Adventures in Moving: Chapter One - The Search

Many of my friends and family know, I use to move every six to nine months. Just within the city. Would you believe it's been five years since my last move? I think part of it is petsitting. I've lived all over the city (and occasionally outside of the city) without having to bring everything along with me. So it was like I was moving every few weeks and getting to experience all different neighborhoods, living there like a local. I think the other reason for not moving sooner is the fact that, with three jobs, I barely had time to look for a place, let alone pack it all up and get it across town. This spring I decided to slow things down a bit so I could have a little free time to do things such as find a new place.

I looked in a few different neighborhoods, but I had my eye on a certain one, which for the blog, I'll call "Wills."
One of the reasons to move was to have a home base closer to where I have the largest amount of petsitting clients who use me most often. Which is Wills.
It's a place I've always liked and know it well since I'm petsitting there half the time. Wills is also closer to downtown.

I found a listing on Craigslist. A house in Wills, shared with another woman. I talked to her briefly on the phone and found out she also works in the arts and works with animals. There is one dog she owns and is always fostering a second. And my age. I'm older by over a month.
Right before I met up with her, I was hanging out with my friend, Josh. I told him how much I seem to have in common with this potential roommate. "And she talks just as fast as I do!"
"Imagine if she laughs as much as you do," he said. "You two will never get any sleep!"

She was meeting with other people even up to half an hour before I got there. I had been beat out of apartments just by being the second person there that they would be willing to rent to.
I looked around at the place - FANTASTIC location, quite a lot of character, very good vibe - then we sat in the kitchen and talked for TWO HOURS. At the end of the first hour, she said, "I'm giving you the green light. I want you to move in." And the only reason we ended our visit at the second hour was that we both had to get up early in the morning to go to work.
I still had some reservations, such as the size of the place (wondering if it would be too small since I had already furnished a whole place on my own), so I let her know that I would still be looking but she was definitely in the running. I still had time. I still had a trip to San Fran to take. I also had the luck that she was headed for a week in Hawaii and wouldn't be interviewing many more people.

I looked at other places. Shared housing, single apartments, daylight basements...I could write a chapter just on how every time I thought I knew exactly what I wanted in a place and the order of importance, I would find a place just like that. And find out that my order of importance wasn't in the order I thought it was. But instead I'll leave it to this little confusing paragraph here.