Fri Jul 8 – Guess what? Guess what?! We got the apartment! We got the apartment! Mel called me late last night while I was leaving the shire meeting, with the “unofficial approval” but I didn’t want to jinx anything by announcing we’d gotten it. But today at work I got the official phone call from the gals in the Manager’s office. So tomorrow morning we’re meeting the manager to sign the lease and sort out all the details. They’re starting the lease on the 15th for us, and then *whooppeee!* we have a new apartment!

It’s payday, and so it’s my big day to pay bills and balance my checkbook every two weeks. I hate when I go through cycles of being responsible versus letting things slide, and so when I *do* find something that works, I start treating it like it’s a hard and fast rule in my life. For example, everyone has to do laundry. Trying to fit laundry into my weekend never works, but after work on a Monday fits neatly. If I can’t get out on Monday nights, Wednesday is a good substitute.

The same with paying bills and balancing my checkbook: since I get paid on every other Friday, I just sit down on that Friday and pay everything for the next two weeks, chart out which bills go on which paychecks for the next 4-6 weeks, and put it all away neatly again. It’s really helped me keep up on every penny, and not have any financial stress anymore. Have I mentioned lately how much I love my job?? *grin*

And so that’s my really exciting Friday night. Hmm. I need to redefine “exciting,” don’t you think?

Thu Jul 7 – I spent some significant time putting together my “generic apartment application information” sheet this afternoon. It’s a lot like putting together a background investigation application, and since I’ve done that 3+ times in the past two jobs and another job application, I have far too much of that information at my fingertips. But every apartment application seems to want to see how much can you cram into a tiny form that’s been copied so many times you can hardly read it. So my approach now is to fill out the easy fields and put “see attached” in all the other sections, then attach a neatly typed, thorough, extremely detailed one-page two-sided custom form. I’m thinking I’ll have that on hand for job applications in the future, too.

After racing over to the apartment to drop these off with Mel, I hit the road to go up to the Shire meeting. I even got there in time to pick up Etain and bring her to the meeting, which made me feel pretty good about both getting on the road quickly enough and good about hitting the right freeways to hit the good traffic.

Strangely enough I got another phone call from the guy who’s doing my federal background investigation from a job I applied for back in December (that I no longer want, but investigations take so long, so why burn bridges?); then a call from Mel; then a call from Lisa… It was just one long Grand Central Station kind of evening. Etain wasn’t up for dinner, so I took her home first, and then went back to Chili’s to see my shire friends again.

Dinner was lovely, and I finally got to hang out with some of the brewers that I usually only see on our mailing list. And Lisa was able to swing by and join us for dinner, which was lovely. I got to tell her quite a bit about my Sunday revelations, sing her a few more song snippets I’ve written, and generally enjoy hanging out with her.

The drive home was tough, being so darn tired, but with some loud singing I made it home safely. G’night!

Sat Jul 9 – I almost slept in, but Mel (bless her heart) came knocking on my door to see if I was up yet. Quick shower and dress, and I was over at the new place on time. I finally met the manager (on Wed I had met her real estate partner when she brought the application over to the laundromat), we did a walk-through on the apartment, and we agreed on the “to-do list” for the manager to finalize the apartment for us.

I almost can’t believe we got it. Gee, I guess my phone charm is better than I thought it was. *grin*

I had breakfast afterwards, spending some time continuing to read “Seven Habits of Effective People.” It doesn’t resound as strongly as “Time Management from the Inside Out” but it’s more of a stretch-read for me. I’m working on trying to expand my organizational and planning skills, and so I’ve got to continue researching and applying what works and what improves.

Then a little shopping time. Etain and I are working on some site tokens for Crown in September, so I dropped by Michael’s crafts to find some yarn or cotton or cord that might make a nice lucet cord (a type of braiding, sort of).

Next door was a Lowe’s home improvement, so I wandered around creating a toolbox of supplies for my sword fighting kit. I couldn’t find any leather gloves or strapping tape, but I got a great toolbox, a variety of colored duct tapes, a sanding sponge, some WD-40, and a package of zip ties. Whee!

Finally, I spent about an hour or more working on some new lyrics for our next CD and then headed over to the studio. Turns out rehearsal was postponed an hour, which gave me even more time to continue lyrics while waiting. One nice thing about personal song-writing lately is that it’s given me the motivation to get back to lyrics for the band again.

After rehearsal, I couldn’t think of anyplace where I really wanted to get dinner, so I stopped by the Borders near my new apartment. They had a huge clearance sale going on so I picked up an Ursula Le Guinn book for $3, a coffee-table book with those optical illusions where you can see the 3-D images for $2, and the spinning magazine that Lynn wanted me to read. I’d been meaning to subscribe to it anyways, so getting a copy now made sense. They had some yummy sandwiches at the coffee shop in the store, so I sat over my magazine, the local arts paper, my decaf latte, and a cheese and tomato sandwich until they kicked us out of the store.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love my new apartment?

Wed Jul 6 – Beta class today. Originally I thought that I’d be bored, not getting to multi-task, but I actually had plenty to do. Very cool. After class, I went touring a number of apartments as potential places. The first place in Long Beach was gorgeous, the second place in Lakewood was on a heavy trafficked intersection (blech), and the two apts close to our apartment now were just ickier and ickier. The last one was over the garages for an apt complex, looking out over a sea of garages and alleyways. It was depressing, and made the pretty places look even nicer.

Finally, I went to do laundry, and while there got a chance to get the application for this beautiful apt over in Long Beach. The manager’s partner was just a few blocks away, and so she brought over copies of the application while I was waiting on the dryer cycle. I was pouring on the phone charm (as I call it) so much that another guy doing his laundry was compelled to ask me what I was trying so hard to get. *grin*

House-hunting is tiring work, but worth it.

And of course, after laundry, I’ve been spending a few hours ironing everything and putting it away, organizing around my room, and watching junk TV from the Food Network in the background. When “normal TV” is on sabbatical in the summer, I finally get a chance to watch other shows that I never would normally get to see. Mer’s gotten me addicted to watching “Good Eats” for the science and silliness of his cooking tips.

Tue Jul 5 – Finished the beta manual! Yippee! Well, not completely finished, but good enough for a beta class. My boss was impressed that I was able to finish it so quickly, and sent me home early for all the long hours I’d been putting in.

So after dropping off the manual with Kinko’s, I was able to get home at a really decent hour. This gave me hours and hours to unpack my car from the weekend, vacuum the carpet that I had in the park, get my laundry put together, and then tackle the kitchen. I’m looking forward to having a kitchen for only two people rather than four, but it felt wonderful to work hard at making a clean and beautiful kitchen again. Post-coffee-bar has a lot of cleaning, and before I could wash everything, I had to pick up from everything else.

With Mel home, we were able to tackle the refrigerator for several minutes. I was able to condense the other roomies food down to the lower two shelves, scrub all the shelves, and designate the top shelf as off-limits and only for Mel and me. It’s been tough to find room in the fridge with all four of us, so hopefully this will make it easier on two of us. And hopefully the other two don’t take offense that I’ve gone on a scouring and cleaning spree.

It’s almost worth counting this afternoon/evening as equivalent to a workout in the gym.

I made it to the studio on time, and they didn’t seem upset that I missed rehearsal on Saturday. Steve is working on sending CDs and marketing promo packets to several venues, possibly to book some live shows, so we’re splitting our efforts between practicing a live set and continuing our work on the next CD. It was a good rehearsal, and a decent drive home. After a quick shower (because all that cleaning was smelly sweaty work), it’s now time to crash and start all over again tomorrow morning. G’night.