By Christine

When I said I’d failed last time I wrote, I didn’t mean I was going to quit trying altogether. What would be the point in that? What I meant was that as usual I’d failed to reach a goal in the time frame I’d laid out for myself. It’s a recurring theme. Along with letting enough time pass between posts that people start thinking I’m dead.

Since I last wrote I took a couple comments to heart and stopped going to the gym, lengthening my daily walks and hikes instead. My hunger decreased immediately. I also began seriously monitoring my food intake and within a couple of weeks I noticed my shirts and pants felt looser again. A quick check on the Wii scale confirmed my hopes: I’d lost seven pounds.

Then I flew to Arizona to meet my new baby niece. My routine, however, stayed home. I really can’t muster the energy to walk in a city where it’s 80 degrees at 6AM. Five days later my mother-in-law flew back with me and we began to diligently scour the city for a new place to live.

See, my husband, baby and I live in a one-bedroom apartment. Actually, our baby has the bedroom to herself, my husband and I converted our dining room into our master. (There’s nothing like crawling into sheets that smell like whatever dinner I made that night.)

Our coffee table doubles as our dining table, so all meals are consumed in front of the TV. When the in-laws visit, they have to book a hotel. When I want to work out to a DVD, I have to move three pieces of furniture to find room. If my husband has a work emergency and has to talk his guys through it on the phone, he has to do so in the bathroom, or kitchen, because those are the only rooms with doors other than the bedroom and there’s no work emergency worth waking up our baby once she’s down for the night.

In short, we can’t live like this anymore. Having lived far below our means for the past ten years means we can splurge a little now, so we decided we just had to have three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a little yard. (We also don’t feel it’s the right time to buy a house yet. We firmly believe that in LA, house prices still have a ways to fall before they reach bottom.)

We found what seemed like a perfect fit. A Spanish-style duplex in a historic neighborhood with a two-car garage, a washer and dryer and hardwood floors. I was in heaven and mentally hanging photos and painting walls. Then the tenants moved out and we got a look at the place without any furniture in it and discovered it was in horrid, squalid condition. Something the landlord had no interest in rectifying. So we backed out.

And so the search continued. And the stress mounted. We’d already given notice at our current place; we have until the end of the month to find somewhere to live. With my mother-in-law in town to watch the baby, (and incidentally, sleeping on our living room couch, in full view of our dining room bed–ahem) I took the opportunity to pack what I could, leaving us with four plates, four bowls, four sets of utensils, etc. I lost all interest in cooking and ordered from all of my favorite delivery places, figuring that once we start paying the new much-higher rent, we’d have to eat at home as much as possible.

And exercising? Hah. Unless you count getting in and out of the car twelve times a day to tour apartments and homes exercise.

And so pants and shirts are tight once again.

But it seems to have all been worth it because on Friday we’re going to sign the lease to an adorable Spanish-style single family home with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a washer and dryer and our own private, fenced-in back yard complete with a blood orange and a lemon tree. And I’ll finally get to buy a dining room table, which will sit in a room without a TV.

I have high hopes that this move will change my daily routine for the better. Maybe it’s naive, but I got a little taste of the good life last summer when we housesat for my brother and we were amazed by how much less time we spent in front of the TV and how much less wine we drank on a nightly basis. We ate outside and talked late into the night, we weeded his garden and mowed his lawn, we played board games, and when one of us needed a nap we had a room to go to with a DOOR TO CLOSE.

Hopefully, the next time I write, I will be doing so from our new heirloom-quality dining room table (for which I’ve been saving FOR YEARS) after having consumed a healthful dinner, which my husband grilled outside in our private little back yard.

Here’s to Life 2.0.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Blogs, Hippo in a Tutu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.