1. The one where I hiked to this waterfall.
2. The one where I rode a bus from New Orleans to Atlanta to see one of my college roommates/favorite humans get married. The one where I reminisce about reunions and late-night talks and how random dorm room assignments 8 years ago brought together a (now) husband and wife and how absurd and beautiful relationships (all types of them) are.
3. The one where I spent a night in New Orleans with three of my best friends and realized that I could not remember the last time that I was with more than one of my friends in the same city.
4. The one where I share some thoughts about women’s Olympic gymnastics.
5. The one where my sister found out she’s having a girl.
6. The one where I was, yet again, jobless until mid-August and then in a span of a few hours I got an interview (then a second, third, and fourth), and two days later a job offer. Then the one where I packed everything I could fit in my car in one day and drove to DC with no apartment or plan other than showing up at work two days later.
7. The one where I crashed at a friend’s apartment while starting my job (5 days after all the other new hires started) while trying to find an apartment at the same time and teaching myself how to parallel park.
8. The one where my new school is a Catholic school and I had to attend my first Mass afraid that I would accidentally reveal to my new coworkers that I had no idea what was happening.
9. The one where I found an apartment in Bethesda, which I only knew to be the home of the girls in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but is, in fact, a delightful town less than a mile from DC where everyone has enough money to attend $30 per visit exercise classes daily.
10. The one where I attend a couple of said exercise classes (for the $15 first visit discount) and had some thoughts to share about them.
11. The one where I slept on an air mattress in my empty apartment for 9 nights until my heroic parents drove a U-Haul here with my furniture, stayed exactly 24 hours, then had to go back home so they wouldn’t miss work.
12. The one where I live next to a Capital Bikeshare stand (where you can rent city bikes) and have ridden something like 50 miles in the last three weekends.
13. The one where I try to figure out how to teach 5 classes of over 20 students each when the largest class I’ve ever taught was 15.
14. The one where I discover that I’ve somehow landed at one of the best high schools for athletes in DC. (Perhaps the country.) Which is not a thing I can ever say I imagined.
15. The time where my car died in the school parking lot and no one could start it for three days, so I had to Uber to and from school until I finally got it towed to a repair place where they put in a new battery.
16. The one where I finally finish unpacking and have an apartment that actually looks like a home.
17. The one where I tell you all about DC and what it’s like to live here so far and how incredibly nice everyone is.
18. The one where I describe each of the smoothies I splurge on every weekend. Because that truly deserves a post of its own. Though I will never confess how much I pay for them.
