Nine years ago today...

...I moved to New York City.

On September 27, 2002, I landed at JFK with a DKNY tote and a cross-indexed reference binder listing the locations of all my worldly possessions. The first thing I did after dropping my bags off at my apartment was find the closest grocery store (D’Agostino’s 76th Street Market, in case you were wondering, although later I switched to Gristede’s on Second for late-night needs and Eli’s and a natural food store up a few blocks on Lex for most of my staples, which at that point in my life mostly consisted of “meat” made out of various textured vegetable and soy products), where I discovered that Diet Cherry Coke was a real thing. So my life really changed twice that day.

I lived in a teeny tiny studio on the fourth floor of a building my boss’s best friend owned on East Seventy-Fifth Street, and the following Tuesday I made the first of many daily commutes to New Jersey via NJ Transit. I started reading the whole New York Times on the train, every single day, including the sports section. I ended up knowing a lot about baseball in my mid-twenties. I have actually sustained entire conversations about the Boston Red Sox starting lineup.

If you’d told me then that nine years later, I’d be working in advertising and living in a two-bedroom condo with my husband, our dog, and a whole bunch of All-Clad cookware, I would have found that perfectly natural (although I might have asked after my hypothetical children).

If you’d told me that two-bedroom condo would be back in Anchorage, I would have told you to shut your lying face.

If you’d told me that within two years I’d start a blog that would end up costing me a job and earning me a job and getting me a mention in a book about bloggers and landing my wedding in the Alaska Ear, I would have said “What’s a blarg?”

Even when I moved back to Alaska in 2005, on some level I assumed I was going to be a New Yorker for the rest of my life, but it looks like it’s probably not going to work out that way. Turns out I love having a back yard more than I love being able to walk to Bloomingdale’s. (Yeah, I couldn’t have called that one, either.) Which, unfortunately, means I’m going to have to do something from which I normally try to refrain at all costs, namely, quote John Lennon, who, of course, sang that “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Sorry. I tried to find a way around it, but it just kept creeping in.