The Move

Finding a New Home

So, we made it. In the dead of what would become the worst NYC winter in 100 years. But when we first arrived, not even that was able to deter our excitement. Luckily, since we moved so close to Christmas, David was able to have a few days off and we got to go exploring, along with alllllll of the tourists. We just walked around a lot and got a sense of where things were. We practiced our subway skills and honed our knowledge of the City. We sightsaw and learned that when you have to use the bathroom, you just stop into any bar or restaurant and get a drink. They’ll gladly let you use the bathroom if you pay them for something! 🙂

Some of our sight seeing from that first week or three:

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Upper West Side brownstones. Soooo pretty. Almost made me want to live up there. Almost.

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Off We Go…

I am skipping the “saying goodbye” part of our story for now, because, well, it’s really, really hard to put into words how it feels to move across the country from the only state you have called home and to leave all of your favorite people behind. Let’s just say, the ugly cry that happened when we pulled away from our house for the last time (and the subsequent THREE times, because we kept remembering things that we needed to go back for) was a big one. (Side note: I’m doing this all from memory 4 months later, so forgive the lack of details!)

We rolled out of Austin on the morning of December 17th, 2014, and headed off to our new life in New York. We had rented a car to get us across the country, because we really couldn’t figure out how to live for the first couple of months on just what we had in our suitcases, especially since we needed all of Nelly’s gear – her kennel, toys, food, etc. I wasn’t sure what our temporary apartment was going to provide, so in my normal fashion, I completely overcompensated and brought a crap-ton of stuff we never ended up needing. As David would say, ohhhhh well.

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See, told you that we had too much crap. 

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Are you crazy?

That’s pretty much the first thing all of our friends and family said to us when we told them we would be moving to NYC. And after that, the most popular was: “I’m so jealous!” or “What an adventure that will be!” or “That is so awesome!” And it was going to be an awesome adventure. I knew that. But the reality of the move was really hard for me to grasp. It was completely overwhelming to think about, and I was so sad/scared/excited/intimidated by the whole thing, depending on the hour you asked, that I just stuck with my ostrich act and only pretended to understand how our lives were about to change.

I told my office first, just because my position was one that I knew was crucial to the success of the company and I knew they would need a while to find my replacement. It was funny how fast word got out around the office, and how surprised everyone was (Me, too, friends! Me, too!). I told them my last day would be December 5th, which would give me a few days of not-working to finish packing the house for our December 10th departure date. David told his job he was leaving about 2 weeks before we were set to leave, as to not rock the boat too too much there.

At the end of November, David got a message from his new hiring manager that they really wanted him to be in the office in NYC the week of December 8th. Which would mean that he would need to go up without me for a week and we would be delayed in leaving for an extra week. (Hallelujah!) Little did I know, I would need every minute of every hour of every day of that extra week to actually get our lives in order to leave Austin. Totally a God thing. (God Thing #123, if I really told you the ENTIRE story here. He was working on this for a LONG time before either of us knew anything about a job at Google in NYC.)

Google had offered a very generous moving package, which included temporary housing so we had a place to stay while we found a permanent apartment. So, what that meant was that I had to sort our lives into 4 piles: things we would need for the first 60 days, things we would need to live in (what could be a 500 sq ft apartment in) NYC, things we were sentimentally attached to that we wanted to keep in storage in Austin for when we have our next real house, and things to donate/trash. I say “I” had to sort these things out, only because I am a control freak of the highest order, and I was convinced that David would throw out something we needed or that I was attached to (for some probably ridiculous reason). I took ALL of this on, and it almost cost me my sanity, although my ostrich-ing probably made it more of a chore than it could have been. We opted for POD for storage, so as I sorted, David packed things in there. Here is a picture of his genius tie down system for attempting to keep things some-what in place for when it was moved back to the POD storage place.

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What is in those boxes? Anyone’s guess. And, yes, I am quite sure I will need those lampshades whenever we might have our next real house (in Texas??). Blame it on the ostrich.

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Deep Breaths and Deep Faith

So, I guess we should start from the beginning here, shouldn’t we? I guess this adventure all started to unravel in late Summer/early Fall 2014, when David got a LinkedIn message from a recruiter from Google. Yes, Google, like that giant company that runs the search engine, along with a zillion other super lucrative and successful side businesses. He had received several of these messages throughout the past year or so, and we had even considered, on two separate occasions, moving to Houston and Vermont (cannot tell you how glad we are to not be living there in this winter-from-hell). Neither of those opportunities turned out to be what we saw as our “next step” for various reasons. We had been trucking along with our happy little life in Round Rock, going to work at our jobs, coming home to our baby dog in our cute house that we had worked hard to make into our first home. Despite the fertility treatments that had been unsuccessful for going on two years, and the frustration and disappointment that came along with that (a whole other post for a later date), life was peachy keen. So, this message from the Google recruiter was not something out of the ordinary, except that this was actually a really big deal. And the kicker? The position was in New York City. GULP. And that part was pretty much non-negotiable. As in, we would have to move to NYC in order for him to take the position. DOUBLE GULP.

So, we casually talked about it, as he had his first phone screening with the recruiter. And we talked about it some more when she pushed him on to the next round of interviews. And then on to the next. And then it started to get really real.

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