Even though moving day was a long and tiring day, I ended up waking up naturally at around 6am this morning. I felt a little confused, and though I lingered in bed for a couple hours, I immediately realized why I woke up; we didn’t pull the bedroom blinds or shades down, so the morning light streamed through the window.

I cannot remember the last time I had this much natural light in my bedroom… ever. Even in hotels, I usually take advantage of those thick window curtains where you can mask out every bit of light, just because I could. Outside of hotels, I’d never seen such thick curtains before.

This place is going to take time to really feel like home. Everything feels like an adjustment so far.

Even though we hired movers to move all our boxes and lone bookcase, I still had to cart over a number of bags of things I didn’t want them to deal with, like our perishables from our refrigerator and freezer, jewelry, and random loose items from the kitchen and bathroom that could have become messy. I went to the apartment building first to get the keys from the building manager so the movers could enter, and as I unloaded all my things, the concierge came and asked if I needed help bringing my items to the room. I insisted I didn’t (and didn’t fully register that this is normal service in the building), but as I met with the manager, I left all the items near the service elevator. When I came out, they were all gone, and when I went up to the apartment unit, a porter came with all my items hanging from hooks on a cart and asked me where I’d like all my bags placed in the apartment.

I guess this is part of what I’m paying for, huh?

After work today, I went home to pick up two massive bags of old blankets to walk up to the ASPCA about 14 blocks away. As I walked up First Avenue, I noticed all these new wine bars, restaurants, and little shops I’d never really noticed before. It must be because I just never really paid attention, as well as the fact that this neighborhood has changed so much over the last five years I’ve lived here. It’s become trendier, more diverse cuisine has become available and actually stuck, and of course, more expensive and shiny high rises have gone up. Every day this neighborhood is changing, and soon, we’ll be gone and won’t see it evolving anymore.

New Yorkers have such an attachment to certain neighborhoods. I’ve grown to really love the Upper East Side, which I once thought as a food-and-drink area was quite mundane. Now, it’s flourishing with all types of cuisines. I noticed a Chinese-Hawaiian fusion spot on First Avenue in the 90s today, as well as a hip looking Korean spot just a block over.

I wonder what interesting things we will find in the new neighborhood. Who knows – maybe in another five years if I come back to this current neighborhood, I may not even recognize it anymore.

Tonight, I came home to meet the next tenant who will be living in this apartment. She’s originally from Atlanta but has lived here in New York for the last twelve years. She was living in the 30s on the east side and got a rent hike she wasn’t thrilled about, so she decided to start looking and found our unit. She’s probably the most respectful house guest we’ve ever had that we didn’t know; she asked permission for literally everything she did and even proactively took her shoes off without asking me.

The main reason she came by was so that she could take measurements for planning purposes, as she’ll be moving in during late August, and so she could check out our TV and couch, which we were hoping she’d take, especially the couch, since it would have required a sofa doctor to cut it up and take it out of our apartment given the doorway is too narrow. She saw both, sat on the couch, and immediately said yes, and Venmoed me right on the spot. Now, if only everyone could be as easy going and swift as she’s been.

We chatted for quite a while about quirks of the apartment, things to be mindful of, and favorite spots in the neighborhood, including our beloved Australian-owned wine and liquor shop that we’ll be missing. She immediately wrote that spot down; it was so obvious she couldn’t wait to move. She raved on and on about how big our bedroom is and how great our setup was with the kitchen island, as she saw it before we sold it during an apartment viewing. She said she wanted to set up the apartment almost exactly as we had it.

That’s my Chris, the closeted interior designer.

I hauled home more boxes from work today, and spent most of the evening cleaning out the kitchen, scrubbing the cabinets, cleaning all our wine and liquor bottles, and filling more boxes with our belongings. For people who live in a small apartment who don’t think they like owning “stuff” that much, we have already filled about 23 boxes with our “stuff.” Seeing all of it together boggles my mind that this small apartment held all this stuff, not to mention all the things we sold, donated, or tossed out.

I was talking to my friend this weekend about the packing process, and she said she could never imagine anyone else packing up her things for her. “Why would I want someone else touching and packing up all my things?” she said. “It’s my stuff. How do I know they will pack it the way I want it to be packed?” Well, it’ll never be done exactly the way you would have done it. But at least if money didn’t matter, you could pay someone else to deal with all this calamity.

But I’m too cheap and too much of a control freak to do that. I actually do find more comfort knowing that I packed all these boxes other than some random Joe-Schmo who could easily toss all my wine glasses into a box between thin layers of bubble wrap and think they did a good job.

This morning, we heated up our leftover food over the stove. It felt like such an old-fashioned way of reheating leftovers.

This is what life was like before microwaves.

When I was heating the food in a pan on the stove, I was thinking about the time I came home once and remembering how I went downstairs to the basement, and somehow, there were literally four microwaves stacked on top of each other. I had no idea where they had come from or why we even had them. So then I asked my dad.

Apparently, he had been collecting free microwaves around the city from Craigslist when people have moved.

“You never know when your microwave will break down!” he said.

Well, I lived at my last apartment for four years, and the microwave never failed me. At this apartment, where Chris has lived over seven years, this microwave has been more than sufficient.

Hoarding is not a good thing. It’s not healthy, either. At least all those microwaves are gone now.

It was a sad day today. I worked from home this afternoon so that I could be there to sell our kitchen island, bar stools, and microwave to a Wellesley alum who saw my furniture sale postings on our Wellesley Facebook NYC alumnae group. Even though I was happy to make progress on our move and getting rid of items we won’t need in the new apartment, I felt a little empty watching her boyfriend wheel out the kitchen island, and even more so when they managed to squeeze it into their small van. I’ve spent so many hours sitting on those bar stools and preparing food at that kitchen island. We have so many fond memories together, and now it’s gone. Now, it’s being carted off to an apartment another Wellesley alum is purchasing on West 96th Street.

I guess today, it’s more real that we’re moving because our kitchen island is gone. Now, I can think more about the future and the new kitchen in which I’ll be cooking and prepping food.

A lot of changes have happened at my company since I’ve started. A number of people have left, a few boomerangs have happened, and last week, the announcement of a new CEO came. The specific team I’m on has been growing quite quickly, and it’s been a really good feeling to know that I have a team where everyone seems passionate not just about their work and the company, but about taking care of each other. It’s such a different place for me to be from a work perspective — to feel like people genuinely, truly care not just about my outputs but about me.

Difficult conversations have come up in light of our new CEO. Our former CEO and co-founder discussed ensuring that they met with a diverse set of candidates that included women and people of color; if they never set this rule to begin with, they probably never would have even had a first round interview with someone who fit either category. And a result of this mention during the announcement was: how hard did we really look for someone who was a woman or non-white person? And what does white male privilege actually mean?

When I heard this conversation in our New York office this week, I couldn’t help but smile and suddenly feel really excited. It was obviously a very uncomfortable and awkward conversation, but the fact that it was even happening and people were willingly choosing to participate and admit their privileges was such a relief to me. I’ve been working full-time for over nine years now, and I’ve never had a moment of such pride and gratitude that I work where I work than I did today. It wasn’t even just this conversation that sparked it; it was the overall feeling in general of coming to work every day, having the good relationships I already have with so many of my colleagues across teams that I not only like but respect and think are truly smart and driven people, feeling like our company is actually trying to solve a real problem and that we’re really going somewhere and not being delusional about our future. It’s such a good feeling to finally have.

I had a long, two-hour chat with my colleague visiting from the Amsterdam office yesterday. She’s Chinese-American, originally from Queens, but has pretty much decided that she’s never leaving Amsterdam (or really, Europe) ever, and wants to live there for the rest of her life. She loves the high quality of life, the cleanliness, the affordability and relatively low cost of living, the relaxed attitude of the Dutch and all the expats she’s met there. And her husband, who is also American, feels the same way and wants to stay. She misses her family and friends here, but she says every time she comes back, she realizes how much her friends are changing, how different they are than her, especially in a time when her last good friend has had a child (she’s the only person in her friend group who hasn’t had a baby yet).

She told me how frustrated she gets each time she comes home at the American attitude around parenting and children, especially among her friend group, and how many of her own friends speak condescendingly to her because she “doesn’t know what it’s like” to have children, because otherwise she’d behave very differently. “It’s like Americans just don’t understand that you can actually have a life when you become a parent,” she said. “You can still travel and eat out and roam the streets. In Amsterdam, people are just so chill about babies and still have fun and have lives and don’t think their lives have to be all about their child. Here, people are just so high strung and think they have to give up everything for their child. The way it is in Amsterdam is just so much healthier.”

That’s so true. We really do think our lives end when we have children in the U.S. I can feel it myself. Things change a lot, though. I don’t want to be the type of person she complains about. We all still need our own sense of selves even after becoming a parent.