Last night, I invited a good friend over to see my new apartment, have some dinner, and catch up. Given that most of the last month has been spent on settling and moving in, selling the original couch, and having my parents over, we’ve had no time to really invite anyone over to see our place until now. My friend had her bike stored safely downstairs in the mail room, and as she entered the building, she said she felt the building was too fancy for her to be entering. And as she entered the different parts of our new apartment, she marveled over everything from the windows to the light to living room rug. “This is the nicest apartment I’ve ever been in in this city!” she exclaimed. She was wide-eyed as we were on the roof overlooking the Empire State Building, the Chrysler building, and One World Trade downtown.

The funniest thing about this apartment is that for New York, yes, it’s a big one-bedroom, but for the country or the world? Not at all. Even things like having a pool on the roof in our building or a gym in-building are no big deal and are expected in better kept apartment buildings in the middle of the country… like in Arkansas, as my friend from Little Rock likes to remind me. She’s still in shock to this day that the last apartment we were in on the Upper East Side was as small as it was.

It’s all relative as we always say. I’ll be honest, though; every day I am in this apartment, other than the days my parents were here, I think I love it here more and more. It feels really nice to have real space again and actually have different living spaces, and a real hallway.

I baked in my new kitchen with my new oven tonight, and it was absolutely glorious.

I was a little intimidated looking at all the oven options (there’s a heat setting for both the upper and the lower oven… I’ve never seen that before, but hey, I don’t really keep up with oven trends). But when I set the timer digitally to 350 degrees, the number gradually increases to show what the actual temperature is. Then, there are timers for how long you want to bake, and all are digitally set by the digits; no up and down buttons. Just type in what number of minutes. Then, the timer goes off twice; once when there’s only one minute left, and then there’s a seconds countdown, and the second and final time of course when the bake time has completed.

And the banana bread loaf was perfect, beautifully browned on the outside, and moist on the inside. Banana bread is my most often baked good, mostly because it’s so easy and fast, and you never need fancy ingredients for it (well, except this time, I used creme fraiche).

I feel like I’ve finally entered the modern age of oven technology now. No more crappy dials for me.

I’m 31 years old, but I still can’t let go of my stuffed animals and all my other miniature Japanese and Snoopy toys I’ve been collecting forever. Do I really act my age? Or are other people like this, too, and they just don’t talk about it?

We have two huge bags full of stuffed animals, and I can’t bear to give any of them away. I think I gave a few of them away before we moved, but the ones we have, even though we don’t have enough display space in the new place, I can’t give them away. We have my Snoopys out, plus Pooh Bear from our wedding, and a couple koalas to represent Chris’s home country. That’s really it. There’s no place for animals like Ponyo or the FAO Schwarz bears or even Classic Pooh Bear, which was gifted to me by one of my best friends when we were only 12.

Decorating is hard when you’re trying to balance being an “adult” and having a “modern” apartment with also displaying all the things you love and are obsessed with, regardless of whether they are “age appropriate” or not.

Ever since I first moved to New York, I always noticed the restaurant supply stores that line Bowery on the Lower East Side. I figured they’d be good places to shop one day when I had my own place (well, not a roommate, but a husband or a more permanent home), and I could peruse their aisles to see what I might like. On my mental list were things like massive stock pots, huge stainless steel pans, and maybe even cheap serving platters.

I left work early to go since they’re supposedly only open from 9-6pm Monday through Friday. And I showed up at 5:05pm yesterday, and I got turned away. “Closed!’ two different men shouted at me. And I said, what, I thought you guys close at 6pm? And they both rolled their eyes at me as though I was some deaf child and said they changed their hours over a year ago, how could I not know that?

Well, sorry. I don’t check your hours every single day because I don’t pass your store every day. And no, I didn’t know because I completely went by your Yelp posting. And no, I don’t really like your attitude when I was trying to give your stupid business my money.

This is why regular consumers like me go to stores like Bed Bath and Beyond or Williams Sonoma. We end up paying more for what we buy that way. But we don’t get treated like shit like at the industrial supply shops.

I’m not even sure I want to go back. How much money would I really be saving, anyway?

We planned to catch up with one of our couple friends for dinner tonight in TriBeCa. We pretty much never eat in TriBeCa, nor do we even go there. TriBeCa is one of those neighborhoods where the rent and general cost of living is stupidly exorbitant, the restaurants are equally overpriced and overhyped — and anyway, who wants to live there when during a hurricane, it will likely be under water and without electricity, anyway?

But I really wanted to try this Shanghainese spot that opened by the same owners who run Cafe China in midtown. It’s not located in any Chinatown, but I always enjoyed the food and am eager to try new Shanghainese places that sound authentic (so many places in Chinatown say they are Shanghainese.. but they really aren’t). And so I made a booking for us at 6:30 on Yelp and made my way down there.

So, the annoying thing about eating at a fancy Chinese restaurant vs. a regular Chinese restaurant is that when you go to a regular Chinese spot in Chinatown or other very Chinese area, they don’t care if you add one more person. If you add one more person to a “fancy” spot, they either won’t give you your table, or they will just have you get seated three hours later. Those were our two options tonight when Chris’s friend wanted to come join us… and couldn’t.

The food was very good. The service was just okay. And in typical Chinese fashion, even at a fancy restaurant, they made sure we were out of there within two hours when they had their next booking setup for our four-top.

We finally received a notification that someone is purchasing our new sofa that came with our apartment through AptDeco. I figured our chances of selling the sofa were quite slim on Craigslist given a) it’s a designer couch, b) the price point was relatively steep, and c) how often do people really commit on Craigslist anyway, especially to an item that is worth more than just $20-50? So this really worked out for us. Their fee is a bit steep, but the entire process was so smooth, and they’re having their pickup guys come on Saturday to wrap and take it out of here, which is really what I wanted.

We’re finally going to have our living room space whole for the first time this Saturday. It’s like even though the apartment is new to us, this Saturday, it will truly be new and whole to us for the very first time since we moved in.

I was onsite with a customer all day today, and to end the day, we had a surprise wine flight where we had to guess the country and varietal of the wines we were trying (I failed miserably), and then I had to rush off for my team’s dinner since two of our team leads were in town from San Francisco. One of our leads picked out Tree Bistro for dinner, and it was a quaint little French restaurant in the East Village that without her recommendation, I probably never would have noticed before.

I had so much fun, and really before I worked here, I really can’t remember ever genuinely enjoying not just the food, but the conversations at my work dinners…. even the ones with my customers. A lot of time because I am me, I’d pick the restaurant to make sure it was a place I wanted to try on my list that would potentially be good, and I’d pretend to enjoy the company just so I could try the food. Most of the conversations were forced and trite, about topics I cared little about, or things I had to pretend to be interested in (the future of the company… like I care about my last company at all). Tonight, we talked all about traveling to see every state of the country, the current state of politics, and about a number of different books, including one about the history of New York.

I finally work with people who see the world beyond themselves and the cities they live in.

In the last apartment we were in, I always felt like the floors were dirty. Since I was little, I’ve always worn slippers in the house. Part of the reason was just in case I stepped on something sharp (when your dad can’t live without his tools, you inevitably will step on something sharp on the floor at some point during the day), and other times, it was mainly because I just like wearing slippers. But at the last apartment, it was because I always felt the floors were dirty. There was always something crumbly on the floor. Even after I scrubbed the floors, they felt dirty. It was probably because the floor boards were old and coming up, resulting in actual dirt being uncovered from underneath the boards. And then there was the issue of random nails sticking out of the floor boards, especially around the kitchen area, which was obviously a place I spent a lot of time.

So now that we’re in this new apartment, it feels strange that the floor actually always feels clean now. I rarely feel anything under my feet when I am walking barefoot, and even though I really haven’t cleaned the floor much at all the last two weeks, the floor… actually feels almost the same. I vacuumed for the first time today, and it didn’t seem much different than before I did it with the exception of a couple dust balls.

Does this actually mean I will have to clean less here? Is this what it’s like to live in a good apartment?

When I first moved to New York City, the biggest craze around lobster was at Luke’s Lobster, this little shop in the East Village that was famous for lobster and crab from Maine, brought in fresh daily from the state that is famous for these delicious, rich, and expensive crustaceans. Luke’s aimed to make lobster “affordable” for the New Yorkers who couldn’t always shell out the $25-45 for full lobster or lobster roll, and when I first moved here, that sounded really exciting. I think back in 2008-2009, the cost was around $15 for a lobster roll.

I wasn’t very experienced eating lobster or lobster rolls then, so then, I thought, wow, that’s a good deal. So my friend and I went, and although we both preferred the crab roll over the lobster roll, neither of us thought it was small.

Now, fast forward nine years later, I have this work perk where I can get free lunch at work. My colleague organized a group order for all of us to get lobster and crab rolls. And I hadn’t had these in ages, so I was just excited to try it again.

When the delivery came and I opened my box, half a crab roll and half a lobster roll, I was shocked by how small they were. Each half roll was literally three bites. I made it into six bites by taking the tiniest bites possible to savor it longer. But the rolls just looked so sad and puny.

I realize these are first world problems, but now Luke’s, having expanded throughout New York in multiple neighborhoods and having increased their prices, really doesn’t have any spark for me anymore.