If there’s one thing I respect above anything else in an Asian household, it’s that shoes always, always go off as soon as you enter the house. Nothing is dirtier than trampling all over someone’s house with your outside shoes on. It’s absolutely disgusting. Without even knowing it, we all step on the filthiest things: sidewalks that have had dog poop and urine covered in them and simply wiped off; endless spit, insects, cigarette buds and ashes, gasoline and dirt from the streets. Many studies on dirt, grime, and germs over the last couple years have shown that the bottoms of our shoes have even had traces of e. coli. No one wants e. coli, even the non-Asians. Even Martha Stewart advocated for a shoes-off household, and we all know how much I love and respect Martha Stewart. Crafting for a living would be my dream.

This apartment that we’re moving into is supposed to be fully cleaned before we move in; even the windows are getting a washing, both on the inside and out. I pressed the leasing agent about how clean it would be. All I could think about were all the disgusting feet that have walked through this apartment for viewings and how dirty the bottoms of their shoes were. I want all the counters sanitized and the floors swept and mopped… because if I move in and feel any bit of grime under my feet, I will probably abandon all the packed boxes and luggage and just start mopping. Really.

Today at a dim sum palace in Brooklyn Chinatown, it was like the typical Chinese restaurant situation where you see disparate groups of people all seated at the same round table with a Lazy Susan: an Asian woman with her brown husband, a Chinese couple with their four-year-old who won’t sit still unless he has his iPad in front of him with a handful of Pepperidge Farm goldfish, and two older Asian female friends with a random eight-year-old girl who refuses to eat or speak. Except in this case, we were all technically the same party. My aunt always insists on inviting random Jehovah’s Witness Chinese friends to our family meals. It’s like her thing. She always treats them, and she probably never gets treated back, and she really doesn’t care; her generosity seriously knows no bounds. My cousin and his wife didn’t acknowledge or even say hi to the random Chinese friend my aunt met in China who joined us for lunch. The eight-year-old girl stared into space and didn’t touch any of the food that her mom’s friend, who took her to this restaurant, put on her dish, and Chris and I happily ordered away and got all our favorite dim sum dishes, and then some.

That’s a day in the life of the extended Wong family meal. Fun, fun, fun.

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.