We’re about 90 percent of the way there to finalizing a lease on a new apartment. It’s been a long search with lots of really terrible places, but this new place we will be moving into, if nothing catastrophic happens, will be the first home that Chris and I will have picked out together and decorate together. It will really be our own home.

We were thinking about what we’ll miss most about our current apartment, where he’s lived for seven years, and I for over five years. He said he’ll miss the shower pressure from the shower head the most… not that our new shower head won’t be as good, but it will just be new, whereas the other was familiar.

I think that’s what I’ll miss the most — the familiarity, the oddities of this apartment I can expect, like the fact that there’s a working chimney we never use as a chimney, but instead use the fireplace as an area to store our wine and liquor. There’s the big mirror in the lounge room that I’ve always enjoyed for partially vain reasons, but also because it makes our small, cozy living room space seem much bigger and more open than it actually is. I will miss the exposed brick in this apartment, and even those odd cut out windows in the living room and bedroom where you can see the light from the other room when you look up. It’s always comforting to have a routine where things are familiar, and I will miss that. But then at this new place, I will find a new routine, and that inevitably will become a new comfort.

Tonight, I went to my mentoring organization’s end-of-year appreciation event for some drinks, appetizers, and mingling with the program coordinators. While it was enjoyable and in a lively venue, what I didn’t expect to happen was to run into a former colleague who had left my last company just over a year ago. She was one of the very few people I spoke to and liked — at least, for decent small talk in the kitchen. And since it’s been over a year, she really let it rip when it came to how screwed up things were from an organizational standpoint, not to mention how the technology didn’t even work (and barely existed), and lastly, the level of overt sexism that was rampant there.

It’s really amazing when you’re colleagues and you have no idea that this person you speak with every week has all the same opinions that you do, and you learn them all much later. But the world keeps turning, and the sexism and delusional thinking continues.

In addition to the madness of looking for a new apartment in a place as infuriating and fast paced as Manhattan, the other frustrating thing that awaits shortly after we choose our new place is… what furniture are we going to put into it? For the most part, we’ve decided that the majority of our furniture in our current apartment will not come with us, not because we don’t like it, but more because it was bought specifically for the shape and quirks of this apartment, so if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to sell at least some of it to the next tenant who moves in here.

I visited my friend’s new apartment yesterday, and he showed me the new dresser that he got from West Elm that I thought was nice; he told me it was a good deal. I’ve never seriously looked at furniture there, so tonight, I decided to take a look at their website to see what we could potentially buy for the new place this summer. And again, I had the same shock I had back in 2008 when my then roommate and I went furniture shopping; things are THIS expensive, really? The night stand tables that I liked cost… $299 each?! How is this even possible?!

Maybe I will end up spending time on Craigslist this summer, too, in an effort to save money and get cheaper things and at the same time drive myself even crazier.

In Manhattan, where apartments are oftentimes teeny tiny and cramped with very little storage space, it’s hard to have a well stocked pantry unless you make a serious effort to keep key items and have the very bare minimum to survive in the event there’s a snow storm and all the stores are closed.

When I was growing up, our pantry was always well stocked, and the vegetable and fruit drawers in the fridge were always full of different things. You could whip up many different meals without even going to the grocery store. So when I am stocking up on grocery items, I tend to think about this and think about things I could make quickly and easily when I don’t have much time or energy to cook.

One of those things is noodles. If you have noodles – dry or fresh from the freezer, you could boil them up in less than five minutes and in that time, create a sesame, peanut, or chili based sauce and have a quick meal in a matter of minutes. And that’s what I did this morning when Chris was whining that there was nothing to eat. 🙂 I made spicy peanut sesame noodles in less than 15 minutes, and we ate and caught up on Samantha Bee’s missed episodes over the last several weeks. These are the moments when I pat myself on the back for remembering best practices for pantry stocking growing up.

Facebook has a way of making you realize exactly how crazy people are who you’ve barely been acquainted with. I’m still fairly strict about who I accept and keep as “friends” on Facebook, but a number of them I’ve kept just out of laziness and because I don’t care one way or another to see their updates or if they see mine. Then today, a picture popped up in my feed of a former colleague who left my last company last August. She was in a “I’m not sure where this is going” type relationship with this guy that hadn’t lasted very long, who she then went on a trip to Iceland with, and she said that this trip would either make or break their relationship. Fast forward five months later, he proposes, then fast forward. Then, this Saturday, they’re getting married! They’d been dating seriously for less than a year!

This is how quickly things go when a) you live in New York, and everyone here is so freaking impatient, and b) when you are past your 30s and everyone is pressuring you to settle down.