The weeks leading up to the move on February 22nd were pretty hectic, but not actually as bad as I feared they would be. One thing is certain: having a bit of overlap between when we could move into our new place and when we had to vacate our old place was a godsend. It wasn’t great having to pay both rent and mortgage for a month, but it was definitely worth it. We were able to sort and pack at a leisurely pace, we managed to ferry a few things over to the new house before the big moving day, and on the moving day itself, we were comforted by the knowledge that we still had a few days after moving to sort out any last bits and pieces in the old place if need be.

As it turned out, the move was smooth and painless; the movers showed up at 9:30 in the morning, and five hours later we had everything in the new place. We were starving by then, so we left the chaos of the house and strolled into town for a late lunch: a very tasty burger and fries. After a quick coffee to fortify us, we headed back “home” to sort things out and get our bed and wardrobe put together.

It was at some point during the wardrobe assembly that I started to feel rather sick. I chalked it up to stress, exhaustion and eating too much for lunch—until Jeremy said he was starting to feel sick too, at which point we realized the culprit was probably what we ate for lunch and not how much of it we had.

Thus began a long, utterly miserable night of food poisoning. We just managed to get the bed put together before collapsing in a heap on the sofa. When Jeremy valiantly tried to get the TV set up to watch University Challenge (it being a Monday night), we found that we couldn’t get an aerial signal—and in my tired, sick state, this was enough to make me break down and cry. We drank some tea and watched a DVD for a while before schlepping ourselves to bed to spend a restless night punctuated by visits to the porcelain god. It was most definitely not the way I imagined spending our first night in our new home.

Things could only getter better from that point, and I’m happy to say that they have. As of today, we have no more cardboard boxes sitting around; everything is either put away tidily or hiding away in our vast attic. The lounge is a relaxing, cozy place to be, working in my office is a delight, and I love, love, LOVE our kitchen. I’ve been making good use of our dishwasher and compost bin, and as I write this, some freshly washed towels are flapping gently in the breeze in our back garden. We’ve still got some odds and ends to sort out (more bookshelves, a few rugs, a little island for the kitchen), and I’m still getting used to the new food shopping situation, but overall, I feel at home here much faster than I thought I would.

Now that we’ve just settled in, though, I’m planning to take off for a whole month. Jeremy and I are both heading to South by Southwest next week, but when Jeremy flies back here at the end of the conference, I’ll be intercepting my mom and grandma as they drive from Arizona to Florida to spend a week in St. Augustine. After that, I’ll ride back with them from Florida to Arizona, spend a few days at home in Sierra Vista, and then fly to Seattle, where I’ll rendezvous with Jeremy who will be speaking at An Event Apart. And after a few days in Seattle, we’ll fly back home together and settle into our new flat once more.

So it has been and will continue to be an exciting time for us. To be honest, I don’t know whether I’m coming or going at the moment (both, it appears)—but I quite like it that way.

Courtesy of xkcd.com

Yeah, anyway, the calls from the solicitor and estate agent saying that we had “completed” came much earlier than expected on Friday, so we gave the sellers a few hours to finish moving out, and then after grabbing lunch, Jeremy and I swung by the estate agent to pick up the keys and we hiked up the hill to our new home.

Our first viewing of the place on our own, as owners, was pretty much like I expected it to be for me: a mixture of excitement, curiosity and trepidation bordering on terror. Without the benefit of furniture or an estate agent for distraction, it was easy to hone in on flaws: an ill-fitting door, a sloping floor, a damaged skirting board. And, naturally, my memory of certain things had become distorted since October, when we first (and last) saw the flat; the entryway stairs are longer and steeper than I remembered, the hallway tinier, the bathroom smaller.

But these things were to be expected, and the flaws can be remedied. And my memory played tricks in the other direction as well: Though the garden was somewhat shorter than I thought (and the sellers took their lovely Japanese maple with them, boo), the decked area was bigger—certainly big enough for a nice table and chairs and a decent-sized grill or even chiminea. The fireplace surround in the lounge is really lovely. And, best of all, the kitchen still kicks butt.

I am prepared for the fact, however, that it’s going to take a bit for the new house to really become a home. Even once we get our stuff moved in, it will feel like we’re living a stranger’s flat for a while. When we moved into our current flat, even though it was just one street away from the flat we had been in, it felt like a different world, and to be honest, I hated it at first. That was due in part to the fact that just a few days after we moved in, Jeremy had to take off for a week to attend a conference, leaving me in this strange new place with no furniture and no friends living just upstairs. I distinctly remember coming back from shopping one day and desperately wishing I could keep walking past our new street, back to our old street and our old flat, as run down and cramped as it was. That was home, and the new place wasn’t.

The change is much bigger this time around, not just because we own the place we’ll be living in, but because we’re moving to a completely different part of town which neither of us is familiar with. That’s exciting, since there will be lots to explore—and in fact, I already know that there’s an outstanding butcher and excellent wine shop very nearby, not to mention two highly-regarded pubs. But it will also be very strange to leave the center of town and walk in completely the opposite direction from what we’re used to in order to get home. Being the creature of habit that I am, I know that this will unsettle me for a good while.

But maybe just being aware of that will make it easier to deal with. It helped, too, that the sellers left a card for us in the flat welcoming us to our new home, along with an explanation of where the instructions were for all the appliances (very useful), a few leaflets about recycling collection days, and a flyer for take-out pizza. That personal touch made the place seem marginally less strange and intimidating. They also left the flat spotlessly clean; in fact, it’ll probably never be that clean again. So now all that’s left for us to do is fill the place with our familiar clutter and make a house a home.

After doing scary movies back in November, the theme this time around was time travel. Time travel is a fairly rich seam to mine as far as movies go, though for every Time Bandits there’s a Time Cop, so you have to choose wisely if you want a quality time-travel experience.

I’m not sure we chose entirely wisely the other night. We had a lot of films to pick from, ranging from the whimsical Pleasantville to the suspenseful and tightly composed Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes), but the vote for the first film of the evening came down to either 12 Monkeys, which most everyone had seen but was happy to watch again, or a Japanese film called Returner.

In the end we opted for Returner, which was like a cross between Terminator, Transformers, The Matrix and E.T. To be fair, I think the film would have been marginally less ridiculous had we watched it with subtitles instead of cheesy dubbing, but even so, it was rather silly and, as is the case with so many Asian SF/horror films, it just didn’t know when to stop. It was good for some laughs, and I did quite like the planes transforming into spaceships, but I still kind of wished the vote had gone in favor of 12 Monkeys (one of the best time-travel movies ever).

The second movie of the night had been decided in advance, because it was agreed (by those who had seen it already, anyway) that no time-travel evening would be complete without it: Primer.

I was surprised to discover yesterday that I actually blogged about Primer four years ago, after Jeremy and I watched it for the first time (I should say the first two times, because straight after watching it the first time we watched it all over again). What I said then still holds true today: it’s a fascinating, intelligent, believable film which chews up your brain and spits it out again, leaving you to sort out the pieces.

Our viewing of Primer this time around was somewhat hampered by the sound system, which made it really difficult to understand the dialog—and Primer consists mostly of dialog, rapidly spoken and overlapping at that. Nonetheless, everyone seemed to enjoy the movie, and when the lights came up, we all sat in silence for a few moments, trying to work out what it was we had just seen.

If you’ve seen Primer and you want some assistance in mapping out what exactly happened when and to whom, there’s a decent description on the Primer Wikipedia page, there are some very thorough timelines out there, and there’s an exellent 19-page essay which goes into great detail about “the perils and paradoxes of time travel” (it also taught me the word syuzhet, a term I’d never heard before).

However, as I said the first time I wrote about Primer, if you haven’t seen the movie yet but you’re planning to, don’t read about it in advance. Much of the pleasure derives from being carried along by the script to an unknown destination and trying to work out for yourself what’s going on. Only when your brain has been fried by the movie once should you do a bit of research—and then watch it again. Appropriately enough considering the multiplicity of timelines and interpretations it offers, Primer is a film which encourages—or even demands—multiple viewings.

I didn’t give a whole lot of thought to doing this myself until I took my last picture of 2009. It’s an unremarkable photo, but it says a lot to me personally, and as I snapped it I thought that having a year’s worth of photos like that could be quite interesting (to me, anyway).

With that in mind, I embarked on my own Project 365. I haven’t joined any groups, I’m not following any theme, I’m not trying to be artistic, and I’m not aiming to improve my photography. My sole purpose is to take an everyday picture every day so that by the end of the year, I have a collage of images which shows me at a glance what I did throughout the year.

Even though my days generally consist of sitting in front of a computer from morning until evening, I’ve managed to take just over two weeks’ worth of pictures without too much hardship and without resorting to repeatedly taking photographs of my desk (though I have done that). Things may get more interesting once we start moving, and in March I’ll be taking off for a jaunt around the USA (more on that later) which will undoubtedly generate some interesting photo ops. Until then I’ll happily keep snapping photos of the mundane.

Having now spent 3 years living downstairs from a variety of neighbors ranging from moderately irritating to utterly unbearable, I once again say “Nie wieder!” When we were looking for a new flat, my top priority—the one thing I would not budge on no matter what—was that we would not have anyone living above us. This immediately ruled out a lot of really nice-looking flats, but every time I found myself wavering in my determination, I imagined our horrible former upstairs neighbor (“Stumpy”) living above me in one of those nice-looking flats, and suddenly the flat looked like a prison cell.

I admit that I’m more sensitive to certain types of ambient noise than your average person. Some things I can tune out (car alarms) and other things I can tolerate (distant music), but what I cannot stand is the continuous thunking, thonking, banging and scraping of an “active” upstairs neighbor. A bit of footfall is to be expected, of course, but when the noise is always there, it drives me nuts. Even noise-canceling headphones don’t block out noise like that, because it reverberates across the ceiling and down the walls, turning our flat into a giant, resonating kick drum.

Our current upstairs neighbors (“The Elephant Man” and his companion) aren’t nearly as bad as Stumpy, but they still engage in lots of inexplicable marching-back-and-forth, punctuated with the occasional dropping-something-heavy-on-the-ground or pushing-something-large-across-the-floor. I find it aggravating to the point of madness, and for this reason (among many others), I am counting the days until we leave here and move into our new place.

It’s sad in a way because this is a lovely flat and I’ve had really good times in it. I adored this flat unreservedly for the first year we lived here. We then went through a rough patch when we thought we had to move, and even when it subsequently turned out that we didn’t have to move, I felt somewhat cooler towards the place after that because I had mentally prepared myself for leaving it. And then just a month after that, Stumpy moved in upstairs and I started wishing we had moved.

Well, now we are moving, and while there will probably be different types of aggravation in our new place, the one aggravation I won’t have to put up with is someone stomping around above my head all day—unless, of course, our loft space is haunted, in which case I just hope the ghosts have a light footfall.

Since time immemorial, Scholastic Inc. has run book clubs and book fairs to encourage kids to read. When I was in elementary school, our teachers would hand out Scholastic book order forms a couple of times a year, and we’d take them home, choose the books we wanted to order and then hand the forms back to the teacher, who would send them off to Scholastic. And a few weeks later, the books would be delivered to the classroom and handed out to all the kids who’d placed orders.

I distinctly remember that the order forms had a thin, newspapery feel to them, and I think you had to put an X in the tiny box next to the books you wanted. As someone who was a bookworm before she even knew how to read, choosing which books to order was always an agonizing task. My parents were generous and never restricted me to just one or two, but even so, it was hard to whittle down my choices from a world of possibilities.

Once you had made your choices and returned your order form, then you had to wait, since it took a few weeks for the books to show up. Book delivery day was the really thrilling bit, as there would be a stack of soft, shiny new books at the front of the classroom, and you knew that some of them were yours—and if you’d ordered a certain number of books, chances were you’d be getting a bonus kitten poster or bookmark as well. Score!

A quick Google of “Scholastic order forms” tells me I’m not the only grown-up with fond memories of Scholastic book orders—not to mention the book fairs, when Scholastic representatives would come to the school and sit behind tables loaded with books ripe for the picking. Oh, the joy of being able to shop for books in the middle of a school day! Life doesn’t get better than that, I tell you.

I guess I get that kind of thrill through Amazon now; I check the books I want and then wait expectantly for the package containing my shiny new purchases. And while there are benefits to this—I can order as many books as I want and it takes just two days for them to show up, not two weeks—I have yet to get a free kitten poster from Amazon.

No, wait, that’s not right. Ten years ago, on a bright sunny day, Jeremy and I exchanged vows in a (sweltering) chapel in Arizona. That’s better.

Last year we celebrated our 9th wedding anniversary by extravagantly jetting off to Italy for the weekend. This year, in the face of our impending flat purchase and in the midst of the worst winter weather Britain has seen in, like, forever, we’re not going any further than a few blocks away for a quiet dinner at a restaurant called Graze.

On our wedding day, we received a bottle of champagne from our friend Joe with the instructions that it was not to be opened until our 10th anniversary. We had to jump the gun a bit and open it on New Year’s Eve instead while we were still in Arizona, but we still used it to toast Joe and our first decade of marriage.

I love the optimism of giving someone a gift which can’t be used for 10 years. It’s like the optimism behind buying wines for cellaring rather than immediate consumption; you’re making a lot of positive assumptions when you invest in something long term like that (even if “long term” is only ten years).

In light of this, Jeremy and I decided it would be nice if we bought ourselves a bottle of wine for our 10th anniversary which we wouldn’t open until our 20th (gah!). We haven’t quite decided on a wine yet, though we’re thinking along the lines of a Côtes du Rhône because we’re both big fans of those gutsy, spicy wines. Once we make our choice, we’ll slip the bottle into our little wine rack and let it collect dust for the next 3,650 days (give or take a few days)—at which point we’ll pop it open, raise a toast to two decades of wedded bliss, and buy another bottle to drink in the year 2030.

Not an entirely happy time in my life, but certainly a formative one, and one which I recall with a mixture of relief because it’s over and piercing sadness for the same reason.

In the greater scheme of things, our current apartment is pretty small. But in the Brighton scheme of things, we’ve actually got quite a lot of space for a one-bedroom flat. Our lounge and bedroom are unusually spacious, and our 12-foot ceilings leave plenty of room for storing things on top of wardrobes and closets. And as is generally the case, our possessions have expanded to fill the space available.

The flat we’re moving into is perhaps marginally bigger than what we’ve got now, but instead of one big bedroom and one giant lounge/kitchen/diner, the space is divided into four rooms of roughly equal size, three of which are awkwardly shaped because they have fireplaces in them (and two of those are “feature fireplaces,” meaning that they are pretty but completely pointless and space-robbing).

This has made me somewhat nervous about finding nooks for all our furniture and other goodies, particularly our wardrobes. Since we can’t get into the flat itself yet to measure the space, I thought it might be good if I could at least draw up a floor plan of it and then measure our furniture to see what might go where. My search for a simple way of doing this led me to Floorplanner, a free online tool for drawing floor plans and pushing furniture around in them.

I was able to import a rough floor plan from the estate agent to use as the basis for creating a more detailed plan—but I had no idea just how detailed I would get until I started to play with the program and went into OMG it’s like a tiny dollhouse!! mode. You can draw up floor plans and add furniture to them in Floorplanner, but you can also pick out rugs, choose various styles of seating and lighting, insert different appliances, add plants to your garden, put pots and pans in your kitchen—and then look at it all in 3D. How awesome is that?

I initially planned to just roughly map the two bedrooms to sort out wardrobe and desk placement issues. Several hours later, I have mapped out the entire flat—including the garden—and put in laminate flooring, rugs, chairs and tables, lamps, my computer, a television, all the major kitchen appliances, a coffee machine, a shower curtain, and a barbecue in the garden. I even put a tiny chopping board on the kitchen counter, but I removed a roast chicken from the table and a few other things because the 3D rendering was getting unwieldy (I also removed some people from the rooms because they were creepy).

I’m not sure how precise I’ve been with the scale and placement of specific room features, but my floor plan has certainly given me a better feel for what it might be like to move around in the flat. It’s also been ridiculously fun to make, and I’m having to resist the urge to keep going back and tweaking things to make it even more cute (A bar in the living room? A pinball machine? A drum kit?).

Playtime must come to an end, though; real work has shown up in my inbox, so I have to abandon my little dollhouse. I guess the next furniture I’ll push around is our actual furniture in our actual flat—and somehow I don’t think that’s going to be nearly as relaxing.