Birthday Cake

My domestic skills can best be described as average.

On a scale ranging from Take-Out to Martha Stewart, I fall somewhere between Amy Sedaris and Jaime Oliver.  You will get a flavorful and healthy dinner at my house, made mostly without cans, boxes, or packets, but the flatware is vintage, mis-matched Target.  The toilets will likely be clean, but there is probably dust on the shelves.

Life Hangover

I've been working on flexibility and attitude during the last year.  Life married to oil has a lot of sudden twists, but also has many, many opportunities.  Learning to navigate the high-frequency moves and sudden upheavals has mostly been a fair price to pay for the adventure and good fortune that we have.

All the same, even at the height of gratitude, I feel worn out right now.  The new home buzz is waning, and there are still piles here and unfinished life bits there.  The holiday season combined with rapid-fire expenses of moving the household, additional furnishing for the new place, and setting up services, mixed in with unexpected feline dental surgery, has also left me nursing an extreme financial hangover.

As the dust settles, I'm faced again with the question of what kind of life to build here, and how to figure out what's next.

Thanks, I'm in Norway

"Christmas tradition" has been an oxymoron since my sister got married almost seventeen years ago.  We started going to her house for Christmas, but then sometimes they were with her husband's family, or they didn't want to travel when we couldn't, so suddenly sometimes we were just three, or with other friends or family members.  All of the ways of having Christmas have had their charms, but I do not feel a great sense of tradition anymore when I think of Christmas.  Since I got married four years ago, that experience has continued.  My husband's work is filled with unpredictable calendar trickery, and I have become accustomed to the fact that one of the things we give up are classic, scheduled holiday itineraries.  

Holiday Service

The people I have encountered in Houston are so nice, and the service I have been receiving is above and beyond.  When my veterinarian provided me a ride home so I wouldn't have to bring my cat in a cab, I was astounded.  The following week it happened again at my neighborhood liquor store.  I walked there since it was only two blocks away.  But after I decided to buy more than I could carry, they insisted on driving me home instead of letting me go back to get my car. I was pleasantly flummoxed; it seemed that Houston might be the best-kept secret in the U.S.

There's No Walking in Houston

Houstonians, I am learning, don't walk, at least not as a common mode of transportation.  I had always heard this, but I thought maybe if we moved into a neighborhood where restaurants and shops were within easy walking distances (at least in the pleasant-temperature winter months), maybe then I would see some people on foot.

Breakfast Tacos: Introduction

Breakfast tacos are very popular at our house.  Breakfast tacos are one of the reasons that we are excited about Texas.  Saturday morning we tried our first round of them.  Tacos À Go-Go, at the edge of downtown, not far from our home.  $6.25 and very fast.

Houston is My New Chicago

Housecats

I follow a fairly consistent order of operations when we move.  First comes the procurement of a new home and therefore address, after which home and car insurance can be obtained, with which you can secure a local driver's license, which is necessary to get local license plates,which you can always put off getting until your old tags expire, but it's a little dicey to let them lapse.

After I can prove that I legally live in a new place, things like internet and electricity can be set up, and then I can usually relax and unpack and try to figure out how many new shelves will be necessary, and how few trips to Ikea I can get away with.  After the kitchen and closets achieve a level of basic functionality, I turn my attention back outside of the house.  I try to find at least one doctor before I'm actually sick, so that when I have strep throat or something uncomfortable I don't have to try to figure out how to log into some untouched health insurance website.  Dentists don't usually get looked up until much later, and, unfortunately for the cat, finding a new vet normally gets shoved pretty far down the list as well.  In fact, we avoided it altogether in Calgary.  This move to Houston may have created a new template, however.