Firsts

It's been a pretty slow week.  Today's Thursday, right?  What have I done all week?  Walked around a lot.  Tried to put stuff away in our apartment.  Gotten to know the characters of The O.C. pretty intimately.  Snuck into mailboxes.  Stole mail.  Dealt with the most inefficient, ridiculous bank on the planet.  Caught up on some correspondence.  Went grocery shopping.  Went running.  Cooked.  More O.C.  

On Monday, I brought everything else over to our apartment and began to hang up clothes, make piles, sort things out, etc.  I also knew I needed to wash some of our new sheets and make our new bed if we wanted a place to sleep that night.  The washer/"dryer" (if you can even call it that) naturally intimidated me with all of the foreign bells and whistles but it's AMAZING the things you can learn from reading the instruction manual!  (My dad taught me that, thanks Dad!)  I made up our bed with it's new duvet and pillows and voila!  Already the place looked better.  Never mind the huge piles of clothes in the wardrobe that have nowhere to go and the stack of shit on the shelves in the corner that might topple over at any given moment.  It's FFIINNEE!  I turned on my Under the Tuscan Sun DVD for inspiration and found and loved this quote:

"Buyer's remorse is a very common affliction among new homeowners. Just because you have a sudden urge to weep, that doesn't mean you've made a mistake. Everybody knows old houses have their quirks. Especially ten-thousand-year-old houses. I have inherited empty wine bottles, one grape, every issue of La Nazione printed in 1958, and assorted previous tenants. The trick to overcoming buyer's remorse is to have a plan. Pick one room and make it yours. Go slowly through the house. Be polite, introduce yourself, so it can introduce itself to you."

Though this isn't a villa in Tuscany that I purchased, I could relate.  The room I picked to make "mine" was our bedroom and I had to make it liveable.  The living room can be dealt with later.  Monday and Tuesday went buy in a blur of O.C. dvds and cleaning, and walking over to Dunnes (a department store that offers cheap home goods) to buy things for our place.  I think I've been there every day this week actually.

Wednesday...I decided to do two things I hadn't done in months that I actually used to like a lot in Dallas: RUNNING!  And COOKING!  I was able to bust out 2 miles, which is a huge deal for me as I'm out of shape and not the best runner anyway.  Molly says that if you run, you're a runner.  In my opinion, if you run long distances daily, you're a runner. I guess I'm on the lower end of the spectrum but still!  I did it!  I ran from our new place to Ballsbridge and around Herbert Park, and over to our old apartment to try to break into the mailbox again to rescue our mailed debit cards from our new bank.  That's Drew's task for me every day...to surreptitiously sneak back into our old apartment building, go down to the mail room/lobby, make sure no one is in there, stick my hand/screwdriver/pliers into the box, try to figure out if there's any new mail with our name on it, and get my fingers unstuck from inside the slot before someone walks in from parking their car.  EVERY DAY I TELL YOU!  I understand we need these cards in order to spend money here in Ireland but he's not the one doing the dirty work!  Though I've long harbored dreams of working for the CIA or NSA, this alone confirms that I am not up for the job.  But bottom line...I'd put off going running for some reason and now I'm back in the game.  Whew.

I came back and had some emails from Tracy about joining the American Women's Club of Dublin and I promptly looked up the definition of Social Anxiety Disorder.  I think I have it.  But I'm joining this week and it'll be fine.  It'll be fine.  It'll be fine.  

Like I said, I also decided to cook for the first time since we've been here.  And since we moved out of our apartment and in with our parents in Dallas.  I decided to make a good old-fashioned American dish: Spaghetti and Meatballs!  Grocery shopping here is relatively difficult.  As I only shipped over a few herbs and spices, I need to refurbish my whole kitchen.  I didn't even have salt and pepper!  At the end of the day, I had to go to 3 different grocery stores, a few of them multiple times, to find everything I needed for Giada's Spaghetti with Turkey Meatballs.  And I didn't even get ground turkey.  But all hope was not lost.  Though it took me about 3 hours to make and smoke billowed out of the stove every time I opened it, I made a successful dinner.  Whew.    

I tried my hand at food photography with my new fancy schmancy camera, like Pioneer Woman, but I'll put that in a different post as it's pretty long.  And potentially uninteresting for those of you who don't like cooking or photographs of food like myself. 

I'm still taking things one day at a time and crossing milestones off my list...whether it be something small like running or cooking or something big like joining an American Women's Group.  More posts about cooking and the rest of my week next time!