Skipping Town

Who knew our Volvo would open so many doors for us? We always feel an surge of affection when we happen to park next to a similarly well-worn Volvo in a parking lot, or drive past one on the road. And now we’re convinced our car is what ultimately led our new landlord to accept us over other potential tenants. When we first got the lease, the landlord asserted that he couldn’t wait to introduce us to another couple who rent another of his properties nearby. “I think you’ll get along great,” he said. “They have a Volvo.” And last night at the house, our landlord let it slip that he once owned 6 Volvos (old ones, not new ones) at one time. I’m not sure why—I came into the conversation late—but all I know is that we probably shouldn’t get rid of our car for the duration of our lease. I didn’t look at it too closely; but I wonder now if there’s some sort of Volvo-requirement clause.

The farmer’s market is starting to feature some of the first vestiges of summer. We’ve seen strawberries there for a couple of weeks now, but now there are even more strawberries, and even the first few tomatoes. Artichokes and asparagus are in full display. We took some pictures there on Sunday; and Monday night, I made some stuffed artichokes that turned out, if I do say so myself, splendidly. Enjoy some of California’s spring bounty: Some paper-wrapped flowers Fresh asparagus Selecting a giant head of lettuce Excited about making the first fresh pesto of the season My masterpiece

It should feel more satisfying to write the words that form the title of this post; but alas, it is our last weekend here only because we are moving twenty minutes away to Roseville. The day I write “last weekend” and mean it in the sense we all wish I did just might be a day I write two simple words for the post: THANK GOD. In the meantime, we enjoyed our “last weekend in Sacramento” in one of our favorite ways: getting the heck out of Sacramento, with a nice Saturday visit to Beth and Nate and the babies in Napa. The babies didn’t cry when they saw me and Andrew this time, which I think is a first. Perhaps they could sense my imminent motherly-ness and were somewhat less terrified of us than they usually are. Andrew was also wearnig his "butter" pants from J. Crew (they're not made of butter; they're butter-colored). It's hard to have an adverse reaction to someone wearing butter pants, unless that reaction is dirisive laughter. That's another story. No, rea...

To us, moving to Roseville isn’t really that much of a shift from where we are. It’s suburbia through and through, but for us, when it comes to choosing between Roseville and Sacramento, it’s six of one. (More to the point, it’s all NorCal.) To hear Sacramentans talk about it, though, you’d think we were moving from a brownstone on the Upper West Side to an apartment complex next to The Outlets in Vacaville. “ Roseville ?” said our downstairs neighbor when we told her we were moving. “The suburbs?” She gave us a confused, pitying look while nodding and pretending to go along with our reasoning (reasoning that consists of two things: big, cheap house and baby on the way). “You’re moving to Roseville ?” said another of our neighbors. “We’re having a baby,” we reminded her. “We need space.” “Well, that's going to be...a change,” she said. Yesterday, at the eye doctor, I mentioned our move, and the doctor pushed his rolling chair back in undisguised horror. “ Roseville ? The suburbs? Y...

Ah, the joys of moving. Of packing one’s belongings in endless boxes, hauling those boxes down stairs and into trucks, piling those boxes in one’s new home, searching for places to put everything that once had a home, collapsing boxes, carting empty boxes to the trash. What fun. We’re easing into this move in what we hope is a calm, organized manner. Rather than choose one mammoth, exhausting moving day, we’ve decided to do this move over a two-week period—our leases overlap somewhat, and our new landlord has been nice enough to invite us to start moving our things into the house even before our lease actually begins. Each night, Andrew and I pack up a few boxes, which Andrew then delivers to the new house during his lunch hour. So far, we’ve almost finished the living room, which contained the bulk of our books. We’re moving into the dining room now. We’ve hired two guys with a truck to move our furniture out next weekend. Moving is chaotic no matter how organized one tries to be. But...

I was just on the phone, lining up a mover for our big move to Roseville. When he asked where I was moving from, I said, "We live in Midtown Manhattan." It took me a moment to realize my mistake, and then I stammered, "I mean, Midtown Sacramento. Ha, ha. I wish." But I don't actually wish I were moving from Manhattan to Roseville--that would be even more depressing than moving from Sacramento to Roseville. What a funny little slip. But I did line up the movers.

Yesterday, it was in the 90s here. Today, it is in the 90s here. Last night, we slept with the AC on in our bedroom. When we turned it off in the middle of the night, a mosquito soon woke us, and a hunt began. Andrew loaded a few boxes in the car this morning and almost melted. I’ve put anything that could possibly get moldy in the refrigerator. Our trash rots as soon as anything is thrown away. It is stiflingly, horribly hot. And it’s April. Welcome to the early summer of NorCal. We are moving to our central-AC’d home in 12 days. That move cannot come fast enough. I find it funny now that when we were apartment-hunting, we paid close attention to where I’d be able to walk in the neighborhood—forgetting that in the high heat of a NorCal summer, the only walking I’ll be doing is from one AC’d room to another.

Our weekend in San Francisco with Andrew’s dad started off on an exciting note for me: with a sighting of the San Francisco Twins. Friday night, Andrew and his dad headed off to a Giants game, and I took myself to dinner at my favorite restaurant in SF, the Nob Hill Café. (Last time I was in SF, Andrew and I ate there three times.) I was sitting at a small table, engrossed in my gnocchi and a book, when I heard some slight commotion to my left. When I looked up, I saw them: the San Francisco Twins, two tables away, happily posing for pictures. The SF Twins, aka Marian and Vivian Brown, are 82-year-old twin sisters who live in the Nob Hill neighborhood; they’re famous in San Francisco for their jaunty identical getups. A quick Wikipedia search has informed me that they eat every meal together, have dressed identically their entire lives except for a brief time in their twenties, and have won prizes as “most identical” at international twin conventions. When I saw them on Friday, they we...

We’re off to San Francisco for the weekend, a trip that always brings a good bit of excitement. This time, it also brought a bit of complexity—specifically, because none of my pants fit anymore. This is not a problem in uber-casual Sacramento, where going grocery shopping in one’s yoga pants, even if one is not going to or returning from a yoga class, is the norm. When I’m working here at home, walking around with my pants unbuttoned matters to no one. Yet neither of these options is viable in San Francisco. Beth lent me a “belly band” to minimize that open-button look, but I don’t yet have any shirts long enough to make that work. My t-shirts are alarming short and tight now in a way that is simply not flattering. And so last night Andrew and I embarked on a quasi-maternity-clothes shopping trip. I really just need a decent outfit that I can wear in this in-between time, before I really start showing—something that will tide me over for a while. Or at least for this weekend. It seems...

Yesterday, in an ill-advised bout of procrastination, I entered our address in Barcelona into Google Street View. Suddenly, there it was—our street, Pau Claris, in near-real-time, cars and motos and pedestrians captured in situ. There was our building’s doorway; there, next door, were the stylishly filled windows of the design shop Vinçon. I “walked” down the block—there was a bakery; there was the French restaurant where we went for steak frites. It felt like looking at pictures of someone who had died. I then Google Street Viewed our current apartment. All it showed was garbage cans in the alley. Andrew’s at work and won’t be reading this blog for a few hours, so, free from his disapproval and his reasonable reassurances, I’ll indulge in a brief spell of pregnancy-hormone-induced hand-wringing. Where the *&^% are we? What on earth are we doing here? Where are the people, the places, the things we love the most? How on earth can we live in this remote, godforsaken outpost with a b...

I had my second doctor’s appointment this morning. I heard the baby’s heartbeat for the first time (at the last appointment, I saw it fluttering on a screen) and was feeling quite happy when I went to the desk to make my next couple of appointments. But then my midwife appeared at my shoulder with a quiet, confidential aside for the nurse’s assistant. “Dori would like to speak to Margo when you’re done,” she said. Indeed, down the hall came Dori, who shook my hand and began leading me back to her office. “Would you mind if I got my husband?” I asked. Andrew was in the waiting room, scared out of the exam room by the possibility of some graphic internal exploration, and I didn’t want him to miss any pregnancy-related discussion. “Well…” she hemmed and hawed and made it quite clear that his was to be just between us. In her office, she sat me down. “I wanted to talk to you because I noticed that on your initial paperwork you mentioned drinking alcohol every day before your pregnancy,” sh...

My favorite part of pregnancy so far is that every night I spend approximately eight hours being entertained/alarmed by a circus of crazy freak-dreams. I’ve always had vivid dreams, but the dreams I’ve been having now that I’m a hormone-riddled “vessel” have been on another level entirely. It’s not just that the dreams are weird—it’s that they are incredibly physical and visceral. And they are populated by characters I wouldn’t expect to see in my dreams—people from high school I haven’t talked to in years; deceased relatives; imaginary animals. A few of the dreams have been disturbing, baby-based dreams (dropping, accidentally drowning, holding a baby and being unsure whether or not it’s mine), which I try not to be too alarmed by—many books I’ve read have said that disturbing baby dreams are normal. What I don’t consider by-the-book “normal” are dreams like this one: I’m walking outside, in a zoo-like area, near a huge body of water, like a lake. The water is teeming with what people...

I ask you this: Does the fact that we’re moving to bona fide suburbia mean we’re making the best of a bad situation—or giving into that situation, becoming part of the badness? Before you answer, consider this. After several days of apartment- and house-hunting, we’ve found a single-family home we love. It’s huge—three bedrooms plus office, breakfast nook, laundry room, living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, porch, and huge backyard. In the front and back of the house are two enormous redwood trees, and the house has the calm, almost mystical silence you feel in a redwood grove. The downside is that the house is in Roseville, among the worst places on earth. Roseville is where Andrew works, home to office parks and suburban sprawl, housing complexes with no trees, shopping plazas and highways and malls. It’s where we stayed at the MDPOE (most depressing place on earth) when we first arrived in California—and it’s where Andrew nearly had a nervous breakdown (“We can’t live here. W...

Knock on wood, I haven’t been plagued (yet) by pregnancy symptoms. The only exception is occasional extreme exhaustion. It hits me all of a sudden—sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes in the early evening—and it really knocks me out. Lately, when the exhaustion hits me at night, it’s been compounded with an unusual symptom I haven’t read about in any of my pregnancy books: a sudden, clear-eyed realization that one’s apartment is a rat’s nest of clutter and mess, and an attendant compulsion to clean it up immediately. Wednesday night, we returned late from our foray into Grass Valley, and I was exhausted. Zombie-like wouldn’t be an overstatement. Andrew was calmly typing at the computer while I brushed my teeth and got ready for bed. But when I left the bathroom and walked into the dining room, I saw it—piles of newspapers on the coffee table, and a dining table covered in mail, rubber bands from the newspaper, notes, printouts of apartments, and much, much more. Andrew had about ten p...

Last night we visited three apartments in a charming town called Grass Valley, in the Sierra Nevada foothills. We were told that snow actually falls in the area—a definite plus—and the downtown is perfectly lovely, with streets full of small shops and restaurants. We liked all three apartments, but only one turned out to be a truly viable option. The first was a cute townhouse with a fireplace and a perfect place for my office, but it was too far from the downtown—only a shopping plaza was in sort-of walking distance—not exactly a place I'll enjoy strolling with a baby. The second was great—a restored Victorian with pretty stained-glass windows and a brand-new kitchen. The third was a restored Victorian as well, but with a strange quirk in the new-ish kitchen: a refrigerator without a freezer. When I noticed it, I said to the realtor, “No freezer?” “Oh, you noticed,” he replied. “I was going to bring that up.” He pointed out a large freezer in the garage that he said we could bring...