Moving Out

At the end of 2013, Jim and I moved from Massachusetts to Virginia.  We had no idea what we were going to do, or where we were going… really no plan.  But that’s just how we are I guess. Jim had applied to school and was starting in January, so we needed a place to live—and soon.  We looked at a bunch of places and heard back from an old farmhouse in Woodstock Va. 

When we first got here, we were so excited about the place. A beautiful view of the mountains and more space than we knew what to do with. But we soon found out that space isn’t always a good thing.  Electric baseboard heat in a house 100+ years old is very expensive.  We started sleeping in the living room to save money.  For a while we only heated that one room, until our fridge stopped making its usual noises.  The fridge man came and told us that we needed to turn the heat on in there—apparently the fridge doesn’t work if the room is colder than the refrigerator settings.  Did you know that?  ’Cause we sure didn’t.  Plus, our landlords were worried about the pipes freezing, so we turned on the heat in the kitchen.

Other than the winter expenses, the house seemed pretty great.  But then the internet started sucking.  Internet isn’t very important to some people, but for me and Jim—it’s our lifeline.  The county we lived in had two options for internet: Dish, or a company called ShenTel, that had monopolized the whole county.  Jim is opposed to Dish, so we went with the other one.

Jim plays videogames (online) and I watch my Netflix (online), and we didn’t feel like paying the extra 50+ bucks for cable.  So when the internet decided it could only handle one device at a time, it wasn’t good.  We were on the highest speed plan offered, but when we did an online speed test, we were barely getting a third of the speed we were paying for. Whenever I tried to video-chat with my family and friends back in Massachusetts, it would lag and stop like a movie shows through strobe light images with a slow banjo thumping in the background. Jim was calling and complaining to the company once or twice a week.  Once in a while, they would send someone and it would work okay for about a week, but it would go back to its old ways before long.  Before summer came, Jim was ready to move.  But that was not a good enough reason to break our lease in my opinion, so we stuck it out.

Summer came and went, and the house kind of made up for the winter heating issues with its self-cooling system.  We only had to use the air conditioning a few times.

One day in late September I noticed a rolled up wonton wrapper in the bathroom.  This didn’t seem so unusual, as I had been cooking with wontons a lot this past summer, but how it got into the bathroom confused me.  Hesitant, I asked Jim to deal with it, and we both forgot about it. Until a few weeks later when it appeared again, this time inside one of the shelves in the shower.

“Jim?.... Jiiiimm?” I yelled as I walked from the bathroom to the living room with confusion.  He looked at me, expressionlessly waiting as usual.  “Are you trying to play a trick on me, or did another stray wonton wrapper find its way into our shower somehow?”

“Yea… about that… I think we have mushrooms.”

And that’s when I started freaking out.  I googled “bathroom mushrooms” and sure enough, pictures of rolled up wonton wrappers flooded my screen.  But they weren’t wonton wrappers; they were mushrooms.  I learned that mushrooms don’t grow the way plants and other things grow.  They don’t start small and get bigger like the rest of us.  Mushrooms, at least this kind, sprout invisible little spores and lay their groundwork silently and then BAM! One day, they just appear, looking like an uncooked crab Rangoon (or cheese wonton for you southerners reading).

I did some research and learned that this tends to happen when there is a lot of moisture in a small warm space.  So… a tiny bathroom in Virginia in the summer with the humidity from a shower… yea, that would probably do it.  Had I known this might happened, I would have opened the window a little more often—even though the window was about 5 feet away from my neighbors’ front door.  But now it was early November, and it was getting cold.  That was the breaking point for me.  Jim was more than ready to move, and neither of us wanted to spend another cold winter heating the house.  Our lease was up in Decemeber, so we started looking right away. 

We went to a few townhouses and apartment buildings and finally we found a place we both really liked (with the option for Comcast internet).  I asked the property manager about the ventilation in the bathroom and alluded to our problem in the past house.  His response was “well if it becomes a problem, let me know and I’ll just put a ceiling vent in for ten or twenty bucks.”

We moved in January first, and so far, we are loving it.