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Cherry Blossom Tree across the street from our apartment

I love our apartment and I love our neighborhood, but in general, I have been very down since we have lived in Baltimore. Some unfortunate things have happened such as being turned down for a driver’s license until I go through a 3 state fax & snail mail chain plus a $25 check to clear it up. Getting kicked off of SSI was a pretty bad blow too. Worse than pretty bad, not to mention completely unexpected. Thank goodness Karen’s workplace will recognize me as her domestic partner so I can still have insurance and get my meds.

But enough of all that. Things will get better. Hopefully soon! There have been good things too. On Saturday, I got to meet Sharon da Vanport for the first time after working with her for close to 3 years on the Autism Women’s Network. She is the executive director and does more things in a day than I can do in a month. I am the web/tech person. She is just as awesome in person as she seems on Skype, email, and various other virtual means of communication. Thanks for being you Sharon! Almost got to meet a couple of other people that I have worked with to some degree or other, but that didn’t end up working out. I believe we will meet at another time, probably in the not so far future.

I have been very sad and having a hard time thinking, but today, Karen did the most awesome job of cheering me up! We went to the water at Fell’s point and had the best ice cream cone in the world and looked at the boats. After that, we went to see this co-working space called Beehive Baltimore that I was pretty excited about, but it turned out to be a disappointment. We got there and there were a bunch of people working on computers. No one said anything and I don’t think there was anyone working at the Beehive (as opposed to people just working). I think I didn’t understand how it works and was comparing it to TechLiminal, this awesome place in Oakland that I miss very much. I will give it another chance. There are WordPress meetups there and I will definitely be going to those. We also stopped at Whole Foods. Even though we really can’t afford it, we got some good food. It is not nearly as easy to find packaged vegetarian food as it is in California. No big surprise there, but nice to know it can be found somewhere.

We got home to find that our awesome landlord installed a new kitchen faucet to replace our old one that was kind of strange and hard to aim. Karen had mentioned that she liked the sprayer in the other sink and he went out and got this really nice faucet with a nice detachable sprayer at the end of it and a soap dispenser. He is easily the nicest landlord that I have ever had. He lives upstairs.

Other highlights:

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There are tons of Cherry Blossom trees everywhere and they are all beautiful! I love the trees here and the season is right to see all of the flowers too. I am very much looking forward to the fall when the leaves will change colors. I wish we could just skip right over the hot sweltering summer!

Bricks

The bricks are awesome and they are everywhere. I was born in Brooklyn, NY, and bricks feel like home to me. I think I can look at them all day. They are completely mesmerizing. Bricks are one of the things that I missed most when moving to the west coast. Right up there with good pizza and bagels, both of which are also here.

Karen has a couple more days off before she has to go back to work. We still have lots more unpacking to do, but we are hoping that there will be more time for K to show me around and even visit some places where she has never been. Even though we have been non-stop busy for several months now and still have so many things to do, days like today feel like we are on vacation. It is really nice to get to spend this time together before ‘regular’ life takes over. I think we will be okay here. Just not sure exactly how yet.