I'm BACK!!!!....

Yea, I know. I am grounded. I neglected my blog and I have heard about it from the only 3 people that actually read it. But I had an idea/wanted to vent so I thought this was an appropriate forum.

We only signed a 6-month lease with our apartment and it was up in February so we are now officially month-to-month on our lease... though we already paid our last months rent and believe me when I say with the amount of rent we pay you better dang well believe I will be in this place until 11:59 pm on the last day of the month we live here.

Anyways... we've been thinking about what we want to do. Stay here till we leave SF? Move to the East Bay, Move to the North Bay, move somewhere cheaper/bigger/with a garage. We're kind of waiting on the Coast Guard (as always) to give Scott new orders. They are restructuring and he'll get a new assignment sometime between now and July (lovely timeframe, right!). Chances are it'll be in SF still BUT we can't know that for sure until they are in our hot little hands so we don't want to make any decisions before that. It also kind of depends if his rotation date starts all the way over (what year we move will have some say in what we decide to do).

So I thought I would amuse myself and you with some aspects of "city living" that we have learned the first 6 months we've been here and positive/negatives of it all.

GOOD
- Walk to cafes, movies, grocery store, post office, pretty much anything
- Big park overlooking Golden Gate bridge is 3 blocks away
- Bus stop is across the street that will take you downtown (other buses nearby)
- I belong to a gym that has 3 locations within a mile of our house
- There is a cafe one block away that serves diner breakfasts should you find yourself hung over and unable to trek the 10 minutes to the other cafes
- Gorgeous weather... the perfect weather for an Alaskan (sunny but not obnoxious and just enough rain to keep you honest)
- cool shows, music, plays (though we haven't taken advantage of this as much as we should)
- yadda yadda

ANNOYING/BAD
So this is the heart of what I was thinking about today. I just foreshadowed it with some positives to put a positive spin on things.
- No washer/dryer!!! We have to drag our laundry a block away to the laundromat.
- No garage/parking. We've gotten use to this and tend not to use the car very often so we don't have to find parking when we get home (plus it's not like you can park wherever you go either).
- Live in the "Marina district" populated with activewear Barbies, drunk frat guys, and rich stay-at-home moms that parade their babies around in $1000 strollers during the day drinking lattes.
- Where has nature gone? I went for a bike ride the other day and saw actual trees and could hear the sound of stream and it made me sad because I realized that I missed it. You can take a gal out of Alaska but you can't take the Alaska out of the gal.
- "Dateway" - so yea, there is a grocery store nearby. It's a Safeway but it's actually known as "Dateway" because everyone goes there looking all fabulous (usually in their gym clothes though), I haven't seen a whole lot of singles scene action there but I am out of the mix. You must go to Dateway to buy your tofu, organic milk, grapes, and whole grains. Don't attempt to actually go "grocery shopping" here unless it's a very off hour - only hand baskets are trendy here.
- picking up your doggies doodies (need I say more!)
- Our rent is more than my parent's mortgage (sad, sad, sad)

So there ya go. These are the thoughts I think about. Some days I focus on the good and some day the bad - depends on what's going on and my mood of course. Well - gotta run. I have to take movies back to "Dateway" and go pick up some doggie doodie.

ahhh... the glamorous life I live.