30 By 30: Monument Walk

After 11 years in D.C., it was really, truly hard to say goodbye.  I know I will still continue to see my amazing friends, and I hope they will all come to visit here for weekends (one already has!), but it will never be the same as meeting up after work for happy hour or kickball or trivia nights.  While we certainly added to the group over the years, my core group of D.C. friends were all from undergrad, so for my going away festivities, I decided to go back to our undergrad roots with a drunken midnight monument walk. 

Midnight monument walks are certainly up there on the list of things I will miss the most about D.C. 

Sober, there is an unbelievable sense of peace and awe walking around the empty monuments lit up at night.  I remember freshman year, wandering down to the Lincoln Memorial shortly following September 11th with a new group of friends and lying down on the floor, reading the Emancipation Proclamation, etched in giant marble letters, out loud to each other.  My senior year, struggling with the decision of where to go to grad school, my best friend suggested an after-dark monument walk to just chat about pros and cons while we strolled through the city. 

Drunken, that sense of peace and awe is still present… with a little bit of laughing and inappropriateness on the side.  As undergrads, it was an inexpensive source of entertainment (and perfect for underage participants) – pack up a portable beverage of choice (traditionally a 20 oz bottle of diet coke, half he diet coke poured out and filled with rum) and set off for an evening of mischief.  Sometimes, it would be a big group and we’d sit along the tidal basin and laugh for hours; other times, only two or three of us, and we’d talk about big life experiences and our goals for the future.  Either way, I’d always return home in the wee hours of the morning wondering what I did to deserve such amazing friends.

I didn’t take too many pictures at my farewell monument walk, mostly because my dSLR has a sensor broken beyond repair leaving me with just a point and shoot, and after buying a house, there is no money in the “camera replacement” fund… but thankfully, memories last a lifetime, and I can’t think of a better way to say goodbye to some of the very best friends I will ever have.

30 by 30: Buy a House

Number One on my 30 by 30 list was to buy a house, and I am delighted to report that it was also the first thing I could successfully check off the list.

We moved through the process extremely quickly given the short timeframe between deciding where I was moving for a postdoc and the date by which I needed to start.  My mother was a pretty big Negative Nancy about the whole situation – convinced we wouldn’t find a house on our short time frame, that there was no possible way we would actually close on the day we were supposed to close, that we were naïve for setting up our furniture delivery and movers in the days immediately following closing (since there was no way we were going to close on time).  Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

The first time meeting our wonderful realtor and discussing what we wanted in a house was June 16th and we looked at a few options.  We returned to the city to look at houses again on June 27th, placed an offer on June 28th, and went through the offer, counter offer, counter-counter offer process and signed the paperwork on June 29th.  By July 31st, we were movin’ on it.

I love our house and still can’t get over how huge it is!  Easing back into living together after so many years of long-distance marriage is certainly a whole lot easier when you have four entire floors (plus a roof deck) instead of being squished into 600 square feet like our last apartment together.  Our neighborhood seems great so far, and I can still walk to work (albeit a bit more of a trek than my walk to work in DC). 

I’m a bit overwhelmed with unpacking and getting settled into my new postdoc lab (I really have no idea what I’m doing and it’s incredibly frustrating), so the rest of my 30 by 30 list is falling by the wayside… but I am so, so ecstatic to have actually been able to check this one off the list!

(I don’t think I will ever tire of the view from our roof deck!)