Sneakky's Profile

I don't buy food in bulk because with just me and my daughter at home, it'll get stale or spoil before we can eat it all. I do stock up on paper towels (I've cut down on using them, but keep them for cleaning because cloths and sponges feel unhygienic to me), toilet paper, laundry soap, cat litter, light bulbs, and sometimes toothpaste and deodorant.

I've done this lots of times. Years ago, my husband and I moved from a one-bedroom to a two-bedroom in the same multi-building complex. The packing was just as intense, but the move itself was really easy - we had a hand truck and a couple of furniture dollies and just rolled stuff along the path to the new building. A couple of years later, we moved to a new place a mile or two away so our then-toddler daughter could have a yard to play in. DH passed away about five years after that, and Daughter and I moved to a nearby apartment complex for a while (too many memories in the old place), until I got a chance to rent a relative's nice, big townhome. That's where we've been for the last four years and we'll probably be there until Daughter graduates from high school in another four years. All these moves have been within the same city and none have been more than a couple of miles. The funny thing is that moving even a mile can disrupt a lot of your daily routine - suddenly you have a new supermarket, take a different route to work, have a new garbage day, etc.

My mother has never liked anyplace I've lived. She views a "real house" as a sign of success, and I've always lived in apartments or condos/townhomes. She decorates in a beautiful, coordinated style and I just sort of buy things I like and strew them around, plus I view my home as a functional place where I live and not a showplace for visitors, so I'm perfectly happy with a $15 IKEA side table as long as it gives me a place to rest my drink. My dad (divorced from mom for 25 years now) is the polar opposite. He's never decorated anything in his life - I visited his current place for the first time last summer, and it's full of random hand-me-down furniture and posters, some of which I left behind when I moved away in 1996 - so anything I do is cool with him.

It only takes me a few months to feel like a new place is home; once everything's unpacked and I've hung stuff on the walls, I'm good. But I've also moved a LOT - I'm 41 and I've lived in 20+ different apartments/condos/houses, with 5 years being the longest in any one. I may beat that record with my current place since we've been there 4 years and I'm hoping to stay until my 14 y.o. daughter finishes high school.

For partners, definitely how much togetherness the other person needs. I'm an introvert and my late husband was an extrovert, and it was really difficult for him to understand that it wasn't a personal rejection when I went into another room to read or listen to music alone (and for me to understand that he wasn't deliberately trying to drive me crazy by coming in and talking to me).