O Tannenbaum

Having a woman in the condo makes a difference in all sorts of subtle ways. We're cooking at home more often and the music that's playing is from outside of my own, tired play list. And we have a Christmas tree. Bachelor-Raj didn't bother with such things -- home was a place to sleep in, watch TV, and dump my stuff before going out again. B's putting back the touches of "home." Our tree is tiny, fake, and cost us $5 as a Christmas Eve purchase at Ace Hardware, but it's something to liven up the place while we figure out what to do with all the boxes we need to unpack.

I'm Bringin' B Back

Last weekend, I brought B home from Washington DC to Chicago. Because loading, unloading and driving a U-Haul 700 miles wasn't enough of a challenge, we did it just as the snow and ice storms began pounding the Midwest. Sixteen months ago, we drove to DC in a rented Jeep with a few boxes, a couple of suitcases, and room to spare. That the return trip filled up a ten-foot truck is yet more evidence of the correlation between time elapsed and volume of possessions. It's a pity there's no such correlation with living space. We were fortunate that my brother-in-law still lived like my old college roommate, sleeping on a mattress on the floor -- to him went the bed, dresser, and nightstand. But right now, the condo is decorated with pillars of boxes, a 32" LCD television lying on a beanbag, and clothes. Oh, the clothes.

The drive itself wasn't bad. Yes, there was a learning curve with the truck -- even the smallest U-Haul is exactly as wide as some of DC's narrower streets, and the side-view mirrors stick out a good deal wider. This means that it's entirely possible for a tree branch to thwack the passenger-side mirror, which, even at speeds lower than 30 mph, will shatter half the mirror. (Yes, I know this empirically.) Side mirrors are important on a truck; there is no other rear-view option. And yes, I learned that if you accidentally get turned around on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, you'll have to drive 30+ miles to get turned back the right direction. And yes, U-Hauls don't have CD or tape players. But the drive from Washington DC to Toledo Ohio had clear weather throughout, and when the storms hit between Toledo to Chicago, the truck could plow through the worst of it.

The unloading was the bad part. In -30 degree windchill, unloading 15 boxes, some suitcases, paper bags of odd, loose items, and a television was decidedly unpleasant. Unloading the bedroom set on the ice-buried street in front of my brother-in-law's place was pure hell. People parked on the streets were trying to free their cars using shovels and pickaxes. Arjun and I carried furniture over a jagged obstacle course of snow-covered ice, with the wind tearing through our scarves. But I will give credit to the U-Haul folks. Maybe it was the Christmas spirit, or maybe it was just too damn cold and too close to closing time, but the people at the U-Haul dropoff told me not to worry about the broken mirror, and said they wouldn't charge me the $361 for returning the truck to the wrong office.

It's done. I had nightmares about driving the truck the following night, but I slept hard. The condo is a disaster, and the clean-up and organizing effort will take up our holiday, but that's okay. B's back, and we're one household again. That makes it all worth it.

It Begins

This seems like a good time to begin a personal blog. The year has been full of changes and transitions, and for those with whom I haven't spoken in a while, I have updates to provide.

Most importantly, my wife is coming back to Chicago, and we're going to live like an actual married couple again. Though being a "commuter couple" is oh-so-trendy (many are doing it, and the lifestyle even had an article in TIME Magazine this year), we've had a long-distance marriage since August 2007, not too long after our first anniversary. Seeing each other only a couple of times a month does not help when trying to build a life together. We never intended to be apart for this long. The planets of our professional lives just aligned in strange ways.

Without getting into the details (that's for B to disclose), her work took her to Washington D.C. at the end of August 2007. During this time, legal proceedings were underway in America and Europe to approve Google's bid to acquire DoubleClick, the company in which I had worked up from a sofware developer, to a technical lead, to an engineering manager. The deal was expected to close in April 2008, after which I would learn whether or not I still had a job. If I was laid off, I would move to DC and look for a job there; if I became a Google employee, we would figure out what our options were and do our cost/benefit calculus. (Google stock was still in the 800s at the time.) Either way, we expected things to be decided before the summer of 2008.

But come April, instead of hiring or firing me outright, Google offered me a one-year contract with a completion bonus hefty enough that I couldn't take my wounded pride and simply storm out the door. So we remained in limbo, with me needing to stay in Chicago until April 2009, and with no good reason for B to leave DC, where she had found both interesting work and success in her career.

Mentally preparing myself for moving to Washington DC was a process. I love Chicago. I love our River North loft, walking distance from my last two jobs. I love the friends I have here, and I love the cheap Southwest Airlines flights from Chicago to Omaha, so I can visit my parents. But I love B and her professional happiness too, and if I can't put my wife's needs ahead of my own, then I've failed to learn the lessons of the third Spider-Man movie. For the record, I would have done it. I would have moved to DC, and done so cheerfully, when the time came. But again, events took a different turn. B found a new opportunity in Chicago, which made the issue moot.

B and I are excited that she's coming home, even as we acknowledge that we'll have to get past our "set in our independent ways" mentality again, just like when we got married. It's a little bittersweet, because she has made some great friends in DC -- good people who have taken care of her and made sure she didn't get too lonely. I think I value them for that almost as much as she does. B's departure will be bittersweet, but mostly sweet. My baby's coming home!