I Miss Having a Home

Congrats to Sarah on having her baby! Finally the pregnancy is over! Yay! I hope for quieter and happier times ahead for her, and her family.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure no one, from the living-in-Japan group, will be reading my blog anymore. くそ。。。

Um...well. We still don't have a place to call home yet in downtown Lancaster. We've been looking at a number of places, and lots of them are dirty, and as old as Stonehenge. And some of them ended being in really shady locations. At one location, we got out of our rental car, and after looking around, Takeshi said, "I don't even feel safe on this street, during the day..."

We got a tour of 2 places this morning as a matter of fact. The first apartment was on W. Orange Street, and was a 1 BR. It was listed at $575 a month but the "tour" lady told us that the people trying to rent it out are itching to get it settled a.s.a.p. and lowered the price recently to about $475 a month. This place wasn't bad, and graded much better than most of the places we'd seen so far. The carpet was mostly clean, the places with a hardwood floor were OK, and the appliances were a mix of newer and not as new. The second place we looked at was stellar. We're looking to jump at this one, for sure, after seeing it today.

It is located on N. Lime Street and is an efficiency and is $625 a month. We get 1 off-street parking space, which is really great because trying to find a parking space on the street in downtown is not my favorite chore. That apartment is very new and very clean, with nice carpets, and new appliances. We were told that it actually used to be a dental office! There was even a small square-shaped X-Ray screen left on the wall! I think that's a very funny feature. :)

The only thing we're waiting on is a 'letter of employment' from a place in town that Takeshi is going to be working at. He's decided that the best thing for now (since we don't have a car yet), would be to go back to the restaurant he was working at in Lancaster, before we left. If all goes well, his plan is to work 2 days at his old workplace, and 4 days at the new one. You cannot find fine-dining restaurants in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. These two places are no where near what he wants to do for a living, but I don't plan to stick around this town after my final year of college!

Most of the places in town that he's wanted to try eating at that proclaimed themselves as "fine-dining", did not even reach a C+ grade in Takeshi's book, I think. Every time we go, he's torn between snickering under his breath, or shaking his head in disappointment at the menu. Ah well. Let's hope he soldiers on until we leave Lancaster again.