We're Moved!

Last weekend, we finally moved in to our new condo in Palo Alto. We were worried that we would like the place less when we replaced the realtors' designer furniture with our um, dirt-cheap Craigslist/K-Mart ensemble, but so far, we've been even more delighted with it than when we originally decided to make our offer. It's infectiously sunny and cheery.

The depressing part was when we realized how much stuff we accumulated since college. Freshman year, I had two suitcases and a computer. Last weekend, we filled an entire 17-foot U-Haul truck. (!!!)

Andrew, who flew out from Maryland to help us move, was in charge of putting stuff into the truck. He was determined to find the absolute optimal packing, and it was fun to watch him pack and un-pack the truck over and over. Maybe I should have mentioned that it's an NP-complete problem.

He did a very impressive job though! Here's what it looked like at the halfway point:

Meanwhile, Chris, Tommy, and his girlfriend Tiffany were tasked with carrying boxes from the apartment (which was on the third floor) to our staging area (parking space). When Tommy first walked into our apartment and saw that I was trying to sell off a lot of our furniture, he demanded to know "why don't you keep it?" Later, I'm sure he realized how great it was that I decided to let miscellaneous strangers walk off with the heaviest pieces of our stuff:

And what was my job? The "feeble injured one" was in charge of monetization. I sold a sofa, a loveseat, a TV stand, a big L-shaped corner desk, a cabinet, and a microwave -- all WITHOUT INTERNET, using my new Blackberry. (Comcast disconnected us early, boo.) Craigslist is awesome; I was impressed how quickly people took our stuff, and how they hardly even bargained (except for one guy who haggled me down from $20 to $15 for the microwave, haha). Total day-over-day revenue increase: $325.

Afterwards, we treated the crew to Olive Garden, which is walking distance from the condo. Here's us waiting very hungrily to be seated:

And here's the crew at our place after dinner. Thanks again crew! Note how there's a gallon full of pennies on the dining table. I remember someone being particularly incensed at having to lug our gallon of pennies up and down several flights of stairs, but in defense of the penny-jug, it did turn out to be a superior doorstop, even when pitted against heavy doors.


One Week Later

Behold the progress we've made!

Er, okay, not so much. It's actually gotten worse. But to be fair, we spent most of the day working on the upstairs bedroom and den, which are relatively tidy now.

We also moved the cats today, after a week of leaving them alone in our big empty apartment. I suppose it sounds kind of mean that we left them behind, but on the whole, it was probably less stressful to leave them to play in a big empty apartment than to have them constantly underfoot and shredding boxes while we unpacked. At least that's how we rationalize it to ourselves. Honey, with her laser green eyes in this picture, probably sees through our laziness. :-)

Today was the first time we felt sad to be leaving Avalon Parkside. Somehow, before we removed the cats, it still felt like our home, but now it's completely empty and ready for someone else to move in. We officially turn in our keys on Tuesday. Our home of three years...no longer. Of course, if Avalon Parkside decides to pocket a big chunk of our security deposit, most of this nostalgia will probably be erased. We'll see, heehee.

Now, back to watching scantily-clad men prancing around (i.e. the Olympics).

More (higher-quality) moving pictures here if you want them:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jenn.c.taylor/MovingToPaloAlto

Bat Country

This weekend, we helped our friend Paul assemble his project for Burning Man. It's called Bat Country and it's an awesome 21-foot Sierpinski tetrahedron built out of baseball bats and softballs. More accurately, Chris helped. I helped to eat all the delicious food, my arm being too gimpy to do work and all that. ;-)

We were really impressed by the project and how solid it felt when everything was put together. You can see from the picture how many guys are standing on the top!

We're Homeowners!

It's official! We got the keys! It's ours! :-)

Delightfully, our new home is a short stroll away from all the nifty shops on California Ave. and we already love the farmer's market they have every Sunday (amazing stuff!). It's also close to the CalTrain station and just a few blocks from some tennis courts at Peers Park. And we're pretty excited that we're basically across the street from Mollie Stone's, so we can actually walk to get groceries. After three years of living next to a fire station and a dirt lot that would eventually become a Lowe's, we are ECSTATIC to be moving someplace where we can walk to so many awesome things.

(Note that we did walk to the Lowe's once or twice to buy light bulbs, but few things are as useless to a renter as a home improvement store. And there was already a Home Depot down the road! Give me a break right?! Anyways it was sad when they finished building it, because we were desperately hoping it turn into a Borders, haha.)

We don't move for a couple more weeks, but we'll be starting to Craigslist some of our current furniture and shop for some new stuff. Our brothers will be coming up to help us move during the second week of August.

If you're shocked and amazed at how suddenly we decided to buy this place, so are we. I looked back through our emails and realized that we didn't seriously start looking for a place until June 10, when we first wrote to a couple potential real estate agents. We decided to make our first bid on June 23 (which we lost, probably for the best). A mere week later, we bid on this lovely condo at Palo Alto Central, and now, here we are! I always assumed that I would be terribly picky before making such a gigantic investment, and that I would be searching for 6-12 months at least. Looks like I was only off by an order of magnitude or so, heehee.

On the brighter side, three years ago when we moved out to California, I chose our apartment (which we're still living in today) without even seeing PICTURES it. I was actually on a beach in North Carolina with only some very shady cell reception when we committed to it, so we've at least raised our standards a little bit since then. :-P Plus, we've been pretty happy at this apartment, so I suspect I just have totally awesome judgment.

Our kitchen doesn't have those hot new granite countertops, but then again...our kitchen doesn't have those hot new granite countertops. :-)

Anyways, we're super excited, and we'll post more pictures and updates as we move in!

Fourth of July Celebrations!

Well outwardly, we didn't do much to celebrate the 4th of July this year. No fireworks or barbecue party -- we just sat around, lazily watching the Wimbledon semifinals (hooray for Federer and Nadal), and the Red Sox (who beat the Yankees again, sweet!). But we do have a couple reasons to be super-happy this Independence Day:

• We're officially in contract for our first home! Last week, after a mere three weeks "in the market", we made an offer for a lovely condo in Palo Alto. The sellers formally accepted yesterday, and on Monday, we get to write down a large number on a check and send in our downpayment! More fun details about the search and what the place is like later (still keeping fingers crossed until everything is actually finalized and we get the keys, haha).

• Today I also made my triumphant (okay, actually pretty lame) return to the tennis courts! Last week, I asked my physical therapist when I could play again (not serving or hitting big shots, just easy volleying) and she said I could actually play any time I wanted, but warned me that it would hurt a lot and I would be really weak if I insisted on starting so soon. In retrospect, this was probaby code for "no." But anyways, she was right. Several shots were really jarring and I could barely return one-handed backands. But WOW it was satisfying to be running around and playing a real sport again; I hate the treadmill and stationary bike so much at this point! In the end, I only managed to hit for about 20 minutes, but what a morale boost to work harder on my physical therapy.

Off to do more exercises and start packing!

Shoulder Finally Improving

When my doctor first told me that I needed to have a Bankart repair, I was disappointed that I couldn't find more information about the rehab process on the internet. There were plenty of articles making different recommendations on how soon to remove various restrictions (i.e. when to stop using the sling, what angle of rotation to aim for at what week), but not much information about what sort of pain was acceptable, and what pitfalls to watch out for when you're doing the exercises. Granted, this is all stuff you should hear from a physical therapist instead of the internet, but it still would have been nice to read someone else's account for reassurance.

So after my shoulder surgery in January, I meant to write regular blog posts about how my physical therapy was going. But there were a number of reasons why I didn't do it:

• Recovering from surgery made me much more tired than I expected, to the point where it took significant willpower just to go to work and then head home to do more exercises.
• Progress was very slow (much slower than my physical therapist expected), so I was often too worried or frustrated to think about improving the internet.

Twelve weeks after surgery, I was supposed to have regained full range of motion. That means I should have been able to lift my arm to 180 degrees (like raising your hand in class), and have 90 degrees of external rotation. Instead, at twelve weeks, I was struggling to lift my arm to 90 degrees, and get even 30 degrees of external rotation. Even worse was that I had stopped making weekly progress.

My doctor chalked it up to everyone reacting differently to surgery and taking different amounts of time to recover. My physical therapist wondered whether lifting my restrictions earlier would have prevented so much scar tissue from building up. There was so much stiffness that it was really hard for me to do exercises correctly without subconsciously "cheating".

The body is amazing in how many ways it can "cheat" to reach a goal. Each week, my physical therapist found a new dimension that I was cheating on without knowing it. For instance, on the arm-lifting exercise, I was rotating my shoulder blade out and around my body in order to lift my arm, instead of letting my arm rotate in the socket (the goal of the exercise). I can't even do this consciously with my good shoulder. Likewise, on the external rotation exercise, I was tilting back my shoulder blade, which made it look like I had a good angle without getting any real rotation in the socket.

Today, after lots of hard work with my physical therapist to get me to do the exercises RIGHT, I'm happy to report that I can lift my arm to ~150 degrees, and I can do external rotation to almost 90 degrees. The big turning point was a month ago, when my doctor told me to start taking LOTS more ibuprofen (3 a day, 3 times a day, instead of 2 a day total, which is what I had been doing before), and when I finally ran out of ways to cheat on the exercises. Apparently, doing exercises correctly - swelling and pain = goodness. (Go figure.) I also pay much more attention to what hurts. If I'm doing exercises correctly, I feel a deep ache in the back of my shoulder. If there's pain on the top or the front of the shoulder, it means I'm using the wrong muscles or letting the shoulder blade slip or tilt.

Hopefully, the next time I report back, I'll be on the courts again! I can't play tennis yet (obviously) but I can now do awesome things like driving, brushing my hair, holding doors open, and washing dishes. And I'm actually not being sarcastic about this -- it actually is quite awesome to be a normal person again!