And we all know how much I love making friends online.

So a few weeks ago, Leela and I went to our first ever Elite event. It was drinks and hors d’oeuvres at the headquarters for Rover.com, a website that matches you with pet sitting services. I was excited to check out their HQ and hear more about the company, especially because Dan and I don’t have our go-to boarding place for the dogs now that we’re no longer in California.

Rover is a godsend. They screen all their sitters extensively, require constant communication between the sitter and their office as well as the sitter and the owner during the stay, and have pet owners submit reviews once the stay is over. And with Dan and I planning a trip back to California over Thanksgiving (!!), we’re going to need trustworthy, reasonably priced care for our furbabies.

But back to the party! Leela and I had a blast. We participated in a kissing contest (where your dog had to kiss you consistently for five seconds), and actually made it to the final round, but eventually lost to an adorable corgi puppy who REALLY liked the way her mom’s chin tasted. Leela made up for it in the photo booth, though:

In fact, another couple thought that she was so good at taking pictures, they asked to take a picture with her, since they didn’t have a dog of their own with them. Of course, Leela and I obliged, and got what is possibly the most awesome picture ever out of it:

We ended the evening with some Frosty Paws ice cream (which is made specifically for dogs). Suffice it to say, Leela was in HEAVEN.

Thanks to Yelp and Rover for an awesome evening! And for any of you looking for pet sitters to take care of your dogs (or cats!), check out Rover.com!

Those were the easy things. But the silverware – the stuff that fits in a drawer – was contentious. Dan asked if we could throw some of it away. Then he followed that up by asking if we really needed all the china we got for our wedding, or if we could sell it.

I gave him the Glare of Death, because HOW DARE HE try to give away stuff that we might need to host a dinner party!

But … a dinner party? When are we ever going to host a dinner party? In the almost four years we’ve been together, we’ve had people over for dinner exactly three times, one of which was a Passover seder that was hosted by my parents and at our house. And does it really count as a dinner party if all of the guests are related to you? How harshly are they going to judge your cooking and hosting skills, really?

I love the idea of hosting dinner parties, but I don’t want to do the work involved. I don’t mind setting the table and making the coffee after the meal, but it’s all the stuff that comes before that – the hours of scouring the internet, trying to find the perfect recipe that will make everyone’s taste buds swoon with delight. The days of preparatory grocery shopping and cooking and freezing and re-cooking so the food is hot and ready when guests arrive. It just seems exhausting.

But that’s what adults do, isn’t it? They grow up, get married, have dinner parties. And then they have babies.

Babies. When are we ever going to have babies?

Shortly after we decided to make the move to Seattle, I decided to set a timeline for babies. I figured we could move, take a year to get settled in, and then start having kids. I’d be twenty-nine by that point. Twenty-nine seems like a reasonable age to have kids, doesn’t it? But now that it’s just around the corner, it seems too soon. And I just want more time to be me, rather than someone’s mom.

I know that it’s okay to wait a little longer, to put things off, to feel young while I am young. But it feels like I’m not progressing, like I’m not getting the wisdom and confidence that is supposed to come with age. I still have macaroni and cheese for dinner and take naps in the afternoons and complain when there’s no sugary sweet non-dairy creamer for my tea or coffee. I’m an eight-year-old in a twenty-eight-year-old’s body.

Eight-year-olds shouldn’t have dinner parties. Or babies.

I planned my trip to Seattle so thoroughly, there was no room for error. I piled the animals into my car, meticulously considering every detail. A litterbox for the cats. Sedatives all around. Halters instead of prong collars for the dogs, so they could sleep comfortably in the backseat. Audio books to keep myself awake and aware on the long drive.

I passed cherry blossoms and run-down farms as I drove through the Central Valley and into the mountains. One of the last things I saw as I left California was snow. I pulled over in Mt. Shasta to get something to eat and let the dogs out to stretch their legs. It was beautiful out – sunny and clear – but the ground was covered in snow. Most of it had been plowed by local residents, but there were still some drifts – like the one under these trees – that made me wonder exactly what I was getting myself into.

We stayed overnight in a small hotel just off the freeway in Roseburg, Oregon. The hotel was great, but being in a two hundred square foot room with four animals was challenging. The cats were still thoroughly drugged, to the point where Marley actually head-butted Nixon while he was trying to eat his dinner. He barked a warning at her and Marley, my normally “hidden kitty” who lives in cabinets and under beds, afraid of everything and everyone but me, retreated to the safety of a chair barely a foot away.

And hey, did you know that you can’t flush kitty litter down the toilet? Ask me how I know.

When we finally got far enough north to see the peak of Mt. Rainier jutting out of the horizon, I felt this strong sense of relief come over me. After planning every second of this journey for the last eight months, we were finally here – our new home.

It’s still strange to think of how far away we are from our family and friends. The distance doesn’t feel that great thanks to technologies like Skype and FaceTime, but there is something to be said for being able to text someone and invite them to lunch tomorrow, and not in three months when you finally save up enough money to afford a plane ticket home.

California will always hold a special place in my heart. But both Dan and I knew that it was time for something new – a new adventure, new jobs, a new housing market that might actually allow us to own our own home someday.

That’s not to say we won’t be back. We do certainly plan to come back and visit, to see our family and friends, the people that we left behind. But for the foreseeable future – and possibly forever – Seattle is home.

Just think about that for a moment.

Eight months ago, Dan and I were sitting in a booth at Chili’s (don’t judge me – their honey chipotle chicken crispers are the BOMB), talking about potentially, maybe, possibly moving to Seattle. It was just an idea. It didn’t even seem real.

At the time, I was an emotional wreck. My parents had just purchased a condo in Sonoma, and were talking about moving there full-time, and I was feeling abandoned. I had moved back to the Bay Area a year earlier with dreams of raising my kids here and having my retired parents around to babysit. I wanted them to be a bigger part of their grandkids’ lives than my grandparents were of mine. I saw Fremont as temporary. I was looking at houses in Daly City and South San Francisco – places that were only twenty minutes from my parents’ house rather than an hour.

But even if we moved farther north, Sonoma was still too far for them to have any regular interactions with us or our children. An hour doesn’t seem like much, but when it’s driven on rural highways, on busy weekends, and by aging parents who no longer want to drive at night, it becomes problematic.

So I pulled the trigger. Because if everyone else was moving on with their lives, why shouldn’t I? I’d wanted to live outside of California for more than a decade. Now was my chance, and no one was going to be around to tell me “no.”

Weeks went by. Dan talked to his boss. His boss agreed. An offer letter arrived. I started house hunting. We dealt with real estate drama. And then suddenly, it was February. Suddenly, we were ten days away from a day I never really thought would come.

I’m starting to feel guilty about leaving all of this – our friends, our families, the life we’ve built here – behind. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

When I moved to Santa Cruz, and then to Merced, and then back to the Bay Area, I moved with the intention of leaving everything behind, of starting fresh. But you never can start fresh, because wherever you go, there you are. Your life story travels with you. Your relationships travel with you. There is no escaping who you’ve become.

This move feels different. This time, I want to move my whole life to Seattle. I want to bring everyone and everything with me. Because I’m not moving to escape – I’m no longer that girl. Instead, I am moving to move on, to experience, to gain.

And with ten days left to go, I can finally say, “I’m ready.”

To make a long story short: We needed an extension to close. Fannie Mae didn’t want to give it to us. Our realtor begged and pleaded. They said fine, they’d give us the extension, but only if we paid closing costs ($6,000) and replaced the broken stove ourselves ($800). We couldn’t afford it. I called my parents freaking out. They offered us money. Our realtor and lender offered to give from their commission. We thought we might be able to swing it. Then our lender sprung on us that the down payment was five percent instead of the three percent he’d originally told us it would be – essentially, an extra $4,500. We didn’t have another $4,500, and we didn’t have time to scrounge up more money, because we need somewhere to live on March 1. So we had to give up. And that’s what we did.

Dan and I are both upset, but we understand that this is probably for the best. We don’t want to financially over-extend ourselves, and we figure this will give us an opportunity to rent for a year or two, get familiar with the area, save up more money, and then buy a house we’re truly in love with, and in a neighborhood we love.

Because everything happens for a reason, right?

I forwarded the letter to our realtor and she says it’s a long shot but I watch HGTV and I know how this shit works and maybe the letter will change their minds and I’ll have a place to live that doesn’t care that my dog “looks like a Pit Bull” or that I have overnight visitors for more than three days at a time, because I can’t fathom renting and I just want there to be good news because it’s my birthday and that’s what birthdays should be.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Deep breaths.

I continued to write into high school and college, transitioning my work into blog format (first on LiveJournal, then Blogger, and now here) as the internet became popularized. In high school, I self-published two short books of prose (thanks to my mom and her office’s Xerox machine), ebb. and a blatant misuse of the semicolon ;. In college, I wrote first for the campus’s Jewish newspaper, The Leviathan, and then for the satirical newspaper, Fish Rap Live!.

As graduation approached, I began sending out resumes to Northern California-based newspapers and magazines. I got a lot of rejection, followed by some unreasonable job offers (ie. the offer of “we’d like to bring you on full-time, but we need you to start NOW” three months before my college graduation, or the offer shortly after graduation that promised a lucrative pay of $1,600 per month). Finally, a wonderful woman at a San Jose-based weekly gave me the opportunity to freelance.

My first story, a piece on a local Olympian, made the front page. I was hooked. I continued to write for the weekly and its sister papers, traveling around the South Bay to interview people, desperately transcribing those interviews late into the night (after coming home from my full-time job in higher education), and putting the pieces of the journalistic puzzle together to create what would become a published news story.

When I moved to Merced, my employer told me I was not to have contact with the media because of my connection to the local university, and I was forced to give up my freelancing. I kept writing, as evidenced by this blog, my award-winning paper on the history of abortion (written for my master’s program in history), and the umpteen novels I’ve started (but not finished) over the last six years.

But there don’t seem to be enough hours in the day to work a full time job and write. At least not seriously. At least not in a way that could become my career.

So with this move to Seattle, I’ve decided that it’s an ideal time to make that transition. Sure, I’ve been applying to jobs in higher education, because it never hurts to have that stability, or those benefits. But with each rejection, each “we’ve decided to go a different way,” I feel more and more confident that writing is not only want I want – it’s also what the universe wants for me.

I compiled a list of newspapers and magazines based in the Seattle metropolitan area, built a website, and started emailing editors. I introduced myself. I told my story. I linked them to my website, which features my resume and samples of my writing. And while I’ve gotten quite a few rejections – mostly of the “sorry, we just don’t have funding” variety – I’ve also gotten quite a few offers for paid freelancing work.

However, I’ve also had offers for unpaid freelancing work, and this is where the business of being a writer – and specifically, starting out as a writer – becomes tricky territory.

I think that taking an unpaid gig or two, just to get into the practice of writing, just to get my name out there, is a great idea. It can also potentially lead to my being referred to other publications for paid freelance work, or even being taken on as a paid regular. But several of my friends (and my husband) have balked at the idea of my doing something for nothing.

I crowdsourced the question, posting it on Twitter and Facebook in hopes that I’d be talked in or out of it. Dan said, “The reason people are professionals in a field is because they get paid to do it.”  A friend said, “Get paid for your work, because if you don’t value it, no one will.” But I still feel like this could be a good opportunity. And I feel like if I pass it up now because it has no monetary value at the moment, I might be missing out on other opportunities down the line that do.

Then, an acquaintance who happens to write for a living said this:

So why can’t I go into this with my eyes open? Why can’t I volunteer to write in hopes that it will land me paid positions in the future, with the understanding that if it becomes too time consuming or too much of a job, I can back away at any time?

I’m torn. Because on one hand, I do want this to be my career, and it can’t very well be a career if I’m not making money. But on the other hand, doesn’t everyone have to start somewhere? Maybe this – with some paying gigs, some non-paying gigs, and some writing just for me – is my somewhere.

That’s an email we got from our realtor (who rules, in case you couldn’t tell) on Monday night about Brown House. I guess the other deal they canceled us for fell through, and now they want us to buy the house again. TOO BAD, suckers. We’ve moved on.

We close on Green House at the end of the month. I’m starting to get excited. I’m flying up to Seattle tonight for an interview, and plan to swing by the house tomorrow afternoon to take measurements and pictures and etc. I want to figure out where to put our couch, which room to use for guests, can we fence off a portion of the basement for the cats?

I can’t believe we’re only seven weeks away.

With our move to Seattle just weeks away, we’ve started to clean out our garage and get rid of things that one or both of us forgot we even had. Pots and pans, books, pairs of shoes I wore twice and never will again.

I’m not one to throw things away. I’m not a hoarder by any means, but I’m very sentimental. I also feel like if I potentially have a use for something in a week, a year, a decade from now, it should be kept. Because really, what happens if all three of my other pairs of headphones break and I need that pair I stole from American Airlines, but I threw them away? That would be a TRAVESTY.

An acquaintance of mine from college wrote about this on her blog, too, but more from the angle that she isn’t blogging as much because she doesn’t feel the need to keep track of every little thing that’s ever happened. She doesn’t need every inside joke, every drunken outing, every polaroid to be preserved for all time.

I commented and told her that maybe it is a sign that we’re maturing, or becoming less sentimental. Or maybe it’s a sign that we’ve accepted the past as just that – the past. And we know that our lives are now, in the present, and what memories we retain are the important ones. Every little detail and inside joke that we’ve forgotten about over the last decade doesn’t do anything to enrich our current experience.

And really, how many fake Kate Spade bags does one girl need?