Apartments and Houses

Resurfacing into bloggerland after feeling too busy to write recently. No good reason--well, I guess mostly that Brett was in San Francisco for 3 weeks, mostly working nights and long days, which meant that I also was working long days (although not so much at night). Then when he returned home a week ago we found ourselves with a flurry of things to do. Firstly our house in Portland is now officially on the market. It was a hard decision and we still aren't sure it is the right thing to do. Ask us again in a few months when it has been sitting empty and the housing market continues to decline, maybe we will have more clarity on the wisdom of trying to sell it right now. Our lovely renters moved out a week ago--they were great, we were so lucky to have had them there. They left the place in great shape and were easy to deal with for the past year.

After neurotically searching for apartments for the past 5 days we have decided to continue renting the one we are in for another year. It was a hard decision as well, and while it vaguely feels like there is a deal out there to be had, for us it feels like too much work to find it right now. Maya and I went to some open houses yesterday. As usual, in our let's-find-a-cheaper-place price range, this means you walk through a narrow and claustrophobic hallway that smells like someone's uncleaned hamster cage with a group of 15 other perfectly normal hopefuls. You trudge up several flights of stairs (Surprise! You didn't know it was a 5th floor walk up!) and everyone dutifully files in to have a look around. The windows face another building across a 10 foot expanse of alleyway, the kitchen has no real surface areas to speak of and when you ask where the 2nd bedroom is the "broker" looks at you funny and says "You just walked through it." Oh...sorry, didn't realize that was a bedroom, as in a place to put a bed. Looked more like a wide hallway. And how intriguing that you have to walk through one bedroom to get to the other. Quaint! Cozy! One woman in our group was looking for a new place because her current building (only a few blocks from ours) is so infested with bedbugs it doesn't look like it is going to be free of them anytime soon and she is moving out. Then there are the inevitable craigs list ads from a "pastor" from Africa who unexpectedly needs to leave the country and he loves you and wants you to rent his apartment...just give him all of your bank account information and wire him $10,000 and that lovely apartment (which looks suspiciously like a Pottery Barn catalog photo) is yours! He will even mail you the keys in a FedEx package, just as soon as he lands in Africa.
There are of course some deals to be had. Like way over on the East River. Nice, normal, non dog-kennel sized apartments in doorman buildings. The only problem is the transportation. It is a long 4 blocks to the subway. Fine on a nice day. But looking ahead, I see myself hauling library books, a baby and grouchy kids in need of a snack and that long 4 blocks might as well be a lap of jogging around the track with a whip snapping at the kids tushies after a long day of being out and about. And then it starts raining and we might as well just sit down on the sidewalk with the piles of garbage...
There is always Brooklyn--but again, the nice areas like Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights are just as expensive as Manhattan. And while they are more likely to offer brownstone filled streets, which generally translates to larger apartments, there doesn't seem to be a lot on the market. The less trendy neighborhoods in Brooklyn aren't really neighborhoods at all, and Wikkepedia describes truly harrowing descriptions of drugs, urban ghettos and crime in their recent histories. Since we don't spend a huge amount of time in Brooklyn, it still feels like we aren't quite sure what we are getting into over there.
We have also entertained moving further north, into Harlem proper. Bill Clinton's office, several parks, access to express subway lines, soul food and lots of shopping all close by. We have several friends who have done this and they are very happy there. They love the 2 and 3 bedroom apartments they have and the extra $1,000 to $2,000 a month they keep in their pockets. But for now we have decided we like having the subway right outside the building. We like the doorman, the way our apartment feels more roomy than even many of the 2 bedrooms. We will just stay here, hugging our little corner of Central Park in our small but friendly locale until our next decision point comes in another year. Never mind that our rent is going up to a point out of our comfort zone...we write it off as just part of our Manhattan experience.
I can't stop scouring the ads though...Last time we did this I did it for weeks after we moved in. Just always checking, making sure there aren't great deals out there that I would miss if I wasn't tuned in.

In other news, we have been doing our usual New York things. This weekend Brett took the kids to both the Met and MOMA free kids programs. They are really outstanding. Today the kids and I joined some friends at the Jewish Museum to see the nicely done William Steig exhibit. It was full of his artwork from children's books and New Yorker cartoons, with plenty of interactive things for the kids and a reading room with most of his books. I didn't realize that he was the one who originally wrote "Shrek". Last week we had a field trip to the Van Cortlandt House in Yonkers. The interpreters have the kids running around gathering firewood, pulling water from the well and otherwise giving hands on examples of life in the mid 1700's, so they could see how much kids had to work back then and how easy they have it today. It was great. We also had zoo classes at the Central Park Zoo, a theater performance and the usual ballet classes, chorus and book club. This week Maya's sewing class begins and she has a ballet workshop to celebrate Chinese New Year (complete with ribbon and umbrella dances)...We are also excited to have a friend in town Thursday and the weather keeps teasing us with spring like temps before it drops back down into the low 20's. We did have snow one day last week and the kids went sledding in Central Park before it all turned to slush the next day.