Flying Toilets

Just kidding.

We had a really exciting Saturday night a few weeks ago. It was great. We finally got to do something we'd been looking forward to since before we bought the house.

We (mostly my husband and our friend) finally replaced the inner workings of our half bath toilet! You're probably thinking seriously? this is what you're writing about?! Yes, yes I am. If you didn't have the pleasure of hearing the toilet before it had minor surgery then you didn't get to hear it doing it's best job to mimic a high pitched rocket launch. You could pretty much hear the toilet flushing anywhere in the house.

Of course, I'm not entirely sure any of us really knew what was going on but what could go wrong with one aerospace engineer and one marine mechanical engineer working on it? They both have degrees in defying gravity!" chimed in one of our friends. Luckily the real answer to that was nothing but I quickly envisioned our toilet growing wings and flying away.

It might not have been the most exciting Saturday but it felt pretty good to check a big thing off our list, make our house a little more ours, and learn how to fix a toilet. If I now tend to imagine the toilet in our hallway bathroom flying away, that's okay too.

The Cool Aunt

I was planning to blog about the house and back-up blog ideas included my thoughts on how it is already over 80 degrees F in Houston most days or how I can't believe that there can possibly be as many accidents as there are every day in Houston. Instead I'd like to blog about a conversation I had with a friend last weekend.

My friend is going to be an aunt for the first time. She, like me, grew up with cousins around her age and we were talking about being an aunt without children. I thought back a few decades, to before adulthood, before I grew disconnected from my family, to a time when my childless aunt was one of the coolest people I knew. Sure my other aunts and uncles had kids my age but that meant that I had a relationship with their children, my cousins, but not necessarily them. My childless aunt though was awesome. She spoke to me like I was an adult, or at least it felt that way at the time. I was able to hang out with an adult (who wasn't my parents) and have an adult friend. It made me feel adult and important.

Interestingly, the whole experience was so significant to me that it has made me actively want to have that childless-aunt time with my own niece and nephews. This time that I have now is so precious to me. When I spend time with those kids, all of my attention can be on them- their concerns and interests, their well-being and happiness. I wouldn't trade it for the world.

So here's to all the aunts and uncles without children who get to focus their love, energy, and attention on their siblings little ones.

And just because it's important to start them early, this is a picture of me explaining to my niece about volcanoes around the world...

Settling In

Yes, that's right. We have jumped off a cliff. Taken the plunge. Bought a house.

We began looking for a house last November and had a few false starts with houses that looked great but weren't good choices for us for one option or another. After a particularly stinging disappointment (a nearly perfect house with some serious exterior issues), we were feeling quite discouraged. No more than a few days later though, a new listing was posted and we thought it looked pretty great. No more than a week later, we had put in an offer and were anxiously waiting for news. I, foolishly, thought that our offer being accepted would end the really tense part of the process. Ha! Little did I know...

The details are too long to get into but I'll summarize the highlights of what went wrong here.

Wrong turn 1: My husband was already living (and paying bills) in Texas when I moved here. We didn't bother switching any of them into my name because that seemed like a lot of hassle for no reason. Apparently not. I didn't have enough credit cards to satisfy the bank for our mortgage because I like paying in cash whenever possible. No problem right? I have eight years of bill paying history, all of which reflects good credit. But wait! I'm not still paying any of those bills because I had the audacity to move in with my husband. No luck there. That's okay. I have lots of other payments- like car insurance! Crushingly, I pay my car insurance bi-annually because ... I don't like having to pay lots of bills? Anyway, at this point, we had an actual, legitimate problem. We were told we would need a waiver for my "lack of credit."

Wrong turn 2: We got the waiver! Wait, you're thinking, that's great. That's not a wrong turn at all! At this point, waiver grants, we had no idea why our mortgage was still being held up. After weeks of asking and, eventually, escalating our problem, I was told that "the mortgage process is just very complicated so sometimes we tell our clients what they want to hear." Yup, the bank had just lied about the waiver. Which brought us to...

Wrong turn 3: My new job! Of course, the job came well before we found a house that we were interested in. Applying for a mortgage, I furnished my existing pay stubs as well as my offer letter for the job I was about to start, which clearly stated I would be paid monthly. The bank, in its infinite wisdom, was waiting for me to furnish pay stubs from my new job. They hadn't told us that they were waiting and hadn't considered that our closing, at the start of March, wouldn't allow enough time for me to get them a monthly pay stub and then a credit waiver in time.

It all ended well a very stressful five weeks later and we are now proud home owners! That said, by the time we closed, I was frazzled and stressed by the whole process and wondering what sort of mess we had gotten ourselves into.

It's taken about two weeks but I'm finally beginning to feel excited about our next big adventure- home ownership!

Coffee and Commuting

My new job also brought a new commute. Frankly, it's not that great. I'll be working on ways to improve it as I get more settled into a routine but that's not happening for a little while. Houston has astoundingly bad traffic. For reference, I grew up outside of NYC. Driving in Atlanta is more or less a dream compared to Houston. One Friday morning a few weeks ago, the entire highway was shut down. Not a lane. Not two lanes. The whole, entire thing. It took me two hours to get to work and I have only once in my life regretted the decision not to stay home more than I did that day. In general, it's about a 45 to 50 minute trip each way.

Over the last month of commuting, I've developed a metric by which I now gauge every daily drive. My coffee. Here's how it works:
If my coffee is still hot as I pull into work, it was a great commute.
If I've had a few sips and my coffee is warm but not hot, my commute was pretty average.
If my coffee is cool, my commute was lousy.
If I have no coffee left, I should have stayed home.

Environmentalism Fail

I'm pretty sure my husband thinks I am a rampant environmentalist. I grew up in a town with 30+ mandatory categories of recycling though so I'm more or less programmed to recycle. My Mom was also pretty thrifty and nothing ever left our house without being reused. To this day, I'm pretty sure we have about 100 aluminum pie plates somewhere.

Just kidding. I know exactly where they are. And it's more like 85, but who's counting?

So yes, by Texas standards, I probably am a rampant environmentalist.

Recently, I've been looking for ways to lessen the amount of garbage we produce. At home, I'm pretty good (there's always 'better' and maybe there will be more on that later this year) about this no matter how many times my husband has to roll his eyes as I stop him from throwing something out while insisting "wait, we can use that!!

I realized that I could do better when I am out though. So this week, I brought my own mug with me when I went to buy coffee on the way to work. I asked while ordering if they could use the mug instead of a styrofoam cup and was told they could. I paid and waited for my coffee. Minutes later I watched as the person behind the counter poured my coffee from the exact same styrofoam cup I was trying not to waste into my reusable mug.

Sigh. Fail.

Momma says...

I remember the day in graduate school when I woke up and realized that there was exactly no reason why I could not have ice cream for breakfast. Sure my Mom would probably have been horrified, no matter how much she loves ice cream, but I was an adult. I was on my own. And I was totally going to eat half a pint of ice cream for breakfast because why not?

So maybe not everything our parents tell us is completely legit. For instance, my niece and nephews are delighted to get cookies for good behavior. I'm wondering how old they will be before they realize that rice cakes are not cookies. I hope I'm there to see it. More often than not though, the things our parents tell us are for good reason. Because they were once our age. They know.

When I started driving on my own, my parents had a strict no-radio-in-the-car rule. I was sure it was the lamest, dumbest rule ever. I followed it for a while though because I was pretty sure they would know. I didn't know how they would know but maybe they would and maybe I would lose my car privileges. Of course, they explained to me that the rule was so that I wouldn't be distracted by the radio. Jeez guys I thought to myself it's driving, not rocket science. Years later, and thousands of miles of driving experience later, I could understand. I couldn't believe how unbelievable cocky I had been. Experience does matter and you can't teach it, no matter how much every parent ever probably wishes that they could.

So tonight I was baking some rolls and muffins for the week. Rushing to get everything done before dinner, I put some butter in the microwave to melt and didn't bother to cover it. I could hear my Mom in the background saying "You better have put something over that! You're cleaning it up if you make a mess! But seriously, in twenty years of baking, I have never once exploded butter in the microwave. I know how long it takes to melt it. Despite my spotless track record, I knew exactly what had happened when there was a loud BANG! from the microwave. I looked up abashed to see butter everywhere.

I mean, everywhere. It was dripping down the door. It had somehow gotten underneath the rotating tray. Don't even get me started on the ceiling of the microwave. It was coated and dripping and, in the back of my mind, I could hear how this would have played out at home. I would protest that something like this had never happened before and my Mom would point out that, eventually, it was bound to happen. That this wouldn't have happened if I had just covered the butter like she had asked. Next time Mom!

On the upside, our microwave hasn't been this clean since Thanksgiving. Otherwise known as "the last time Mom visited."

Living the Dream?

I was lucky enough to be able to work remotely for the last few months. It was a huge boon that allowed me to move to Texas, live with my husband and not end up in a really lousy situation with my lease in Michigan. All around, a good thing that I am very grateful for!

That said, after a few months, I had begun to wonder if I was really living the dream. Sure I could wake up 20 minutes before I had to start work. And I didn't have to wear anything more formal than a hoodie. Lunch was easy too and I didn't need to have anything prepared in advance.

I also had no work-life separation. It was too easy for me to work all night long, after working all day long, because my office was also my home. I didn't have anyone to talk to during the day and started to go pretty stir crazy. Eventually motivation was pretty hard to come by with no colleagues, few deadlines and no meetings or phone calls. I used to be a work at home pro, when I only did it every once and a while, but after a few months I was struggling.

After a month of wind-down on the project I had been working on, I started a new postdoc down here in Houston last week. It comes with a hefty commute and a more formal dress code than a hoodie and shorts but it is also providing me with a lot of structure, people to talk to during the day and a challenging set of goals and objectives. Best of all, when I come home at night, I can leave my work at the office (I might choose not to but that's a different issue...)!