Wew! It was a mad dash getting everything pulled out of the house, and I’m sweaty and tired and cranky. But it’s DONE! I’m so excited. Nothing is ever entirely bad, of course, and there are always going to be good memories mixed in with the bad. So was the case in living in Bed Stuy.

Here are some of my favorites:

The parties. All of them! There were too many to count, and a lot that just kinda came together last minute. We rocked it out almost every month, and I got to know so many cool people who were friends of friends that later became friends of my own.

November 4, 2008, 11:00pm and the hours that followed. Never, ever, ever will I forget the air in the streets that night, hugging neighbors, slapping high fives and crying like crazy, overjoyed people. I know it was similar in other parts of Brooklyn, but I don’t think it was as vibrant, as meaningful, as in a poor black neighborhood. I don’t care what you think of Barack Obama: it was an amazing day for black people (and, really, it was an amazing day for everyone who hates racism).

Sitting in the tiny front entry way bundled in my coat with Bra the cat curled in my lap purring like crazy, happy to have somewhere warm to put his paws.

Fried chicken! Horrible, greasy, sketchy fried chicken, right down the block.

The look of sadness on my old-lady neighbor’s face when she saw us bringing our final boxes to the car. “You’re leaving us?” she said, and Rob said, “Yeah, we are.” “Awww.” she said, crestfallen, and I felt bad, which is saying a lot.

Time to move forward, though! Here we go. Park Slope. Tiny apartment. Laundromats. Vibrant neighborhood. Excellent shopping. John Hodgman as a neighbor!

Happy August.

*This is the fourth place Rob and I have lived together in almost as many years. WHO DOES THAT?

August 1 is when it all goes away, when it’s all over. We have to turn in the keys to the old apartment by midnight tomorrow, but before then we have to get our stuff out of there.

I know! I thought we got all our stuff out of there, too! We certainly paid the movers enough. But there’s still stuff in there.

All the furniture is gone and has been moved to where it’s going to be, but there’s a bunch of STUFF, just STUFF, the stuff that piles into the corners and gets in the way and annoys you because you don’t really know what to do with it, where to store it, or even why you need it, but you can’t throw it away because OMG what if you need it next week except, you totally won’t. But you might. Also, it was expensive.

If you have a place you’re living for a while you have the luxury of ignoring it and storing it, but I have to move it outta there, and the way I’m dealing is sticking my head under my pillow and going “La la la, is it August yet? No? Ok. La la la.”

For some reason, this method is completely unsuccessful in moving the piles of stuff out of the old apartment, nor is it taking care of the other task at hand after getting all the stuff out: “broom sweeping”. That’s term used in real estate to mean “you didn’t bleach it, but all your stuff is out, and there isn’t dirt everywhere.” or rather “Empty, and reasonably clean.”

I just don’t want to. It’s hot. I’m tried. This is overwhelming. Podcasting was rough this week. I need a nap.

Just a little further, Amber. Just a little more.

Last night I hit my head. There were stars and birds and shit flying around my head while my eyes crossed and then faded into slow, circling spirals. I was pretty sure death was eminent, and I cried and cried and cried while typing a last love note to Rob on the notepad application of my iPhone. Romantic, right?

I put peas on my head, Nicole came over so I wouldn’t be alone, and all was well eventually.

***

The local independent book store has a resident bunny, a resident elderly dog that sleeps in the doorway, and a pond in the back. It used to have a resident iguana, but he died. The local pet shop has a resident gray kitten, who likes to climb up the cat tree things and, from there, climb onto customers’ shoulders and help them shop.

***

Our grass is growing! We’ll have a lovely lawn in a few weeks.

***

Moving isn’t done yet. There’s still a bunch of stuff that needs to go to the basement in Connecticut, where it will sit until we figure out what to do with it, which means eventually selling it or throwing it out. I miss being settled into one place. I’m really loving this neighborhood, though; I like being able to walk around and shop without having to get into a car or get on a subway. It feels luxurious.

***

Photos are coming soon of the new place; I need to figure out where to put all of my art, which is normally the fun part, but feels overwhelming right now.

***

After a hiatus, I’m back to working on Hey Brooklyn and there will be a new episode this Friday. Woohoo!

So, we’ve landed in Park Slope after a very self-sufficient move. In addition to going DIY with the painting, we packed everything ourselves* and then ran some of the boxes of stuff over to the new place and unpacked them in the weeks before the Big Moving Day with the Movers. These small chunks of moving were not only sanity-preservers, they made everything way cheaper: our by-the-hour rate movers had finished everything in just under three hours, including the drive over to the new place. Even they were stunned. Rob and I celebrated with a high-five.

One of the things we did early was put our bookshelves in the empty apartment and fill them.  By “we” I mean Eric.  The wall they are on is drywall over brick, and I said to Rob, “There is no way we are tackling this ourselves.

If you ask nicely he’ll wear his tool belt while working (you know, for the ladies who are into that sort of thing) and he gives a discount if he can bring his dog.

Thanks, Eric!

It doesn’t feel like home yet, and I wonder if it ever will. It’s very small here, and it’s clear that we will have to move eventually. Not just because of the space issue, either; the landlord actually told our real estate agent, “Three dogs is no problem, but NO KIDS!” It’s quite nice for now, though.

Stu! came over Saturday with champagne and cupcakes to celebrate the new place, and we spent the afternoon with me shirking unpacking responsibilities to show off the new neighborhood and slowly but surely convince her to become my cup-of-sugar neighbor.

Thank you to Effed In Park Slope for the Twitter welcome! This 4-part-series of videos they did of the local Target explains, to a level I don’t have the ability to blog about, why I feel like I’m descending into the seventh ring of Hell when I go.

*Apparently the really rich people leave their homes and go away for a few weeks and people come and pack them up and move them. Then they come back from vacation to a newly set up home somewhere else!

Ever since the green paint incident* I’ve had a fear of painting the wrong color in a room, but I’ve done pretty well for myself, I think, with this current apartment. That’s a total attitude change from a few days ago, brought on by the elimination of the ugly blue-green trim color that permeated our new digs, the color I’ve been raging against since I first saw the place. (“What were they thinking?!”)

We painted every white wall first with “risky” colors that I hoped I would come to love, and having the ugly trim paired with my freshly painted walls that I wasn’t quite sure about threw me off into believing the entire place was a disaster. I was so upset thinking that I was going to live in the UGLIEST! APARTMENT! EVER! and that I spent money for paint and worked hard painting for that privilege. (It would be one thing if the apartment was ugly through no fault of my own, but to actually make it ugly? Unbearable.) Now, though, with a few coats of America’s favorite paint color, Navajo White, the ugly trim is gone, replaced by crispy colored trim that gives the entire apartment a fresh, modern feeling. It’s downright beautiful if I do say so myself!

We’re half-way there getting the trim done; the ugly color is so deep it requires two coats of Navajo White, and is so extensive – every room, every doorway – that I’m going to be super busy painting it all before moving day Thursday. I’m listening to Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk while I’m doing it, which helps pass the time better than music.

I’ll be back in a few days, posting from Park Slope!

_____

*Oh, it was bad. The worst was that my friends tried to talk me out of it, even as they were painting it, and I was all, “No, no! It’s gonna be great!” and I loved it for about three seconds, and then I was devastated and had to paint over it.

“You didn’t actually want to paint!” I said to Rob. The realization hit me suddenly, roller in hand, mid-roll, and I froze while paint dripped down my arm. I felt terrible.

“It’s fine!” he said, but then later he admitted, “I would have just left it. But I know you. You need it nice. So, we paint.”

How great is my guy? It hadn’t occurred to him to bother talking me out of painting the entire apartment, he just sucked it up and did it.

You may take this moment to stand up and applaud my husband for his awesomeness, thoughtfulness, and wonderfulness.

Later, he was all hugs and consoling pats on the back when I had a meltdown and could not paint another single stroke. After that, I was sent home to shower and relax while he spent the day finishing up by himself. I really hate moving, but since I have to, I’m glad to go through this with Rob. He is a good dude.

We painted two colors, a light slate blue that’s unusual but growing on me, and a color that I thought would be a hip modern camel-butterscotch beige, but what actually turned out to be a mustardy, baby-poop, project housing hallway tan. Bummer! I’m hoping that will grow on me, too.

The whole process of picking colors was frustrating and overwhelming.  I’ve picked paint before and had both great success and horrible results. If I was doing it again, I would have borrowed the ENTIRE color deck selector from Home Depot rather than deal with traveling to Home Depot several times for a bunch of chips (at one point I had about 2 dozen different beige squares spread out on the floor of the new place and let Stu! pick what she liked; she told me to throw them all out and try again).

***

According to this article NYTimes, we are part of a growing trend of people that rent in NYC and buy in the suburbs. I wish we had thought of this before we spent months and months looking for something to buy here last year! We felt a little crazy taking this unusual real estate path, but it seemed like it made sense, and a year later, I’m excited about our decision. See? I do live and learn! Just not about picking paint colors.

This is a jar of water Rob captured from Mahoney Falls in Denali National Park Ketchikan, Alaska in 2005. This was the trip that drew a dividing line around our relationship: when he left, he was my guy-I-sort-of-liked-and-was-sort-of-taking to-but-not-really. When he returned and I first laid eyes on him after he was away, I knew he was my future husband.

He brought some of the waterfall back with him and we “sealed” it with masking tape; now there is a layer of algae at the bottom.

I’d have thrown it out ages ago because GROSS! but I can’t bring myself to. Every time we try, I get choked up and say, “Let’s hold onto it for a little bit longer” and we do. It’s bigger than all of that, too: I was never clear on if he was bringing it back for himself and wanted to show me, or if he was giving it to me. I never had to find out, either; it was arguably our first joint possession.

Now I’m slated to move it to our fourth home, one of the smallest yet, and it’s time to get rid of some stuff. A lot of things were no-brainers: couch that I never liked anyway: gone. Ugly bookshelf I bought out of desperation from some girl around the corner, OUT! I’ve become a pretty ruthless thrower-outer person*. But this is a tough one.

It’s not like I don’t have another memento of the trip, either; he also brought me back a cheap plastic snow globe which I broke almost immediately. (I have a thing: I break any and all snow globes. Seriously, don’t let me near your prized collection. If we go into a gift shop together, Rob sets up bright orange cones around the snow globe section and tells me it’s closed and I can’t touch them, because I WILL break one. I have no idea why.) I saved the now dry and snow-less base, showing a picture of a dog sled and, I think, a palm tree (???) and with a jagged plastic edge (because, yeah, I’m hard-core and break plastic snow globes). I’ll keep that. But moldy four-year old jar of water?

This is, by far, the weirdest thing I’ve ever been sentimental about.

*****

*What’s the word for anti-packrat? Because I can’t think of one, and there should be one. And also: I am aware this is shamelessly lazy writing, but I’m moving, so whatever. Bite me.

“Party” puts it mildly; it was what sounded and looked like an entire apartment building blasting music with all of the tenants hanging around. A DJ was coming on periodically to scream things into the mic like, “Yeah, yeah!” or “What?!” or what sounded like “Abab a yaba goma bla!” to which the revelers would answer, “Wooo!” and I would answer, “Fuuuuuuck yoooooooou!”

I called 311 a handful of times, and so did Rob; we even walked around the block past the party to make sure we had the exact address to tell to the cops (we were leered at by the scary people outside). It wasn’t just “loud”, my windows were vibrating. And it was that horrible hip-hop/reggae fusion shit, too, of all the stupid things to play!

I fell asleep when it finally ended, just as the sun was coming up. When I got out of bed at noon, the months-long debate of “should we or shouldn’t we” was over, completely, 100%, and the apartment hunting started.

I’m way overdue for a humbling processes; depite being on the lower end of rental properties, I know that I have SO MUCH MORE than the vast majority of the world’s population and that if they beamed images of me wrinkling my nose and saying “Ewwww… I have to go to a laundromat?” to a third-world housewife washing her rags in a river, she’d be just as disgusted at me as I am watching the Real Housewives of New Jersey having $120,000 worth of furniture delivered. But I’m still wrinkling my nose, and resigning myself to having to go to one, probably, unless we find a miracle property.

Also, Rob and I tend not to see eye to eye on what makes a good apartment, meaning there’s a lot of, “What the HELL is wrong with you, that apartment is perfect!” on both our parts (ok, mostly me.) (Ok, all me.)

To further complicate things, having the trio means needing a backyard which reduces the number of apartments we can start to consider way down, and then and having people go, “You have HOW MANY dogs? Yeah, no.” reduces that number even further.

Here we go again.

The thought of moving in August makes my head spin, my heart palpitate, and my knees week. But I kind of want to move. We thought the neighborhood would “be fine”, and it pretty much is, but there’s a lot to not like about it.

There’s a weird “thing” that happens here, and I don’t get it: the young men walk down the street spouting off rap lyrics, with or without headphones, and it’s pretty annoying. Singing out loud is fine, really. It’s weird, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. What I take issue with is the “eff this” and “en-word that” that they rap at full volume.

Then there’s the spitting that happens so often it feels like part of the culture more than anything. Men, mostly, spit wherever. This happens in other places, too, but it happens A LOT around here. I haven’t be able to walk to the subway in weeks without witnessing at least one person hocking a loogy, and it’s vile! All around are these huge, phlegmy gobs in the middle of the sidewalk just waiting to be stepped in.

There are more sinister things in the neighborhood, too: the crack dealer a few doors down, teenaged mothers of three screaming at their eight-month old babies for being fussy and “popping” their runny nosed toddlers in the mouth for crying, the crack addicts hassling me for money “for food”, the drunk guy who tried to get into our (fortunately bolted) front entry way Friday night, the guy walking his pit bull down the block with a cat in a carrier, the gun shots, and, oh yeah, some dude getting shot to death forty yards from my front door. I just don’t want to stay.

Our apartment is nice, but it’s feeling less and less worth it. Without a steady income, though, and three dogs, it’s going to be pretty hard to find another apartment and prove that we can pay for it.

Of course, our landlord might not let us re-rent when our lease is up, and my gut instinct tells me this is going to happen, and then we have to move anyway.  It’s really anyone’s game, so to speak, and that feeling is so unsettling.

I’m sure it will all work out in the end, but with the economy being what it is (I’m hearing more and more this being referred to as “a depression” more than “a recession”), it’s difficult to not be worried.

1. Keep steadfast in your hunt for the perfect purse. It will be worth it in the end.

2. If you don’t read the paper, cancel your subscription.

3. Irish car bombs are fun! But only once.

4. Meeting people in real life from flickr is fun and not creepy! (Happy anniversary, G!)

5. You have to let bread rise twice, or it won’t be as pretty. If you can’t wait, though, it’ll still taste good having risen only once. Also, if you need it to keep for several days, undercook it a little bit. When you’re ready for a slice, cut off your slightly doughy portion and finish it in the toaster over. Fresh bread for days! Make sure you keep it wrapped tightly in plastic wrap, though, or it will mold.

6. Tow truck drivers really do say “ten four!”

7. Seriously, don’t buy hard to register cars, like, say, vintage Volkswagons you can’t drive. Really. Really. Just don’t.

8. I build pretty snazzy shelves!

9. It’s fun to get up the day after Thanksgiving if you have fun guys to hang out with. And totally worth it if you want to score a Wii.

10. Speaking of Wii’s, you really do need to respect that they are “physical activity”.

11. I don’t need an expensive bed.

12. I don’t need two Thanksgiving dinners.

13. Photography is not too hard to learn. You should get a book, though, to help.

14. To clean vomited calamari out of your car: 1. Make your husband do it. 2. Be smug in the fact that you have something with which to mock certain friends with for a good long while.

15. There are a lot of REALLY amazing people in Puerto Rico who will help you should you find a dirty hurt dog and want to adopt them.

16. Dogs > diamonds.

17. 50mm lenses are AWESOME!

18. The iPhone is NOT over-hyped. It is awesome.

19. The only marriage anyone should ever have an opinion on is their own.

20. Rainbow Christmas > White Christmas.

21. Bringing your own shopping bags to the grocery store isn’t too hard once you get into the habit, and so much nicer than lugging gross, bad-for-the-earth plastic bags that cut into your hands.

22. When you are too sick to decorate your Christmas tree, it is wonderful to have friends come over and do it for you.

23. When you are part of a family, you can make up silly phrases, words, and songs and then use them on a regular basis. (In our family, some of them are, “Happy Dog Face”, “Happy Dog Foot”, “Uncertain Foot”, “Kind Words”, “Furminating”, “Snearaly”, “Sweetie Ears” and “Puppy Pile”. Also, the “Mountain Laurel Song” and the Song for Chubby Dogs.)

24. Rob and I have nearly the same political views. I honestly didn’t check before I married him, but I’m glad that worked out.

25. Bring your camera everywhere.

26. You can’t split a White Castle Crave Case three ways without risking a horrible stomach ache.

27. I learned a lot about the real estate and geography of western Brooklyn. In fact, I’m pretty much an expert on western Brooklyn neighborhoods.

28. Keep your eye on Tino. He’ll escape.

29. Ask tons of “stupid” questions if you’re confused about your health insurance. It will save you hundreds of dollars.

30. Dogs get colds! Who knew?!

31. Peeps are fun!

32. The dogs like goldfish, and so do I.

33. My husband makes breakfast in bed for me on my birthday. SCORE!

34. Good photography comes from the heart and soul and eyes. It does not come from the camera.

35. If you’re feeling blue, throw a dinner party with true friends who don’t care that you threw it together last minute. It will be good for your soul.

36. Margarine is the devil.

37. It’s ok to make $350,000 impulse purchases for sentimental reasons. Wait, hang on, this one I’m not sure about yet.

38. Ehhhhhh, you can cut your own hair. Well, I can.

39. If you have no dishwasher, you need to just buckle down and handwash on a regular basis, otherwise you will be stuck with Mount Dishmore.

40. Podcamp people are cool.

41. Living in Brooklyn suits me.