Alan Keyes officially leaves GOP and hardly anyone notices. Heheh.

We’ve put in an application and refundable deposit on an apartment. My tension has just melted away.

We saw a very nice place on Friday evening in a building we had looked in before. I thought it was great but Matt was hesitant. So we didn’t act on it. Then over the weekend Matt started to warm to it. But I thought it would be gone by now. I emailed the management company agent last night and she got back to me today and said it was still available. So we acted FAST. She emailed me the application and I put together all our paperwork (since we’d already put most of it together in anticipation of finding a place).

It has pros and cons but mostly pros. I feel very happy. It’s in the area south of Columbia University.

I was tense and frantic all morning. The agent said that someone else over the weekend had expressed interest in it (true? not true? who knows, who cares) so I wanted to get all our papers together and get the necessary money orders and hightail it back into the city (Matt couldn’t get away from work today).

So that’s all done and we just have to wait for approval. There’s no reason we wouldn’t be approved, but I like to worry. Well, my body likes to worry. My body is all keyed up and tensed up from a weekend of stress and a morning of worry and it hasn’t quite realized it can relax now.

At any rate, I AM SO RELIEVED.

I think this was the most dejecting weekend of our apartment search so far. We’ve expanded our search from no-fee apartments to broker apartments, but even using brokers we’re not finding places in our price range that we’re comfortable with. There’s something wrong with every place that we’ve seen. Yesterday we saw three places on the Upper West Side; today we looked at a place in the West Village and two places in Chelsea; on Friday evening we saw three places in a building near us, south of Columbia.

I spent much of the weekend depressed and/or anxious. Matt felt some anxiety at a few points, but not as much as I did, and he subsumes his anxiety in activity, while I just… express it.

Last night we went to bed around midnight. I somehow woke up at about 3:40 in the morning and spent the next three hours awake, trying not to think about apartments. It was awful.

At times, I’ve been ready to take a particular place but Matt has wanted to keep looking. There was this one place Matt liked but I didn’t like at all. A couple times, he’s been able to convince me why a particular place was problematic. There was a very nice little place on West End Avenue, but it was essentially a first floor apartment (really second floor, but the first floor was sunken a little below street level, so the second floor was more like the first-and-a-half floor), and it had no bars on the windows even though it faced the street.

Late this afternoon we went for a long walk, starting from our apartment on 109th Street and ending at Fort Tryon Park in Inwood, to see what different neighborhoods were like. Most areas north of Columbia are crap, until you get to maybe the 170s, where it seems to get nicer but un-Manhattan-like. Using this, I calculated that we walked just over 5 miles.

I’ll tell you something – this whole search has been very healthy for our relationship. We’re learning how to communicate better with each other about what we want and don’t want, and Matt’s getting better at giving me the affection and TLC I need when I’m feeling ragged. As I’ve said before, I am a dog and Matt is a cat, but lately he’s been trying to be more attentive to my canine-ish need for affection.

Maybe in 10 or 15 years we’ll get a nice little place out in the country with a stream in the backyard and a real dog…

[Update: Matt didn’t even tell me he blogged this morning. Some similar thoughts there.]