IsabeauxStudio

I had been looking to get out of New York for a while.  The pace, the lack of space, and the cost of living was  overwhelming.  I had lived ten years in the city and had enough.  I was looking for work in Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island though nothing was the right fit.  My grandfather had passed away and there was nothing to tie me to the east coast anymore.  The final straw was when Matt left to go find work in California.  I now had a really good reason to leave New York and try life somewhere else.  Fortunately life presented another opportunity, not one that was necessarily ideal, but it was good for a time. It landed me a job with nice salary & moving expenses, just where I wanted to be, with Matt in Northern California. 

 Packing up ten years of my life - in a one room studio- is not an easy thing to do for so many reasons. I was more than a little horrified at how much stuff I had accumulated.  I was a proud owner of a tool chest like the one pictured at left (mine is red), stuffed with tools.  I lived in a fifth floor walk up (no elevator!) and began to feel very sorry for my movers.  Fortunately I had already donated my big industrial sewing machine- it was a beast- to a friend for free as long as she brought her own muscle to schlep it down the five flights of stairs.

Once everything was packed up by the movers in a frenzy of wardrobe boxes, newsprint paper, and packing tape, and hauled downstairs to the truck,  I was left with nothing but a big oversized duffle bag.  It was stuffed to the gills with the things I would need in the three weeks before my stuff arrived in California. 

I said goodbye to my little apartment, and made my way to Penn Station, to bounce up the coast to see my mom & grandmom before I left for California.  I took a driving lesson with "Easy Method" up in Rhode Island.  Felt like high school all over again. I hadn't driven a car at all  in the ten years that I lived in New York.  I figured that it was a good idea to practice a little before I went to test drive cars in California. 

 Bouncing a little more up the east coast, I flew out of Boston, and remember being really excited on the plane.  When Matt picked me and my very large duffle up at the airport, I was so glad to have arrived.  Driving to our new apartment, I looked out the window at the beautiful sky, the flowers in the neighborhood, the green grass in the yards, and.... no bars on the windows.