heck is closer than Guyana!). Being closer to our family brings me so much joy! Oma came to visit us yesterday and helped me put the finishing touches on my pegboard pot rack and we had lunch at the Co-op. It was so great that she could come to visit on just a little day trip! Stephan is driving up today to help us move some final pieces of furniture and Mom has plans to come up in August! I feel so blessed to be close enough to see my fam on a more regular basis!

All in all, I know we will be very happy here. The house will come together in time and it is already starting to feel like home. Here are some pictures of how things are coming together. I have some before and after shots from where I have been project-ing and I am totally open to suggestions of other ideas for low-cost home improvement from all my crafty peeps out there if you feel so inspired. Now its off to organize the office filing cabinet! 

My favorite project in the house (so far!) 

Organized kitchen! Makes me smile! Any ideas to nice up the cheap Ikea kitchen island? 

Dry erase note board where we write our menus. Organization! YAY! 

Cutting board "before" nasty. 

Cutting board "after" with contact paper underneath a plastic cutting board surface glued on. Now I am not disgusted to use the cutting board! 

Blueberry cupcake! Yum!

Taking Shape and a Mini-break

Well well well. A lot has been happening in the last 2 weeks! In a nutshell:

We left Oxnard to visit my Dad is Portland, Tim applied for about 16 jobs and got advanced to stage 2 of the interview process at one. Tim worked feverishly to get an interview at said job and I watched the Euro Cup matches with my dad. Tim got called for an interview with the afore mentioned high school but they needed him to come down to Sacramento in a matter of days. To make it happen we rented a car, I drove the 9 hours to Sac while Tim did lesson prep in the passenger seat, we paid for a night in a hotel in Sac, he interviewed the next day while I looked at two houses for rent in the neighborhood and then, immediately after the interview, we drove another 6 hours back up to Ashland for the family reunion that had been planned a year ago. About 30 minutes outside Ashland on the way to the family reunion, Tim got a call that he GOT THE JOB!!!!! We were ecstatic! We reunioned with the family, saw some great plays, ate some good food and had a hootenanny in general, especially since we were seeing our future shaping up and didn't have to worry about much except how to kick the cousins' butts at lawn games. Then we drove down to Northern California where we are presently staying with my Oma while we try to find a place to live in Sacramento (a 1.5 hour drive away). On Monday we spent all day at car dealerships and bought ourselves our very first brand new car (a zippy, but cheap and small, silver Mazda2)! Once we had wheels all we needed was a place to live in Sac and the big ticket items (school, job, phone, car, place to live!) would be taken care of! So yesterday we headed into Sac with my mom and brother to get to know the area bit and house hunt. The second house we had an appointment to see was almost perfect so we put in an application and will hear back on that tomorrow. So, all in all we are feeling really good about how things are turning out!

Today we are spending July 4th taking a mini-break from all this nonsense. We are sleeping in, enjoying the spa at Oma's, and picnicking with Oma and Sampa in the park this afternoon. We don't have to think about cars or jobs or school or work or even furnishing our new house (YET!) because it is July 4th and nothing is open and everyone, including us, should be enjoying this time to rest and enjoy the summer. Tomorrow is another story as it will most likely include another road trip to Sac (yes, we are spending a ridiculous amount of time in cars these days!) to hopefully sign the lease on a new place, get Tim fingerprinted for school and fill out his paperwork and to start measuring out the dimensions of this cutie little house so we can furnish it and get comfortable before Tim starts work on July 16th! But those are all concerns for tomorrow, today we rest and eat watermelon!

Tim and our mini-est cousin picnicking 

Oma, Mom, Me and Eevee walking from the park

My beautiful Oma and cousin Haley

Family reunions, especially with matching tee shirts and talent shows, are hilarious!