Setting Up House

I got into Oklahoma the day after my roommates had come back to Norman (after going home for the week after finals), so I got to be a part of the first grocery shopping experience.

Let me tell you, setting up a kitchen (and a home) from scratch is hard, expensive work. You don’t just need the obvious large food items like milk and giant bags of frozen chicken. You need olive oil, mustard, and sandwich baggies. You need dishwashing soap, salt and peppershakers, and a broom. And all that stuff adds up veeeeery quickly.

Starting a new home is expensive business. Since coming here, we’ve had to set up our electricity, water, cable/internet, and alarm system. We’ve paid too much in deposits and down payments, and we’ve already started paying our bills. And yet, with all this, I just feel like a kid playing grown-up right now. I’ve got the bills and I’ve got the responsibilities, but it still kinda feels like playing house. I’m not sure when it will stop either—maybe when I get a real job to go with the real house.

It’s funny, because when I was griping about living in the sorority house with a bunch of girls and wishing that I could be living with my friends in our own place, people kept telling me to appreciate living in the house because there someone else takes care of everything. I didn’t really believe them, but it’s so true. Before this, the most time I’d spend on worrying about bills was paying my one-time room and board payment. And the most time I spent on food a day was the time it took me to eat—no buying or preparing and no washing dishes.

But in the end, all the furniture finding, bargain hunting, and twenty-minute phone calls to the cable company (ten of which were spent on hold)—it’s all worth it. My friends and I made a celebratory dinner last night together (delicious lemon-y shrimp sauce over penne pasta), and we cooked it in our own kitchen while enjoying a glass of wine and catching up on each other’s stories. To me, that kind of evening is well worth the grocery shopping, dish washing, and frequent dead bug sightings (I think our floor is toxic).