Nothing Gets in Between Me and a Good Snack

I walked through the front door of my house, glowing with the satisfaction of a successful shopping expedition.

I sat down on the couch to review my purchases, marveling first at the beauty of my new red bag and blessing the luck that placed it in my direct line of sight in the accessories department of T.J. Maxx. And I admired the maternity pants that I finally bought to replace my favorite pair of pre-pregnancy black pants that I had been holding onto for dear life until buttoning them made breathing a chore and sitting down nearly impossible and I finally had to wave the white flag and admit defeat. I could practically hear my unborn child sighing with relief when I folded them away.

With the results of my shopping spree reviewed and confirmed, I walked into the kitchen to put my "binge-watch Friday Night Lights and eat the maple walnut fudge that I had made the night before during a strange confluence of pregnancy cravings and nesting impulse" plan into action.

I heard the splashing noise that, unfortunately, was not altogether unfamiliar, while I was standing at the counter, pastry knife in hand.

At first I thought it was the radiators getting ready to heat up and then I figured it had to be water dripping into the sump pump from outside due to sunshine and melting snow. But my head already knew the source wasn't nearly that benign.

One short trip down the basement stairs confirmed that thought.

Grey-tinged water and tiny bits of toilet paper were gushing out of a discharge pipe and spilling onto the floor, and the smell permeating my basement was vaguely reminiscent of a well used porta-pottie.

For a minute I just stood there watching the chaos unfold, but then I turned around and went back upstairs, closing the basement door on the whole big mess.

If I had known at that moment that this wasn't the simple do-it-yourself kind of plumbing issue we're used to but was, in fact, a complete clog of our main sewer line that would require a midnight emergency and very expensive Roto-Rooter visit and another hour of disinfecting the basement, I might have reacted with the mix of panic and helplessness that characterizes my general disposition when faced with house issues.

But I didn't. Instead, I gathered my snack and took to the couch and my Friday Night Lights marathon and decided I just wouldn't flush the toilet for the rest of the day while I waited for David to get home.

I'd like to say that having a baby in less than four months has given me a new "don't sweat the small stuff" outlook on life. That it has made me focus on the important things like creating life, instead of the stuff that's no big deal and more or less easily fixed, like plumbing gone awry.

But really?

It's just that nothing was getting in between me and that maple-walnut fudge.

Double Trouble

So I'm sitting on the couch, watching TV, minding my own business, when I hear a noise.

Now, having only lived in my 100 year old house a little over a year, as I have, I am not quite used to all the random noises that it makes. And, having been plagued with plumbing issues as we have, a noise is never just the house settling or the furnace humming to life. It is much more likely to be a pipe bursting, a major leak, or some other household disaster that I am ill equipped to fix.

Turns out, it was none of those.

As I looked around wildly to figure out what it could be and then decided that whatever it was could wait until David came home - since he is the best homeowner to ever walk the planet, and then solution to all of my home repair and improvement needs - the source of the noise rolled towards me.

It seems that David had bought himself a robot a la The Good Wife to take to his trade shows so that he could have one of his employees helping him man the booth while not actually being physically present at the show.

He calls it his Double, and while its primary use is for his upcoming trade show in Texas, until that day arrives he is using it to scare the hell out of me as frequently as possible.

Witness the picture above.

While my attention was focused elsewhere, he rolled himself (and his dad, who who he was visiting) over to the side of the couch and waited patiently for me to notice him - and jump three feet in sheer terror once I did. And he and his dad laughed and laughed.

This Friday the Double will be taking a trip to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, but until then he is gracing the corner of my living room keeping R2-D2 company. 

Because who wouldn't want a living room filled with robots, of all shapes and sizes? Now if I could only teach one of them to do the laundry. Then we would be talking.

When Weather Isn't Just Weather

I was sitting at my desk at work when the snow started to fall.

I'm usually a big fan of winter in general, and snow specifically, but when I saw those first flakes drift over midtown Manhattan I dropped my head in my hand and muttered, "what else?"

I had never really been one of those people who focused on the weather. I had preferences, to be sure, but I never complained much when the weather was crappy. When it rained I opened my umbrella, when it snowed I pulled on my boots, and I mostly took it all in stride.

But overnight, or, more accurately, over the course of nine days, I had become an entirely different person because of a hurricane and because of a house.

I had recently become a homeowner but I hadn't moved in yet. So I spent Hurricane Sandy away from my house and passed the time worrying and wondering. I worried about my new car in the driveway and wondered what would happen when the debris started flying. I worried that our basement was flooded and that our power was out. I worried that our roof was leaking or that a tree had fallen. I worried that after the storm our house would just be a pile of rubble, and then I hated myself a little for thinking that maybe if that happened we could just stay in Manhattan forever.

All of a sudden I felt vulnerable and exposed. The night of the storm it occurred to me that I didn't have a landlord to call if my power went out or something even more terrible happened. Weather was no longer just weather. Instead, it was an insidious beast sent from above to mess up my house and empty my bank account.

So when the snow started to fall a mere eight days after Sandy and only four days after we moved into the house I just piled new anxiety on top of old until I was a quivering mess.

By the time I got home that night half a foot had fallen. The roads were hideous and I found myself dreaming of underground subways and sidewalks that were someone else's responsibility to shovel.

When I pulled into my driveway I saw David in the garage, building our kitchen cabinets and practically oblivious to the fact that the apocalypse had clearly arrived. I was desperately jealous of him and his homeowner confidence when I was approximately five minutes away from staking a "for sale" sign in the front yard and fleeing back to the world of landlords and apartment living.

I didn't really want to go into the house alone, but I was freezing, so I reluctantly left David to his tools and trudged up the unshoveled driveway, one eye warily on the roof, and one on the tree with the branches bending under the weight of the snow, leaning precariously close to the power lines attached to my house.

And I wondered if weather would ever just be weather again.

After a huge snowstorm and days of subzero temps, I can honestly
say that a little more than a year later, weather is just weather once again.
And I love a good snowstorm, even if it might drop a tree straight onto my house

First Snow

I knew it was supposed to snow today, but that didn't dim my excitement when I woke up this morning to find that it had already started falling. I cursed my responsible self for going to work, not because I didn't want to commute in the weather, but because I really wanted to spend the day sitting on my sunroom couch, hot chocolate in hand, watching out my back window as the snow piled up. 

I love winter, and I love snow.

I took this picture at 7:30 in the morning, right at the beginning of today's winter adventure, and I can't wait to see what it looks like when I get home.

The bright side of going into work was that I got to take this quick video of the snow falling over the train tracks and over my favorite running path that starts right behind the train station.

And as I waited for the train to come, I dreamed of a run through snow covered trails.

When I get home tonight I will make something extra special for our snow day treat - a tradition started by my parents when I was little, and that I continue to this day - and, if I can convince David to take a snow walk through our neighborhood.

Come February I may be thoroughly sick of shoveling, salting and navigating up and down my icy driveway, but for the moment, this is what I love.

Happy first snow!

Saturday Night Scenes

If you're going to have plumbing issues late on a Saturday night,

It's best to have a husband with accouterments like this:

Who knows how do to things like this:

Which makes calling (and paying for) an emergency plumber totally unnecessary. 

Throwback Thursday: Kitchen Construction Edition

This week I'm looking back one year to our move from Manhattan to the NYC suburbs, and remembering those first, anxiety-filled days in our new place. Today, that place is home, but 365 days ago? Not so much.

Today, in this special Throwback Thursday edition, here are pictures of our kitchen in various stages of construction. The kitchen was supposed to have been finished by the time we moved in, but that obviously was not meant to be. So for our first month we ate cereal for dinner and turned our dining room into a makeshift kitchen until our real one was complete, sometime in the middle of December.

This morning I woke up, got dressed, and went to the kitchen for coffee and breakfast. And as I was getting everything together, I was thinking about those days where the kitchen was a black hole, totally gutted, and thinking about how very far we've come.

Succot

For forty years after the exodus from Egypt, the Jewish people traveled the Sinai Desert. The Torah teaches us that as they walked, they were surrounded by "clouds of glory" that shielded them from the danger and discomfort of the desert.

Each year, as the seasons change from summer to fall, we commemorate those years by constructing a temporary hut - called a succah - outside of our homes in celebration of the holiday of Succot. For eight days we eat all of our meals in these huts, and some people even have the custom to sleep in them, something I don't do now, but did once with my sisters and friends when I was about eleven and sleeping outside was a fabulous adventure.

Succot is, above all, a time of happiness and joy. The ten days of repentance are over, and for eight days we fill our succahs with guests, have meals together, and celebrate family, unity and Jewish continuity.

This year in our new house, we got to build a succah of our very own. My parents came to visit for the holiday, the weather has been glorious, and we have spent much of the past four days enjoying it right here:

Attack of the Killer Ants

At first there was just one. One lonely ant making its way across my kitchen floor. It was so small that I thought it was a crumb, until the crumb started to move.

No big deal, I thought. It's summer after all, and we are constantly going in and out through the back door. The little guy probably followed us inside, and couldn't find his way back out again. I killed it and moved on with my day.

That was last Thursday.

Friday before I left for work I spotted two more ants hanging out by my Costco closet. You know, the place where we keep the stacks of a thousand paper plates, a million red cups, and boxes filled with more plastic knives, forks and spoons than even the Duggar family could use in a lifetime. I was rushing around with no time to deal with insects, so I left them where they were, and headed out the door.

Friday afternoon when I got home from work they were gone. I was extra vigilant with my dinner clean-up, and even mopped the floor just in case, but I figured that was that.

But that wasn't that at all.

Sunday morning I came into the kitchen for water and breakfast after my long run. I was exhausted from the seven miles behind me, which was probably why I wasn't paying attention and had to attempt last minute evasive maneuvers to avoid a giant pile of those teeny-tiny ants smack in the center of my kitchen floor.

It seems I unknowingly dropped a pretzel when I was getting my Saturday night snack, and hundreds of ants I didn't even know I had emerged from their hiding places to attack.

Friends, it was not a pretty sight.

Water, shower and breakfast forgotten, I grabbed my iPad, sought higher ground, and frantically started Googling things like "ants in kitchen" and "kill all the ants."

The internet told me that where you see a few ants in your house, there are probably hundreds hiding away in some tiny crevice, and that the only surefire way to get rid of them is to kill the queen. Turns out, every ant colony has a queen, and she runs the show.

The other bad news was that conventional killers don't work on ants. If you go spraying Raid around everywhere, not only will you probably poison yourself and your family, but you will also only kill a few of the ants, and the rest will break away and find refuge elsewhere inside your house. Lovely.

Most people didn't even have any luck with exterminators. Basically, they ended up paying upwards of $200 for two or three ant-free weeks, but they problem always came back.

The only surefire method to get rid of the ants, according to the good people of the internet, was to get this product called Terro Ant Baits. Apparently Terro is somewhat of a miracle worker. Everyone said that they had tried hundreds of different products, and Terro was the only one that ever worked. 

Sign me up.

Terro works like this: The bait is a mixture of the chemical Borax, and some other things to form a clear syrupy liquid, which sits in a little pouch. To use it, you cut the bottom off the pouch and put it where you think the ants are coming from. Within an hour, ants start coming, quite literally, out of the woodwork to get at the bait. They eat it, and then carry it back to the nest where they share it with their friends and, ultimately, with the queen. Within 24-72 hours, depending on how big your infestation is, all the ants magically disappear. The catch is that you just have to let them do their thing, which means that for at least 12 hours, you have streams of ants walking back and forth between the bait and the nest. It's pretty gross.

But it works.

I set up the bait, and 10 minutes later, thousands of ants came out of a tiny crack near my basement door and bellied up to the bait like college frat boys at a kegger. For hours they trooped in a single-file line towards the bait, and back again. It was completely disgusting, but also sort of mesmerizing to watch. For a minute, I kind of got why ant farms were a thing when I was little. 

When my alarm went off the next morning, the first thing I did was go downstairs to see what was happening. And what was happening was absolutely nothing. There wasn't a single ant, dead or alive, to be found. They had all magically disappeared. I left the bait there just in case, but two days later it seems like all it took was 12 hours and one box full of Terro to solve my problem. It's miraculous.

I may be pretty crappy at home-maintenance, and I may still be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from the plumbing issues that have plagued us since we moved into our house, but in a mere twelve hours - and all on my own - I busted up an entire insect infestation, and took my house back from the creepy-crawlies.

And that's not too bad.

Superstition

I stared into my t-shirt drawer last Saturday morning as if the secrets of the universe could be found among the folded fabrics.

The only short sleeve shirt left in the drawer was the grey one David brought me back from his Texas trip in March.

I don't wear that one anymore, because of the last time.

It had been a beautiful April day and we spent much of it outside. Happily exhausted, I changed into the grey shirt, and we settled in for the night. David was flipping through On Demand to choose a movie, and I went into the kitchen to get dinner ready.

I was opening the drawer to get a spoon when I heard the ominous sounds of water hitting the basement floor.

I went down to assess the situation, and when I got there I saw sewer water and bits of toilet paper streaming from the top of my washing machine's discharge pipe.

I fumbled out my phone to call the plumber I practically have on speed dial. Of course, he couldn't come until morning, so David managed to free huge clumps of toilet paper, and then, thinking it would hold until the plumber came, headed up to take a quick shower because, sewage.

I stayed in the basement, eyes glued to the pipe as I heard the shower start. A couple minutes passed, and just when I thought we were ok, a new clump of toilet paper rose to the top of the pipe and before I could react, it burst free, and gallons of water and poop geysered out, covering the washing machine, our basement floor, and my clothes.

We spent the next five hours cleaning it all up, and couldn't run any water in the house until the plumber came the next day to clear the clog.

When the ordeal was over, I shoved the grey shirt into the hamper, and vowed never to wear it again. I'm a little superstitious, and that shirt was now bad luck.

So for the two months since, the shirt has lived in my drawer. I was certain that if I wore it again we would face another plumbing nightmare, and I really wanted to avoid that.

And for two months, our pipes behaved.

With that in my mind this past Saturday morning, I considered borrowing a shirt from David's drawer before I came to my senses.

A shirt does not cause your pipes to clog, I lectured myself.

Pull yourself together and put it on.

I did.

Feeling righteous and very adult for facing my anxiety-ridden superstitions, I headed downstairs for coffee.

When I walked into the kitchen, the sound of dripping filled the room. Certain it was my imagination, I went down to the basement to confirm.

It wasn't my imagination.

Sewer water and toilet paper were once again streaming onto the basement floor.

While David called the plumber, I peeled off the grey shirt and shoved it straight into the garbage can.

Outdoor Oasis

Remember a few weeks ago when this was happening?

Well, our brand new back yard is one step closer to being finished, because that demolished deck and empty frame now look like this:

And that guy sitting there, enjoying his kingdom? He built it. The whole thing.

Color me impressed.

We may have moved into the house back in November just in time for five months worth of snow storms, but baby, we're coming out now.

This is Our Home

This is our home.

The words blew through me, warm and strong, as I sat in Shabbat morning services this past Saturday. I'm not so sure what it is about our new synagogue in White Plains, but it is there that I always think these kinds of things. 

It was, admittedly, our first time there in quite awhile. We both work full time, and by Friday night we are completely exhausted. We tend to go to bed early, and sleep really late on Saturday morning before commencing our Saturday morning routine. We don't often wake up early enough to make it to services, and when we do, we usually prefer to relax our way through the day, rather than deal with dresses and heels and makeup and suits and ties.

But this past weekend we were there. Since we moved a little more than six months ago, some friends of ours had been considering White Plains as well. They live in apartments now, and are almost ready to choose a community and settle down. Since I really want them to choose our community, and settle down as close to my house as humanly possible, they came and stayed with us for the weekend to check out the town, the synagogue and the people. To decide if maybe White Plains could be the place for them.

And for twenty-four hours, I saw our new city, our new home, through their eyes.

It is easy for me to get caught up in the daily minutia that comes with owning a house and working somewhere other than where I live. All kinds of things, both big and small, are different today than they were six months ago. Since we moved we've had dripping pipes, exploding pipes, a leaky washing machine, a yard sorely in need of maintenance, and a clogged bathroom drain. I've had to find a new running route and a new place to get a manicure. I've had to adjust to getting up an hour earlier than I did when I lived in the city, and make the switch from a 15 minute commute to one that takes the best part of an hour. 

There are some really, really wonderful things about our new home too, but it's occasionally hard to see the forest for the trees.

But this past weekend, I did.

This past weekend, I was more appreciative than ever that we own a house that can hold four extra adults and two little kids and not feel cramped. I was thankful that we have made really good new friends in our neighborhood who we were able to introduce our old friends to. I was proud that we have become part of a community that warmly welcomed our friends into the fold. I was happy that we have learned the streets well enough to show everyone around, and help them decide what neighborhood would be best for them.

It's no secret to anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis that moving was not the easiest thing for me. It was harder than I ever expected to leave Manhattan, and a little scary to own something bigger and far more expensive than just clothes and shoes. Something that needs tending and love and maintenance and care.

For the first couple of months I had flashes of contentment. Ephemeral moments where I felt warm and happy and secure in our new place. but those moments were almost always followed by anxiety over the newness of it all. 

But lately, that contentment comes stronger and more often. I feel it when I run my now-beloved Bronx River Pathway. I feel it when I see a familiar face in the grocery store. I feel it when we work on our house and I feel it when I drive the now-familiar streets of our neighborhood. And this past weekend, I felt it when I was able to welcome old friends into our new life. A life that we are building for ourselves, slowly but surely, and one step at a time.

Not every day is good, but there are certainly more good days than bad. More days where I am warm and happy and secure. More days when I am able to say, with absolute certainty, this is our home.

Home Improvement

We're getting our house ready for spring with a brand new deck, and now, new outdoor lights, solar powered of course.

Zesty, no?

Note to Self: There Is No Such Thing As a Quick Trip to Home Depot

When I get home at night, I really never know quite what I might find. Last night when I walked in the door, the first order of business, as it always is, was to head upstairs to change my clothes. I walked into my room to find that David had replaced our pillow cases with these:

We had a good laugh, and since I was in such a good mood, when David suggested a trip to Home Depot I agreed to go along for the ride. Now, ordinarily I hate that store with the fiery heat of a thousand suns, but our shower has been draining at a glacial pace and we really needed some unclogging materials. It was a nice night, and since I figured we would only be stopping in the plumbing aisle, the trip would be a quick one.

We got to the store and, since we had done some research on what exactly we needed, the plumbing necessities were dispatched with quickly. As I turned to head to the check-out, David asked me where I was going, at which point I said something along the lines of:

"Home. Dinner. Modern Family. American Idol Hometown Visits. Whatever gets me out of this dusty home-improvement hellhole fastest."

And then he said the words I fear the most every time I reluctantly step through those garish orange framed doors.

"I just need a few more things. It won't take long."

"What kinds of things?" I asked, curling my hands into fists by my side so I didn't punch anything.

"Tools."

Excellent.

It's my own fault, really. I could have stayed home while my power tool-loving man strolled the aisles, basking in the glow of his handy man's heaven. But since I decided to go along for the ride, I had to wait while he chose hammers:

Consulted on drills:

Tested the drills:

And selected a drill to join the other two drills we already have at home:

But this drill is different. Really, it is.

We also had to stroll by circular saws and wrenches, but by that point I was already delirious and probably having an asthma attack from the dusty air so I couldn't capture those aisles for posterity.

Say it with me. There is no such thing as a quick trip to Home Depot. Ever.

I'll be staying home next time, thank you very much.

Deck Demo, Weekend 2

Now, I ask you, isn't he the cutest thing you have ever seen?

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

"Don't sweat the small stuff." The phrase I have been forcing through my mind for the past four days.

So as you know, a couple of months ago we moved into our new house. After six weeks of construction, we finally got all settled in December. And other than an issue with the painting that our painters are coming to fix this week, everything had been going just swimmingly.

Since we closed on the house, every time a homeowner heard that we bought something they would smile and say "welcome to the club," and mention something about the thrills and woes of being a homeowner. Well, despite some anxiety about leaving Manhattan for the suburbs, a few construction hiccups along the way and the unanticipated purchase of a new washer and dryer, I hadn't seen many of the woes.

Until this past weekend that is.

Saturday night I went to the basement to throw in a load of laundry, and heard an ominous drip coming from somewhere. On further investigation, I found some water leaking from a valve in a pipe that runs under the first floor bathroom. It wasn't very much, just a tiny slow drip, but with horror stories flashing through my mind (mostly made up by my very fluid imagination) of slow drips that become massive problems, I got David to come down and take a look. He tried to tighten the valve to stop the drip, but the drip became a steady trickle. We tried a bunch of things, but couldn't stop it on our own. We needed a plumber.

Luckily, we have a friend who got his plumbing license a couple years ago, and said he could come first thing Sunday morning. We got the trickle back to a slow drip, stuck a bucket under the valve, and went upstairs to go on with our night. But the leak was right under my feet and totally unforgettable - not in a good way - so I didn't sleep much, and ran down to check the bucket approximately a thousand times until morning. It's probably worth mentioning that the drip didn't even fill up half the bucket in twelve hours.

The plumber arrived bright and early Sunday morning toting a huge bag filled with parts, and he thought he could have the problem fixed in no time. Famous last words. Nine hours and an entire section of replacement pipe later he finally finished the job, and stuck around for another hour to monitor the leak to make sure everything stayed dry, which it did.

And as he was making his fixes he kept saying the same thing: "old plumbing."

Now, intellectually we knew when we bought a house that was built in 1923 things would be old and I was ok with that because I loved the idea of owning an old house. And when we got the house inspected before we signed the contract the inspector told us that the house was incredibly well built and well maintained, but that some of the plumbing was outdated and would require slow updating over time. And I know that there is no such thing as a perfect house and that brand new houses have their issues too. And I know that old plumbing means that sometimes things will leak and need to be replaced. And I know that these kinds of small leaks are really no big deal.

But I have anxiety over it all anyway.

I am generally pretty good about keeping it all under control, and don't usually have anxiety beyond what would be considered normal and reasonable. But not for the past couple days. Since the leak was fixed, before I leave for work and when I get home I run down to the basement to check and make sure nothing is wet at the site of Sunday's drama. And I glance around to check for puddles of water where there shouldn't be any. And last night I may or may not have freaked out just a little when I heard some dripping, only to realize that it was just the rain drumming on the family room skylight.

And I may or may not have had a big glass of wine to calm down before I went to bed. And I don't drink. Like, ever. It's just not my thing.

I know that these kinds of things go hand-in-hand with home ownership and it happens to everyone. But I am still getting used to the idea of owning something more than just clothes, shoes and lots of romance novels, and generally prefer that everything be in working order. I hate feeling out of control, and when things go wrong in my house, that is exactly how I feel.

So now I'm trying to force myself into a different mindset. It happened, and it was annoying and a little scary. And it will probably happen again at some point. But we own a solid house that we saved for, and that we love, and that we are really proud of. And that's the most important thing.

So my new vow is to try even harder than usual not to sweat the small stuff. And, as Richard Carlson says, it really is all small stuff.

Even basement leaks.

2012: A Year in Review

New Years Eve.

I have spent some time these past few days reading through my blog archives from the past eleven months, trying to find a way to sum up the past year. And I have spent some time reading other bloggers' end of year posts trying to find some inspiration. Some people were posting their favorite blog posts by month. Some were listing all the books they read, or the places they traveled, or their favorite songs. But none of those felt quite right to me, so I decided to do a little bit of everything. Because, well, I am a woman of many interests, and because for me, 2012 included a little bit of everything. And more.

In January I turned 29. My birthday was on a Wednesday, but I celebrated on Saturday night with dinner and my best friends. It felt a little weird to turn 29. Like I should be focused on the fact that this was the last birthday that would have a 2 in front of it, and that 30 was looming in the distance. But I wasn't focused on that. Instead I was focused on the people around me, and how lucky I was to be living this life with them, at any age. And in January I started training for my first half-marathon. I had been running for awhile, and it was time to kick it up. For four months Central Park became my second home, as I circled its loops four times a week and counted the days until the race.

In February I started this blog. It was February 10th. A Friday. It was raw and rainy outside, and I got an idea. An idea for something I wanted to say. I wanted to write about the books I love, and the people I love, and after I wrote my very first sentence of my very first post, the ideas just flowed. And over the past eleven months my blog has taken on a bit of a different flavor, but I am so proud of it, and will be forever grateful for that first spark of inspiration on an otherwise ordinary day.

In March D and I started talking about moving. About leaving our apartment in New York City and venturing out to parts unknown. About buying a house and another car and becoming suburbanites. We looked at our first couple of houses, and thought how it would probably take months and months to find the right one for us. I fumed over the rhetoric about abortion and contraception coming from the federal and state governments, and took to my blog to express my outrage. And in March we boarded a plane late on a Saturday night and flew to Israel for a 10 day vacation on the beaches of Tel Aviv. And in a Tel Aviv mall I discovered that Israeli women love romance novels too, and my heart sang.

In April I spent the last days of Passover in Pittsburgh surrounded by family. I battled a running injury I thought might keep me out of the half marathon that was a mere four weeks away, and we made our first offer on a house we loved, but walked away after a week-long bidding war. And in April I read Nora Roberts' new book The Witness, fell instantly in love with the premier of Shonda Rhimes' new show Scandal, and bid farewell to One Tree Hill, a show that I had been watching since its premier my junior year in high school.

In May I went back to Pittsburgh to run the race. It was an unseasonably hot day that felt more like the end of July than the beginning of May. For three hours I joined thousands of other people to run the streets of the city I love. And there were some dicey miles, but I finished strong. It was my biggest accomplishment to date. And in May I read Nora Roberts' The Last Boyfriend, the incredible book Quiet by Susan Cain, and the less than incredible Fifty Shades of Gray trilogy.

In June we went to see the house that would ultimately be ours. The first time we saw it I couldn't see the potential, but D did, and twenty-four hours of negotiations later, the contracts were being drawn up, and plans were being made, and I started thinking about what it would feel like to live somewhere that wasn't Manhattan. I discovered Bunheads, a new TV show by the creator of Gilmore Girls, one of my favorite shows of all time, and spent some happy Monday nights with the quirky characters of Paradise, CA. And I stayed up until 4am one night just to finish Gillian Flynn's incomparable thriller Gone Girl.

In July we flew to Cleveland for the weekend to visit my sister and brother-in-law and to smother my little niece with love and presents, and I started the torturous process of applying for a mortgage. I watched in horror with the rest of the nation as news broke of a gunman inside a movie theater in Colorado, and I watched with excitement and glee as the Queen of England declared the Games of the 30th Olympiad open. I watched hours and hours of Olympics, and managed to make some time for the miniseries Political Animals, and the delicious debauchery of Bachelor Pad.

In August I suffered from a post-Olympics hangover and entered my very first blogging competition. I was approved for a mortgage. I watched the Republican National Convention and struggled with how I, a pro-choice, pro-marriage equality Republican, could fit into this modern incarnation of the Party. And in August we found out there was an open permit on our house and that our closing would be delayed, and traded a million e-mails with our lawyer and our mortgage company trying to get it sorted out.

In September we took a late night drive to the Jersey Shore to celebrate Labor Day Weekend and I spent a day looking back eleven years. We celebrated the Jewish holidays, and I wrote my first piece of fiction. We closed on our new house, and I started writing about the nostalgia I felt for leaving the home I had known for more than seven years. The twenty-one TV shows that I watch on a regular basis came back from their summer hiatuses, and my DVR was once again filled to capacity.

In October we celebrated our two year wedding anniversary with dinner and dessert on our living room couch. I started counting down to my last run in Central Park, and started thinking about packing boxes, and whether our cable would be hooked up in time so I didn't miss any of my shows. I wrote a post I love about the female vote, and I took my last Central Park run (or so I thought). And in October our move to the new house was delayed by three days as New York City was devastated by Hurricane Sandy and her aftermath.

In November I took my actual last run in Central Park, we moved into our new house and commenced six weeks without a kitchen as our construction was finished, and I entered a challenge to blog every day of the month. The third book in Nora Roberts' Boonsboro Inn trilogy was released, and it saved my sanity during our first real weekend in our house. D built our kitchen cabinets, I started learning the streets of our new neighborhood, and I saw camels on 51st Street on my way to work. I spent Thanksgiving with my family in Pittsburgh, and I celebrated with my best friend when she got engaged. I finally unpacked my romance novel collection, and spent some serious quality time on my new couch in front of the TV.

In December I got my first blogging award, and saw those camels again. The construction on our house finally came to an end, and I started cooking in my brand new kitchen. My heart broke for the Sandy Hook community as they struggled to make sense out of a tragedy, and I grieved alongside one of the families as they laid their little boy to rest. I finally got my running mojo back, and spent a cozy night in our new home in front of the fireplace.

What a year indeed.

Happy New Year.

Here's to 2013.