Falling into place. Thursday, August 6, 2009

Humph. It's been a while. Maybe I should just give up on trying to regularly update.


I think the biggest reason I haven't been updating is that I've been really freaking busy the last few weeks, and before that I was in Boston for a week for cousin's wedding/ family reunion. And before that I was preparing for Boston, and blah blah blah.

Why the busyness? I'm kind of hella employed, but almost completely by accident. It's not like I went out an submitted applications and begged corporations for a job, I just kept saying yes to small jobs that quite rapidly added up to something significant. I've been tutoring for ages now, but it's slowed down for the summer due to summer camps, conflicting schedules, vacations, kids needing a break from math for serious. Now that the beginning of school is in sight, I've picked up a couple more clients and suddenly my goal of having 3-4 hours/clients of tutoring a week isn't that unreachable any more.

Then about a month ago I put up an ad on Craigslist advertising myself as an artist/artistan assistant, hoping I could re-live the glory days of my job senior year of high school. I got a couple of not-so-serious responses (some guy asked me if I was single, ew, then said "if not, I have some piece work you could do". No.) and a response from a professional and established fine-artist who relocated to Portland a few years ago and was looking for a studio assistant. And so there I was. I've been working for him for a few weeks now and it's working out great. So that's another 10 hours/week, give or take.

Then there's our friend from church. The Hillsboro church, which we only attended for a few months and then decided it wasn't for us. We kept running into eachother coming to or from Fred Meyer, since she lives right around the corner from us. One of those times she asked if I'd be interested in helping her organize her photos (50 years of photos!!), and that she'd absolutely pay me because it's going to be a big job. I said yes, and suddenly that's under 5-7 hours a week. And this 50 years of photos to be artfully put into albums so... it's kind of a continuing thing.

Just a couple of weeks ago I felt unemployed and extremely scared of my rapidly diminishing savings (Summer tutoring has brought it barely more than $200/month, which is definitely not enough to cover rent, utilities and student loan bills). But suddenly it's not so bad. And even if any of these opportunities fall through (if the artist can't continue to pay me, if we finish the photo project early, if one of my tutoring clients stops calling) I've seen just how easy it is (finally) to make ends meet through several small jobs. I'm only working about 20 hours a week, and I'm not going to say how much any of these particular jobs are paying, but let me say that it's absolutely enough.

But not only am I just employed now, we're also moving! We're escaping the suburbs, sprawl, strip malls and Starbucks, finally. We found an apartment in close-in southeast Portland, in the vicinity of Hawthorn and Belmont. The rent is double what we're paying now (but keep in mind we're not paying much right now), but we'll be close to EVERYTHING. Within a mile and a half of our apartment there is a farmer's market, downtown, Hawthorne, Belmont, a co-op, a New Seasons, a library, a park, excellent restaurants and food carts, and more pubs and coffee shops than you can shake a hipster at.

We drew a rectangle on the east side of Portland, representing where we would like to live. The western edge was at 12th and the eastern edge at 40th. The northern edge was Burnside and the southern edge was Division. This rectangle (the magic rectangle, as our future landlord calls it) is teeming with life and people our age. It's not up and coming like Albina or whatever, and it's not new and trendy and expensive like the Pearl or NW 23rd. And it's definitely not far away from everything like Sellwood or St Johns. It's just... there. Right in the middle of everything. Our apartment is situated firmly in the middle of that rectangle.

The rent is definitely reasonable for it's location, the apartment is cute and not too small. For the rent, it's actually pretty big. It's only one bedroom, but it has a walk-in closet in the hallway that can be Rob's music room, and lots of room in the living room for me to have my art-crap. Basically, it's way too perfect. The oven's got to be shitty, or the management will be overbearing or something. Whatever the un-perfect-ness is, I hope it's not too bad. We get the place a week from tomorrow and have until the end of August to move in, thanks to overlapping leases.

EVERYTHING IS FALLING INTO PLACE AND I ALMOST DIDN'T SEE IT COMING!