The holiday weekend and returning to work

Firstly, it is HOT.  So hot, it made the news on CNN, hot.  I have wisely spent my time indoors due to the hot, sitting next to the air conditioner in my apartment.  So I've spent a lot of time watching Star Trek: TNG and in general doing my best to spend as little as possible...

I have started work on selling the houses we still own in Denver, because they have been nothing but trouble the last few years...and if we are going to relocate out here or anywhere else we can't have those mortgages counting against us as far as house is concerned.  I still miss my husband and little girl, but I've managed to make peace with myself enough to function instead of longing constantly to go home. 

I realize that due to the way life works...home probably will be changing sooner than I hope.  As long as whereever home is contains my husband and daughter (and hopefully our roommate, who is an all-round awesome person)...I'm happy.  As long as I am away from them, all I can do is soldier on, make the best money I am able, and work to lay the foundation for them to come join me as soon as we are able to manage it. 

Relocating out here though, has made me take a long, hard look at what I want in life...and more importantly, what I DON'T want.  Out here has a lot of advantages work-wise, with the tradeoff being lifestyle...if I want the lifestyle and schools that are my goal for my family, I'd have to live 2 hours away from work in order to be able to afford it.  If lifestyle becomes the higher priority, then work has to be someplace we can afford to have a lifestyle, where work doesn't cause as big an impact...and potentially offers more benefits. 

Finding daycare out here has proven to be a nightmare and a half...all the good daycares/preschools have waiting lists a year or longer...and even the average ones cost double what we're paying now, at a minimum.  It's impossible to justify moving little girl from a daycare she loves that is cheap (relatively for an infant) to one out here that's subpar in comparison to her needs...if there were one even available. 

Keep in mind when I say lifestyle, I'm not talking going clubbing.  I'm talking about a safe, kept-up neighborhood with good schools, within decent driving distance of things to do on the weekends, and where the housing doesn't make us house-poor.  Ideally my dream area would also be safe enough for us to go walking at night.  The area I am currently renting an apartment in is absolutely NOT that place.

So we'll see what happens...due to the cost of living (primarily) and the commute to work versus lifestyle ratio, I'm strongly considering looking elsewhere to relocate.  Where ever we go has to be an area stable enough to support us job-wise for at least the next 14 years...so little girl won't have to swap schools all the time. 

There's absolutely nothing wrong with my job, the clearance, or the pay.  But I find that D.C. is just too fast-paced for me.

I am home for the time being...

Little girl has changed so much in the month I've been gone...she didn't reject me at all, but seemed happy to see me again..she's so smart, and it shows.  She's walking now, if one holds her hands, and she will stand for a few minutes by herself if she's distracted by something, until she realizes that she's standing and gets excited...then she loses her balance and falls over.  Every time she stands or takes a few steps without any help, she gets so excited she wiggles and bounces...and then falls over.  She seems to dance when she's excited, and it is the cutest thing to witness.

So far, no matter how many tumbles she takes, she's back up with a giggle, and Mommy and Daddy are her favoritest-ever climbing toys...along with everything else...she has perfected crawling over the top of the couch from our kitchen (the family room is sunken, so the couch tops are in line with the kitchen floor) and tumbling down onto the couch itself...she thinks this game is much fun, and despite Daddy's attempts to stop her, she seems quite happy to do it for hours and hasn't managed to fall off yet.

She's a little tumbler, she is...she doesn't mind in the slightest hanging upside down off the couch, giggling like crazy.  She's determined to crawl forwards down the stairs...I can't imagine the balance that takes, but she does it now as fast as it takes her to get up, she gets down.  She seems to have excellent balance, even so little, climbing and crawling on everything.

She's especially fond of crawling into laps.  It's heart-melting...she'll crawl her way over, stand and turn around, then sit in your lap.  I was sitting on the floor with her and she spent most of the time in my lap or trying to dance, holding onto me with the biggest grin.

Someone taught her to do raspberries, so now she'll do it in response to something...if Daddy asks her what a raspberry is and makes the noise, she'll move her tongue around a little and out will come a dainty little raspberry...it's adorable.  She thinks it's hilarious because of the reaction she gets from adults, so she spends a lot of time giggling.

Her appetite hasn't slowed down at all...her daycare continually tells us the sheer volume of food she eats.  At home she'll eat an entire grilled cheese sandwich, a handful of baby puff snacks, a cup of dilute juice, a cup of mandarin oranges...she definitely does NOT have a dainty appetite...and never has.  But to look at her...I saw her after a month of not seeing her everyday and she's ... muscular.  And tall.  But REALLY muscular...most adults would kill to have a back that looks like hers, and she's 1!  Her little thighs are still a-chub though, which is great.

I could go on for hours, but really...she's the cutest, smartest little girl ever.  I'm totally biased, of course...but being home again in our big, quiet old house...there is no better panacea for my lately tired, hurting soul.  It's peaceful here...and that peace is the main reason I suffer so much when I am away.  Life is chaotic...but...it's so utterly RIGHT, I cannot describe it any other way.

A pic of the happiest little girl there ever was. Seriously.  I will have many more videos and photos to post from the first birthday party!

Round and round we go, chant the voices in my head...

As the day I head home gets closer and closer I can hardly WAIT...even though I know that it is very likely lil girl will cling to Dada instead of me...when she and I came home from a vacation together in CA, she freaked out when she woke up to Dada changing her instead of Mama.

I have tried to prepare myself for the hurt that I will feel if M rejects me in favor of other, lately more stable figures in her life.  I hope she won't forget me, or resent me for being away for so long...I still haven't decided if this job is for me permanently.  It will be a few months yet, and having seen the cost of daycare out here first hand, I'm not eager to move M until we know for absolutely, positively SURE we're making a transition out here. 

Still the little voice in the back of my head, that selfish little voice, whispers every so often, "Oh, you could afford to bring her out with you, and wouldn't you both be happier??"  But then the doubts begin to circle around the little voice, chanting, "But how do you feel about the job? Is it definitely for you or not? You shouldn't drag her out of her nice, safe, relatively cheap daycare that she loves for out here amongst strangers!  What about the neighborhood, what if something HAPPENS and she's with you?!"

*sigh*  So the voices argue back and forth in my head all day long while I try to concentrate on doing my job.  The job I'm not sure I like enough to stay past the initial contract.  It's nice being "just an admin" again, on the one hand...it's nice not having to be on-call for once in my career, it's not not being expected to work extra hours for no extra pay.

But the cost of living out here is sky-high, in more ways than just rent, even though that too is ridiculous.  I can deal with the weather (I'm forever freezing) but my husband, poor dear, would melt.  On the other hand, the job market out here is excellent in comparison to pretty much everywhere else, but along with that comes the realization that I have no friends or family out here to lean on. 

I just don't know...and I hate not-knowing.  The average decent daycare out here is double what we pay for the one in Sidney.  And it's hard to justify pulling little girl out of a daycare who's willing to go the extra mile...for instance, they give her extra helpings of food if she's still hungry (and invariably we hear from the incredulous daycare lady at the end of the day, 'Do you know your daughter ate THREE SERVINGS of ?!`) as well as helping her with walking and other such things.

So...I dunno.  Nights out here are hardest, when I lie alone on my air mattress and wish I had a nice warm husband to cuddle, or that I could wander down the hall to my daughter's room to listen to her breathing.  I try not to think too hard on those things, because it always puts me in tears.  I miss my old life so much, even though I know there's no going back.  I know that going home will make me happier than I've been since this all started...and that leaving again will likely result in me crying the whole way back.

Why can't this country be like other countries in the world and give me the first two years of my kid's life off work?

I get to go home for the lil girl's b-day!

Oh happy, happy day!  I get to go home for the little one's b-day!  Thanks to my new employers being absolutely AWESOME, I will have funds for plane tickets to go home for the weekend of July 4th!

I am so happy, I can hardly believe it...!  Only one more week and I'll be home again for a precious few days with my husband and daughter and tons of extended family! (Cause my daughter is totally more popular than me!)

First Day of Work...YAY WORK!

So today was my first day at actual work.  Yay for work.  I can't say anything about what I do or where I do it.  I'm sure there will be more lectures and forms to sign later on that reinforce that fact.  But I can talk about impressions of the place, which is really all I'm blogging about.

The work I do is really immaterial to the whole of the "wow, moving to a huge new city" experience.  It's like any other job...just located somewhere far, far away from home.

Which sucks.  On the upside, I might be able to work out a way to be home for the lil girl's first birthday...providing stuff isn't too expensive.  I hope I hope things work out...I really hope.  It'll be doubly hard to leave her, but at least I'll get one long weekend to spend at home again...and maybe that will be enough to keep me sane.  I guess it will have to be.

What I wouldn't give to have a job like this out where my house is though...anyway.

I've noticed a lot of my co-workers complain about the weather...it is VERY hot...and VERY humid.  A lot of them are envious of my living in Colorado, since dry heat is much better...I tried to explain.  Yes, out here it feels like you're walking into a shower.  In Colorado, you feel like you're walking out into a BLAST FURNACE, and the instant you open your mouth to talk, the dry heat sucks all the moisture out of you like some great cosmic kiln.

Seriously...hot is hot people.  The weather here seems to stay hot a lot more, and their winters are, with the exception of a few freak storms, extremely mild.  I also learned, to my sadness, that many of my co-workers fear for my life living where I am.  Apparently I picked the roughest of the rough side of town to live.  They advised me to break my lease and move.  They even offered to take me apartment shopping.

I explained as delicately as I could about the plethora of housing we own back in Denver, and why preserving as much moula as I could while living out here is the main reason I am living somewhere deemed "not safe."  It is the ONLY reason.  So far, I've been here a week and things have been relatively quiet.

I hope it stays that way. 

Delays....

More delays in the paperwork front, but I remain optimistic.

I drove up to Silver Spring today, to take my car in for a once-over and an oil change.  I'm not sure whether the prior owner or the dealer took decent care of the car, but it drives noticeably better than it did before the oil change.  My husband suggested that my car being oil-thirsty, having a bad oil filter probably hurt it's performance a lot. 

Now the problem is, it's zoomy and happy and wants to GO...and I can't let it on any but a few select roads that are curvy with shoulders.  So my mission is to take it out at least once a day and drive it around...it needs to be driven, and the engine revved, for it to be a happy, non-clogged car.

So say the rotary engine message boards, at any rate.  And who am I to argue about the car NEEDING to be driven to be happy?  I mean...well.  Let's face it...it IS fun to drive!

I have some hilarious video of The Little Bit pouncing on our big fluffy black cat...sadly, I don't know why the 3gp videos won't play on a Windows machine...I suppose I can download VNC and see if that works.  If it does, I'll see if there's any sane way to post video...and if not, it'll land in my FB queue.

Anyway...back to more episodes of Jumong.  I'm glad it's a long series, since I've had plenty of time to kill lately.

It's been a long time since I've lived alone...

And the more I settle into the new apartment, the more it becomes apparent.  I don't remember being quite this paranoid the last time I lived alone, for one thing, and I don't remember spending so many hours wishing time would just PASS, already, so I can get one day closer to maybe seeing my husband and daughter in person again.

Maybe this is what J meant when he said I needed to find myself again...though, I do wish I'd done it via the new sports car versus new job, new apartment, new neighborhood, and all of it ... totally alone in a strange new city PLUS the new sports car that I now worry about because the neighborhood is, as the local security officers put it, "about a mile from a really bad area."

Part of it probably has to do with the fact my apartment is, for all intents and purposes, empty.  I've got essentials...an air mattress to sleep on, bedclothes, a suitcase of clothes, shoes, a couple lamps.  I have a little laptop stand my MIL bought me at IKEA, a folding lawn chair and one of my favorite TV shows on DVD.  I have basic groceries, basic pots and pans and dishes and cups and silverware.

I use my Droid as a tether to have Internet access since Comcast is arguing with me about the prior tenant not having canceled their service...and judging from the sheer number of unpaid bills in the mailbox, I gather she didn't pay any bills for a month or more.

Since I don't know when I'll have actual Internet access, the Droid works to provide me enough access to prevent going insane. 

The water pressure from my washer hose (the apartment style that attaches to a sink) is causing the faucet on my sink to leak like a sieve.  It's an old faucet, and it looks like it goes on my list of things for someone go spend $60 at Home Depot and replace.  Luckily, the leak seems to be confined to the faucet assembly only, which is thankfully draining into the sink above and not dripping down below, so it should be an easy fix. 

I seem to have gotten relatively lucky anyway, since my apartment looks like it got all new appliances and such installed, and all without me having to pay the premium price for an "upgraded" apartment (cause the appliances are all I care about, I could care less about granite countertops at this point!)

All for $828 a month (due to a yearly special) is about the cheapest I can get in the D.C. metro area...for all that its in a clearly neglected neighborhood...there's a grocery store and K-Mart within walking distance, and work is about 15 minutes drive (we'll see how it is for traffic on Tuesday.)

Due to the neighborhood not being the best, I don't go out at night...try not to come home late if I can avoid it, and make sure to park my car visible from a window of my apartment if I can.  My car is currently parked in the perfect spot, under a street lamp clearly visible from my bedroom window. 

Some additional culture shock notes...people are shocked, totally shocked, by politeness.  I gave up my grocery cart to an elderly woman who was having trouble wrestling one free, and she was just floored I offered mine to her.  My being polite also got me some weird looks.

People are frequently surprised when I say, "Thank your sir," or "Do you need help, ma'am?"  Damn that cultural imperative to be formal when talking to strangers or folks older than myself.  For those who don't know, I was raised in an Asian household.  My mom is very strict about that sort of thing, and most customs are relatively unconscious.  

I realize respect and politeness aren't the norm around here, nor is friendliness and saying, "Good morning!" but people are, after they get over their moment of shock, very polite to me in return...one of the people most frank and polite about his opinion was a young man dressed like a gangster...whether he was or not, I didn't really speculate. 

The education level out here is poor, and it shows.  Not that people are willfully ignorant...they're just ignorant and don't even know it!  I'm not one to correct folks to their faces, because I am at my core non-confrontational unless I am forced to be, so I smile and nod.  But it amazes and depresses me there are so many people here who have tons of potential and no ambition. 

I don't dress nice when I am home or out and about.  I dress in old jeans, boots or sandals and a t-shirt.  You may wonder to yourself why I don't dress nicer, seeing as I drive a nice car and make good money...and it's because it draws attention to me.

People take a lot off a first impression based on how you are dressed...and if you're dressed like you ought to be stuck up, people will treat you from the first moment as if you are, regardless of what you're really like.  Out here, not being from the area and not wanting to advertise that, I don't tell people what I do for a living...I don't tell them what car I drive, and when asked about my family I talk mostly about my Daddy, who used repair office equipment.

Most folks out here just nod, having heard the same old story...hard working parents, not much money, etc.

I did grow up poor.  Until today, I thought I'd had it hard...but talking to the man who maintains the apartments, I had it easy...our house had indoor plumbing when I was growing up.  The maintenance man didn't...and he considers himself lucky to live in an apartment only a little bigger than this, with a heating system he designed himself.  He's happy, he tells me, and he can be happy and proud of his situation with far, far less than I have or my daughter will have.

I think it's a valuable lesson to have learned...and I'm grateful to that man for teaching it to me, even though he didn't know he did.