Tokyo Tofu

Well, its about 2.5 months since I returned from Japan. Two weeks after getting back I picked up and moved once more from my home of 21 years to the home my mom bought while I was in Japan. For the next month I got to live by myself (with no roommates or siblings, yea!) while my sister graduated from high school and my mom finished up things in our old house and prepared for the move. At the beginning of June we drove a 27′ truck filled with (almost) all of our remaining posessions from the old house, and were then officially moved out. I thought that I would upset about leaving the only home I’ve ever lived in, but on that 90 degree day where the three of us, two neighbors and three unexpected helpers spent more than 4 hours loading furniture, kitchenware, books, pictures, beds, plants, and a crapload of other things, I was just glad to be inside of an air conditioned vehicle for the 2 hour drive to Ann Arbor. Since then I haven’t really been sad about it, even when I heard that the new buyer (who is somewhat of a psychopath) ripped out every piece of carpet in the house 2 days after she moved in. Two weeks after handing over the keys we came back to our neighbor’s house across the street to pick up some items that couldn’t fit into the truck and saw the buyer and her partner in the yard, where they thankfully hadn’t ripped out any of my mom’s plants (yet).

So what do I think of the new house so far? Its pretty nice. While its larger in total square feet than the old house, it feels a little bit smaller to me. The kitchen, however, is GINORMOUS compared to our old “step-saver” (apparently this is what people in the real estate business politely call a kitchen so small that you can reach each side by just turning around). Our basement is big and dry, and we have a fireplace now! The yard is larger and more square and the previous homeowners did absolutely nothing with the yard so its a completely blank slate for my mom to work on it. My room is only about 1/2 the size of my old room, which posed a challenge at first (cause, well….I have a lot of stuff) but I think I’ve been pretty creative with my storage options. I put up some floating shelves on 2 sides of the room, with the shelves at the same height on each wall. I left two of the walls blank for artwork and other things, which I finally finished putting up today (check out my awesome ‘Skyscrapers In Japan’ poster that I bought from the Landmark Towers in Yokohama).

On the job front, well…thats not going so well. Had an interview last week for a job with the U that doesn’t start until September, but it seemed sort of promising. But I have been quite succesful on the eBay/Half.com front. Two volumes worth of Newtype USA magazines went for over $200 (a shock to me, I expected $20), a 4-year old 250mb (yes, megabyte) zip drive went for $12, and I’ve sold a couple dozen books and dvd’s of mine and my mom’s on Half.com (which I’ve been doing for years now, and if you’ve got a ton of old books (including textbooks) or movies, you should check out Half.com).

So thats pretty much all I’ve got for this long overdue update. Each time something interesting happens and I tell myself I should write it in my blog, I then put it off since I knew I needed to write about the new house first. Well, now I have so I have no more excuses! I decided to be a little different with the thumnail pictures that I use for the blog, so now you’ll be forced to actually click them to see the entire picture!
Pics of the house:

Pics of my room:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 11:51 am and is filed under Daily Life. 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.