one country.... now two -- an update

My life used to be about one.... one person - me.  Then my life became about two - me and Partner.  I guess I never really realized it until we made the decision, until he signed the contract, yet before Sunday our lives as individuals and together had really been about one country - the US.  Both of us spent time studying overseas, but going abroad while a student is very different from selling your home, selling off tons of your belongings, packing up your home, placing three quarters of it in storage, shipping one quarter of it overseas, and hopping on a plane bound for a new life in Singapore. We are now of two countries.

Yup.  That's right - we've moved to Singapore.

Things on the blog have been dead quiet for the past few months because there was other writing that needed to get accomplished -- btw, I finished and defended the dissertation (!!!) -- and I until the deal was finalized and announced I had to keep a lid on the whole Singapore thing, which in a space where I write about my life is pretty challenging to do when your entire days are about freaking out over the dissertation that you fear you won't finish or the GIANT move you might be making to a country you've never even visited.

Not being able to write about the move or really talk that much about the move with anyone but Partner meant that I did not really get to process the enormity of our decision to move to a foreign country and give up everything that we've known before we got on the plane Saturday.  Frankly, there also was just not a lot of time - I defended the dissertation 14 days before we moved.  My head needed to be in that space as much as possible so that I could wrap up the project and not die during the two hours in which I was raked over the coals answered questions from my committee members.  I am really excited by the adventure that we are on together and there is no other person with whom I would I would take on such an adventure, but oh man, this is big.

We made it to Singapore on Sunday having lost all of Saturday to travel.  We also pretty much lost all of Friday to cramming our remaning belongings into our storage unit.  That is an episode worthy of a whole post all of its own. Yesterday, Partner and I spent much of the day wandering around the Central Business District so that he would know the lay of the land and how to get from the service apartment in which the company has put us up for the next month to his office. Plus it was really nice for us to do a bit of adventuring together in this new country which will be our home for the next however long.

In the coming days/weeks I will be apartment hunting for us, getting to know a bit more of this place, and complaining about how insanely expensive everything happens to be in this country.  Once we have a place to live and our stuff which is currently sailing the high-seas arrives, then I will get to resume some of my research projects from my life back in Seattle and start looking for work in Singapore.

car and driver

Life really has been filled with lots of changes for the past 11 months.  Moving to Seattle was the biggest noticeable one, but that really was just the beginning..... or the middle, or the first part.

Really the biggest changes have been the unseen ones.  The changes in everyday living and being that came before the boxes and the move, and long after the boxes and all the unpacking and finding a storage space for two of our five sofas; after purchasing bookcases; and as I continually scan craigslist for that perfect chair or table.

I've been in school for a long, long time, but no where in there did I learn what goes into making a life with another person, what goes into planning for a future as two people as a singular unit.  I have known Partner for a long time -- going on 14 years. We me on our first day of freshman orientation at college.  I remember meeting him then: he was smart, funny, a bit arrogant, an excellent soccer player, and loved music and cars.

After college we fell out of touch for a while, but when he tracked me down about four or five years ago, I was not at all surprised when he let me know that he had recently purchased a Mitsubishi Evo.  In fact when he said that was what he got, it completely fit.  The Evo is a powerful performance car -- there is a rawness but also an elegance to it.  Yup, that was the car for him.  Well, the Evo and the 1999 Nissan Sentra for which he built a motor.  That car is so powerful it shakes the whole house when he starts it up -- it far too powerful to be a daily-driver in Seattle.  Even the hint of rain and tires will spin.

In June we took the car to be tuned by English Racing.  Here is on a lift about to roll onto the 4-wheel dyno for tuning.

In the five years since Partner first purchased the Evo his life changed and he got more into cycling, and then he got more into me. Well, actually, I got more into him, he was already into me.  Still, nothing could have prepared me for the changes of the automotive type around here.  This week Partner sold the Evo.

For a long while now we've known that we would be replacing my 1998 VW Jetta TDI.  It is a nearly 14 year-old car that lived all of its life up until now in states that salt their roads.  While my car is in amazing shape for its age and it is mechanically sound, I knew that it was soon going to be time to replace it with something else because the Jetta would need more money to be put into it to keep it up in the coming years. At some point that becomes a losing situation.  Even before moving out here I knew that I would be replacing my car with another TDI -- once you are used to getting 45-50MPG you just can't go back! -- this time preferably a wagon.

After many talks this fall about replacing my car, we determined that we would wait another year -- until the dissertation is done, until I am fully employed (I felt very strongly about that last point).  My car suffices for us when we need something practical.  Yes, something a bit more suited to our lifestyle would be nice, but my car give us excellent milage for the longer trips and we can throw both bikes in the back of my car -- albeit awkwardly and in a way that means we can't pack too much else.  Sometimes my car makes me nervous -- I hate to think of it breaking down on us somewhere in the middle of nowhere, but still, I am hesitant about replacing it because right now we have three cars for a two car garage.  My car is the one parked on the street and I am not really keen on parking a brand new car on the street.  After more conversations about the cars this winter, we settled on something a bit more radical: sell all the cars!

The Evo sold the other night.  It was snatched up quickly.  That night we moved the TDI in the garage. Opening the door to the garage now and seeing anything but the Evo in there is strange -- even if it is my own vehicle.

There is a lot to figuring out this new life together, but I never would have thought that one of the changes would have been Partner selling the Evo.  I don't know what the timing will be on selling the the Sentra and the TDI.  First I think we both need a moment to get used to the new automotive configuration.

Yesterday morning before I left for campus, I found my spare key for my car and put it in Partner's key ring.  The TDI is now our car.

Love in the time of Cholera

Our trip was awesome.  Super-fantastic, amazing awesome.  Partner really went out of his way in the planning department on this one.  Truthfully it has been a bit overwhelmed to think about planning our next trip as he did such an amazing job with this one.  (I am on the next one as we switch off trip planning each year.)

Still there is no reason to get ahead of myself and contemplate the next trip when I still get to glow in the fun that was this one.

Hello, do you see the color of that water?!?!!? AMAZING!!!


The one downside of the trip was picking up some horrible stomach thing somewhere between Thailand and Cambodia.  It has been bad.  Really bad.  The morning after we came home I called our doctor and we've been on antibiotics since then as I had been sick for about 10 days at that point.  Partner too had been ill, but his system held out for a few days longer than mine did because, as he likes to say, I am fragile.

Fragile or not.  My ass was kicked.

Home

I am so happy to be back in my home after an amazing vacation.  Partner planned a phenomenal adventure.  I've never seen such clear, blue water!  Thailand was beautiful.  Cambodia was interesting.  In the end, however, there is no place like home.

Holiday-ish travel and fun with the CDC

After the holidays Partner and I are leaving for a vacation to far-flung places.  I am very excited about our upcoming adventure.  (Yes, I am deliberately being cagey about our destinations, but in time you will know.)  This, however, is a trip that requires vaccinations and medications. Ugh.


A few weeks ago, when I realized we were about 7 weeks out from our trip, I called our doctor to see what we needed to do about the vaccinations. When traveling overseas to various places, one is suppose to go visit a Travel Nurse or Travel Clinic, but I knew that we did not need to have too many shots and nothing super-special, so I saw no reason to fork over $350 a piece for each of us plus the cost of meds to go learn what we could learn from the CDC website.  (Insurance seems not to cover travel clinics, and I did not want to bother with the hassle of reimbursement forms.)

The medical-industrial-complex does not make it easy to do things on the cheap.  I spent a good half of a Tuesday on the phone with our doctor's office, the CDC, the King County Department of Heath, Swedish Hospital, and UW trying to avoid a travel nurse, get some prescriptions for vaccines, get those filled, and take them to our doctor so that she could shoot us up with all of what we needed. Yeah.... it did not quite turn out that way.

At the end of yet another exasperated conversation, this time with our local board of health - which managed to suggest a travel nurse to us that was about $100 less than I had otherwise been able to find - I asked the women with whom I had been speaking if she happened to know of any pharmacy that stocked the three drugs we needed.  I was totally surprised when she said something about Rite Aid in a neighboring town. Dude, I was on the phone to that Rite Aid sooooo fast!

After talking with the pharmacist and confirming that they had everything we were looking for, I promptly called our doctor's office and left very specific instructions about calling in the prescriptions for the two of us.  It took a bit of doing and a few more phone calls back and forth, but three days later everything had been faxed to the Rite Aid.  AND the pharmacist at Rite Aid would even administer the vaccines to us there so that we did not need to make an appointment with our doctor and drive around with the drugs.

Partner was waaaay better about the shot than I was.  Also, he was fantastic in doing all that he could to distract me from the needle that was being jabbed into my arm.  He even made it all better by bribing me with peanut butter cups and a trip to the movies afterwards.

Now we are fully vaccinated.  One medication we need to start a few days before we leave and continue throughout the whole trip, and I even had a prescription filled for something to help us sleep through the 20+ hour flight.  Soon, it will be onto planning for packing!

How traditions come to be

This is my first holiday season with Partner and we are on our own this year.  As we are going to be off on far-flung adventures in January, we decided that we would not be traveling anywhere for the holidays this year.  Truthfully, I am grateful we will be staying put in our home.

As we aren't going to see family members, we are left to figure out how we want to celebrate the holiday season. If I was on my own, I would not do a darn thing besides the usual Jewish Christmas -- Chinese food and a movie.  Certainly in the past when I've been unable to travel to see friends or family, I have done absolutely nothing for the holidays.  I saw no reason to expend the time, energy, and effort when there was dissertation writing or candidacy exam reading to be done!

Now that Partner and have a life and a home together I was actually a bit surprised that I found myself wanting to do something for the holiday season.  And so yesterday we ventured out to go get a Christmas tree. 

Let me be clear from the start: I only wanted a little Charlie Brown-esque tree.  We live in the city, so something small - around three feet - and low-maintenance was perfect in my mind.  Last weekend when we were at Metromarket we even espied such darling little trees. Oh, no! Partner had other plans in mind.

Truly his plans were awesome and it was an exciting adventure to go out to Carnation and cut down our own tree.  I had not been out to cut a tree since I was little when we would trudge through the snow to find the perfect tree, cut it down, and then put it on a sled to drag it out of the forest.  It seemed to take FOREVER! But maybe that was because I was about 5 years-old at the time.  Yesterday, though, Partner was excellent with the saw and getting the tree into the car.  The whole thing took no time at all.  But small.... this tree is not.  The top of the tree is about three inches away from touching the ceiling in the living room.  Not only did Partner want a taller tree than I wanted, but when you go out to a tree farm (so I learned) they charge by the foot AND they only let you cut down certain trees.  So it is in their best interest to not let you cut down the smaller trees that they have growing for the coming years.

It took a bit of doing figure out how to put the tree stand together and get the tree perfectly straight, but it is up and smells wonderful. 

One of the things I remember from holidays when I was little was my mother unplugging the lights on tree each night and taking her biggest Pyrex liquid measuring cup and filling the tree stand with water.  Yesterday I took my biggest OXO liquid measuring cup and filled the tree stand after we got it situated.  This morning when I came down it had already consumed all of the water, and so I quickly went to fill it again as I guess if you neglect to water it, the tree clogs itself with its own sap.  Hopefully I have not done irreparable damage to our tree.  Either way I am going to have to keep an eye on this rather thirsty tree over the next few weeks.