Progress Reports

Slideshow of our ongoing home improvement process. Click on a picture to see its caption. You can then use the arrow keys to advance the slideshow.

My Twitter/Facebook update on Sunday was, “Today is the day the boy apartment becomes a co-ed apartment. Apartment, I’d like to introduce you to shelf liner and drawer organizers.” It was a big day for the bachelor pad.

I know that in some ways, it would have been ideal if we’d found a brand new place instead of having me move into Darren‘s place. Because it would have been ours from the beginning, we could have avoided my encroaching on his man-tastic lair.

Nonetheless, in most ways it just made sense for me to move into the place he’s had for two years. He’s got a great spot in a four-plex, a big southern house divided into apartments with wood floors and lots of windows. His treesy neighborhood, Belhaven, is known as one of the most beautiful and consistently wins Best of Jackson’s Best Place to Run. Most importantly, right now I just want to have a simple, settled life and am grateful that he has all the basic necessities already in place.

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I’ve been a Jackson resident for a week now. I have a post brewing about all the differences I’ve observed so far between Mississippi, but it has grown so big that I keep putting it off. I’m working on doing more posts in bullets, snippets, or photos, both for your sanity and mine. Here’s a rundown of Week 1 in Jacktown. Even though I spent most of my time this week at home settling in, a lot happened:

•  Splurging at Target to organize Darren’s former bachelor pad. It’s a work in progress, but the place already looks much, much saner. Pictures of the transformation to follow.

•  Finding the best organic foods and green cleaning products that Jackson has to offer. One of the biggest sacrifices I made in moving to Mississippi from the Bay Area is giving up the wealth of healthy food choices, particularly organics. They’re harder to find in Jackson, but they do exist. There’s a local co-op called Rainbow (like my favorite grocery in San Francisco), and the big-box Kroger has a solid selection of organic produce. I can’t describe how elated I felt to put vegetable after organic vegetable into the shopping cart, especially after a southern fried wedding week in New Orleans. Ironically, I felt like a kid in a candy store.

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