I had a quiet weekend, this weekend. Chad was out most of the timing doing man things and I was home doing a whole lot of nothing.

I managed to finish the 2nd Harry Potter novel on Sunday while wrapped up in 300 blankets. I was freezing cold and no amount of soup could warm me up.

The novelty of our situation is starting to wear off. Obviously we are beyond thankful that my parents have opened up their house to us, but it is starting to hit me just how much I wish we had a space of our own. You can only keep yourself cooped up in your bedroom for so long. Especially when it isn’t exactly the warmest place in the house! When you sit in a big empty house, all you wish is that someone was home to make it not feel so lonely, and when you sit in a big full house, all you wish is that everyone would go out so you can have some alone time. Yes, I know, the grass is always greener.

I realized today that in just over a month we will have been living this whole “transition into the next phase of life” for a year. I did not expect that it would take us a year. Scratch that, I did not expect that it would take us more then a year, considering we haven’t even bought a house yet.

We’ve seen a total of 4 houses in the last month. All of them have been older, heritage-esque homes in New West. We found one that was as close to perfect as we have seen to date, but it wasn’t perfect (not that anything will be). I know that when a house is right, we will feel it, but questions and anxiety start to run through my head. How will I know it is right? Will we ever find something that is right? How will I know that this feeling is the right feeling? I guess you just have to have faith. I knew when I met Chad that it was right, and now I have to trust that when I meet our house, I will know that it is right.

I’ve been spending more and more time sitting in silence, waiting for a voice to tell me what to do. That’s all I really can do right now.

Part of me just questions what all this waiting is for, why do we have to wait so long? Well, we have to wait so long because what is meant to be ours isn’t ready to be ours yet, and once it is I will feel silly that I ever worried and stressed about all the waiting. Didn’t Tom Petty say that the waiting is the hardest part? He was right.

I feel a little forlorn about our situation even though I have nothing to be forlorn about.

I just want a house so damn bad.

There was no one to sit in Chads chair in the back of the moving van this year. But it worked out well because there was way more stuff to move out of the apartment then there was into the apartment so Pat wouldn’t have fit anyways.

It’s all over. The move was a success thanks to team awesome. Dario and Ryan are such good planners; they packed the moving van and storage locker like professionals. I don’t even know how they got everything to fit. Gina and Elise were also excellent help holding elevator doors and moving boxes.

It took longer than I had anticipated, but then moving always does. We had two loads to drop off, one to my Moms and one to the storage locker. We were finished by about 4, which wasn’t too bad. You can tell we had out grown the space based on how much stuff we had crammed into every knock and cranny. And to think, a lot of stuff was already in my Uncles basement, plus Chad had already moved 3 or 4 small loads of boxes over the past 2 weeks. We wouldn’t have fit everything had we not started moving things early.

Sunday morning Chad and I went back to move all the stuff from the deck, empty the fridge, and clean everything up. That again took longer expected.

My parent’s basement looks like it’s exploded with all our stuff. I was able to go through a few boxes last night and put away half of our clothes, but there is still so much to do. I forgot how much of my stuff was left in my bedroom and the basement when I moved out, and I know that Mom is going to expect me to take it all when we find a house, so I think my plan of action is to start going through it this weekend, when I’m home alone, and just start chucking it all. Most of it is inside joke stuff from high school which I no longer remember and therefore is useless to me. I’m sure I will keep some stuff, but my goal is to fit it all in one box.

All the payments go through today and the keys get handed over on Wednesday. Chad is going to make one more trip tonight to the BBQ and Drums, which we totally forgot about, other then that, we are officially out of there.

I don’t know how I feel about the whole situation. I don’t know if I miss the apartment itself or just the idea of Chadand I having a space that was ours. I guess on one hand, that apartment always felt like a project to me, a transitional home that we renovated to appeal to the masses. But at the same time, it was the only place I had ever lived outside of my parent’s home, and it was also the first place I ever lived with Chad. I guess the goal is to look forward where Chad and I get to find our first home together.

So it’s done. The little apartment that could is no longer ours. The photos and memories we will always have. I will miss it, but bigger and better things are on the horizon.

It has been a stressful two weeks, more stressful then usual.

The morning of Thanksgiving we received a phone call from our Realtor informing us that someone wanted to put an offer on our apartment and they wanted to meet with us that evening. Whats that, a Thanksgiving MIRACLE!? We were excited but nervous, given the way everything had turned out until this point, we really didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves. Knowing our luck, the deal would fall through before the offer was even put on the table. All day we waited anxiously for a confirmation call of when this would all go down. We had to rearrange our family dinner and prepared ourselves as best we could.

Since dinner was at my parents house, our Realtor met us there along with the Realtor representing the other couple wanting to buy the apartment. Now, I’ve watched enough HGTV to know how this whole thing plays out, or so I thought. The Realtor presented us with an offer, which wasn’t that great of a deal, and instead of laying it out and letting us decide what our next move was, he began to present us with this pile of information that essentially told us this offer was the best we were going to get because our apartment wasn’t really worth that much and the market was just going to go down even more so really, since his clients weren’t in a rush to by anything and since the markets were just going to continue to go down, he was doing us a favour with this offer. I wanted to punch this guy in the face so badly it took all my strength not to move from the couch.

Thankfully our Realtor quickly shewed him out of the house so we could talk in private about what we wanted to do. I was super annoyed with this guy but Chad just brushed it off as him ‘doing business’. I’m sorry, but there is no reason for you to be an ass hat. Present us with the offer and let it be. I know everyone had a budget of what they can and can’t afford. I know that people always want to try and get a deal when buying a place, so there is really NO reason why you have to give us a speech on how our situation is hopeless and you are doing us a favour. UGH.

Anyways, the deal went back and forth and back and forth a couple times until we finally agreed on a price. It was no where near the price we had in our minds when we put our apartment up for sale, but we had to accept it for what it was. We had been on the market for 6 months with NO offers, there were TONS of other apartments in our area that were also for sale and not selling, the markets HAD gone down, and in reality, this really was our only way out. Do you sacrifice money if it removes stress from your life? In this case, yes. We were more then ready to move on, but we were stuck and couldn’t plan or do anything until the apartment sold. So, this was our way out.

You’d think we’d be elated once we had signed the deal, but our feelings were very much the opposite. We were bitter and frustrated, sad and worried. We never thought it would turn out like this. Yes we had an accepted offer but we never thought we would sell it for what we did. We struggled with how ‘unfair’ the whole experience had felt. I am not one to wallow in self pity and I try very hard to accept things for what they are and believe that everything in life happens for a reason, but this whole apartment selling business just seemed ridiculous.

The next step, after we accepted the offer, was to wait for them to book an inspection. I was feeling pretty confident because I knew there wasn’t too much that could be wrong with a small 1 bedroom apartment, plus Chad and other members of the Strata Council work so hard to make sure everything in the building is working and up to par that I doubted there was anything they could find that would break the deal. That was until I realized that if for whatever reason this couple had decided that they didn’t make the right choice or if they changed their minds, they could essentially pick out anything from the Strata Minutes or the Inspection and say ‘Yea, we don’t like this, this is a deal breaker’. When I realized this I started to really worry.

The inspection took over two hours long, which was a far cry from the inspection we did when we bought the place. I guess maybe we should have actually hired an inspector instead of getting my Godfather to walk through the building checking things out in exchange for a bottle of Martini & Rossi. HA! When I got home I could tell everything has been looked at. Furniture was moved and there was drywall dust all over the floors from him taking apart switches to see how they were hooked up. I just wanted this to be all over and done with.

It wasn’t until this past Monday that we found out the inspection went well. The only thing that came up was something about our plugs and switches not being installed properly, which was our fault when we bought new ones and changed them all out. They wanted us to fix everything or they were going to take $1000 off the price. Humm…fix it for $200 or take $1000 off the price. Yea, that’s a no brainier.

The electrician is coming tomorrow to fix everything, then we have to present the bill with all the changes listed to the other Realtor. In the mean time, the accepted offer was finalized which means we are no longer owners of our little apartment, which is just sad to think about. I know it was time to move on, and I know I complained a lot about the building, but I love our little apartment and I am going to be sad to see it go.

Now, we have the challenge of organizing everything. We have to be out of there in exactly 1 month, which clearly does not give us any time to find a place and move into it, but we really weren’t planning on doing that anyways, which is why we agreed to these dates. So, we are putting 95% of our stuff into a storage locker and the other 5% of our stuff into my parents house where we will be moving into. That should be interesting!

So the deed is done. This chapter of our lives is coming to a close. We still aren’t excited, about it. There is a lot of work that needs to be done, but hopefully once the move takes place and we start seeing some homes we actually like, the excitement will come back.

I tend to live in the past. I count on my memories to put a smile on my face and warm my heart. It’s not that life is so horrible and I have nothing to look forward to therefore all I do is focus on the past, it’s just that sometimes you get in a funk, and life isn’t all that exciting and so you look back to a time that was good. It’s not that my past is better than my future, but there were good times, really good times, times that sometimes I wish I could re-live. How awesome would it be to go back in time and re-live one of your favorite days. Trying to recreate it never works, but if you could go back and do it all over again, how awesome would that be.

Chad never thinks about the past, probably because he can’t remember half of it. He is all about the future. I to would like to focus on the future but I find it so hard when I can’t picture it at all. I can’t picture us moving on from this spot. I’ve pictured it for so long with none of it coming true that I have just given up on the thought. I’ve tried to imagine what would happen, but disappointment after disappointment has left me here clueless, not knowing what to think.

Maybe its the tight hold I have on my past that inhibits me from moving on into the future. It’s not that I don’t want to move on, it’s that I am stuck. There is only so much I can do and change. Some of it has to come when the time is right, and I understand that. I want to move on but for right now I am here, stuck, so I might as well think about the days when life was good and things were awesome. When Chad and I first started dating, when Pat lived here, when I actually liked the Cambie, when I didn’t base my entire happiness on the apartment selling.

Thats probably why I am so obsessed with pictures and capturing every moment of fun. I am that person that spends hours looking back at pictures and smiling. I am in love with the past.

I just hope that something changes, something that makes me forget the past and gets me excited about the future.

I am not the most social person in the world. I can be very shy and my shiness can come across as snobbishness. I am not a snob (ok, sometimes I am). I am just a mute. I am not good at small talk. I’m not good at thinking of things to talk about on the spot. I’m not good around people I don’t know.

A lot of it has to do with comfort level. For example, a few weeks ago Chad and I went to my cousins birthday party at a pub and a small group of his guy friends were there. I didn’t know anyone but they were so inviting that I found myself chatting everyone up. Very unlike me, but I was comfortable in the situation and so the conversation flowed. I really enjoyed myself and would hang out with them again given the opportunity.

Probably the hardest event for me to attend, in terms of comfort level, is a party where everyone invited has known each other for a million years and has all this history together. They have all these things in common and all these things to talk about while I just sit there stunned with nothing to add to the conversation because I have no idea what they are talking about and I don’t know their history or all the funny stories they are telling and I feel like an idiot. I feel so uncomfortable that there is no chance of breaking me out of my shell and I become a lost cause.

What is the worst party situation? Going to party after party with the same people, half of which have never said a word to you and because you keep showing up at the same parties and you have been doing this for so long it would be totally awkward to finally go up to them, like 2 years after the fact, and formally introduce yourself and have a conversation with them. At least it would be totally awkward for me.

The most comfortable party situation for me is of course the small group. In this situation I feel as though I can be myself, feel comfortable and actually have a one on one conversation with someone. I find it much more manageable then a house party with 30 people where everyone is talking to everyone else and I am left on the couch all by myself feeling like a loser. Trust me, it’s happened before.

So the question is, if you are invited to a party where you know you probably won’t feel totally comfortable and social, do you go for the adventure and the possibility that you might have a lot of fun, or do you sit at home with season 2 of the Golden Girls?