Movin' on up!

I love moving. There's something so great about starting all over...like you're giving yourself another chance to do everything right. T on the other hand, hates moving with a passion. We could be living in a hut made of meat in the lion's cage at the zoo and she would still prefer to stay put. This causes no end of problems, as you can imagine, when I decide I want us to move. Right now is one of those times. We moved to the Pacific Northwest earlier this year but instead of Portland like we planned, we ended up in Vancouver, WA because we found a landlord who didn't mind our animals and who wasn't going to make us pay any deposits. Unfortunately, living in Vancouver is NOT just like living in Portland, as we thought. It's like living in the suburbs of Atlanta, really, and that's one thing we said we didn't want when we came out here. So now of course she has a job at a vet 5 minutes from our house and I have a job downtown that takes me over an hour to get to every day, and of course she doesn't want to move.

I found this awesome house in North Portland yesterday. It's renting for $200 less than we're paying now and it would cut my commute literally in half. It would increase hers to about 20 minutes but that sounds fair, right? The house is so cute, at least from the outside, and the neighborhood seems nice, but not too nice, which is a very good thing. When we lived in Lawrenceville, GA, we always felt like the neighborhood was a little too nice for us..like someday someone would figure out that we didn't belong there and there would be an angry mob outside screaming at us to leave. In this neighborhood it seems like the people care about their houses but they're not going to freak out if you put your trash can in the wrong place or your mailbox isn't white enough. Plus the house is the classic old PDX style with the built in bookshelves and the fireplace and the alley in the back. As if that wasn't enough, there's a park four blocks away and the public library is only five blocks away! On top of that, the bus stop to work is one block away from the house. ONE BLOCK! And the bus I woul dhave to take doesn't leave until 7:36 am. I could sleep almost an extra hour some days! Sweet!

So, I have some obstacles to making this whole dream happen...first of all, like I said earlier, T hates moving. Granted, I somehow convinced her to move entirely across the country but I think I may have used up all my free T moving points on that one. Then there's the problem of all the damn animals. Not many landlords are really crazy about tenants with pets, but I think I can somehow negotiate my way out of that one. The last obstacle is money, but I'm thinking either we can sell the van and use that money for moving expenses or else maybe my parents would be willing to give us a loan.

So not a slam dunk, but nothing insurmountable either. I have a meeting with the rental agent today to take a look at the inside of the house. I sure hope I love the inside as much as the outside or this will all be pretty moot.