Category Archives: photos

doughnuts

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Doughnut Plant’s delicious blackberry jelly doughnut with peanut butter glaze!

Last Saturday I woke up craving Doughnut Plant. I could not stop thinking about it. It’s on the other end of the city and something about the thought of going all the way down to the Lower East Side just for a doughnut made me feel ridiculous. But the craving was still there. I decided that if I really wanted the doughnut that badly, then I could run/walk the 7 miles (I thought it was 6, but I just looked at the map again…7!) to get there.

I got all geared up (running shoes on, fuel belt loaded with water, gum, phone, keys, and metro card–no way I was running/walking both directions) and headed out the door. One of my favorite things about where I live is that I’m two blocks from Riverside Park and the Hudson River trail (no idea if that’s its actual name, but there’s a path that goes down the Hudson from at least 96th to Battery Park–all the way to the southern tip, basically). It was a gorgeous day and running along the river felt absolutely amazing.

Eventually (I did walk about 3 of the miles…running through Chinatown is a virtual impossibility), I got to Doughnut Plant and picked up my delicious treat! Don’t worry…I got three. I figured every two miles was worth at least one doughnut, right. It was well worth the trip.

Now if I can only motivate myself to go running with something other than food…

the apartment – a work in progress

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Moving is not fun. Moving and downsizing is really not fun. That said, I LOVE my apartment. Thanks to Kelly who was willing to come and look at the apartment–MY apartment–I am in a fabulous one-bedroom on the Upper West Side of the fabulous island of Manhattan. But that doesn’t change the fact that moving sucks. And it’s expensive. So, at long last, here are some photos of the apartment…a work in progress.

It didn’t feel like I had that much stuff when it was all packed in the 10 ft Budget truck with room to spare. But then you pile it into a rather small living room…and it feels like A LOT.

This weird looking vented box? My AC casing. Sarah and I installed it. Ourselves. No boys to help. And guess what. It’s still in the window and still working. (Yes, I did just knock on wood…that thing was pricey!)

This was taken about a week after I moved in. Progress for sure. Although it’s looking even better now. A lot better (only five boxes to go)! Some of this is old stuff that I brought with me (mostly the cubes from Target that make up my “entertainment center”), but most of it is new. Despite the fact that I had a lot of furniture, most of it couldn’t come with me because it just wouldn’t fit.
This…I love. It’s weird to be back in a twin bed, but not because I don’t like it. Just because it is. As you can see, my view is of an alley and a building. This is true of all my windows. I don’t get a lot of direct light, but in the middle of the afternoon, my room looks like this…and it makes me happy. Plus, I LOVE the print of the girls in the water on my wall. I’ve had this print since I was 19. I purchased it while backpacking through Europe. It’s by a Spanish artist name Joaquin Sorolla. My friend Courtney, who was with me, wanted to purchase the same print, but there was only one at the museum. She was really nice and let me have it. It reminds me of my childhood, growing up in California, playing in the ocean.
It’s good to have my stuff out storage and on my walls. It’s good to have walls! While I am grateful for the apartment over my dad’s garage, it is nice to not be living in an attic anymore. Really, really nice. You should come visit me here. It’s a lovely place, this apartment of mine.

officially a new yorker

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Okay, so maybe not a New Yorker exactly, but I do now live in New York. (I’m not sure how long I’ll have to live here to call myself a New Yorker, or if I ever can if I wasn’t born here…)

In any case, after four days of driving across the country with Sarah and staying with Katie, Jennifer, and Jenny, we finally arrived in New York Friday night. Let me just tell you what a welcomed sight the Empire State building was when we first saw it from New Jersey. Four days of driving is rough…especially after discovering that I can in fact get carsick while driving, even though I have only been carsick one other time in my entire 32 years of life. Other than the driving part, it was really fun to see the country and catch up with friends along the way.

But now, I am here, sitting on my bed, in my apartment in my new city. We unloaded the truck Saturday morning (two of the guys interning here for the summer came over to help out…which made it go sooo fast) and then I sat and stared at the pile of boxes that had taken over my entire apartment. It’s amazing how much stuff fit into one little 10-foot truck. Since then, I’ve just been trying to get it all unpacked and organized…managing to also install my AC unit with lots of help from Sarah (it was 99* yesterday), squeeze in a Yankees game with Kelly, church, some fireworks, locking myself out of my apartment, and the Monday night movie in Bryant park.

Pictures courtesy of KP…since I haven’t downloaded any yet…or taking many for that matter.


Sarah keeps talking about how New York days are longer and I have to agree. It just seems you can fill them with so much more. I can’t believe how much I’ve done in the past three days. I also can’t believe how much more I have to do before I start working…the whole reason I now live in this city. Sometimes I forget that working is a part of this whole thing. I forget it until I start stressing about how expensive it is to live here, and then I remember that I will have a paycheck…eventually.

(Don’t worry, you’ll get to see pictures of the apartment in progress…along with a post about how overwhelming moving to New York is…)

my new digs

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I don’t know if there are words to express how much I LOVE my new apartment. For those of you who haven’t been keeping track, I have been living at home for FOUR years. If that doesn’t sound pathetic… Anyway, when I moved home I left a lot of my stuff in storage (more on that later) because when you go from a three-bedroom home to a studio there just isn’t room for everything.


Most people who move from just about anywhere in the U.S. to New York find themselves downsizing dramatically. I, however, am not most people. I cannot explain how excited I am to have a bedroom, and kitchen with more than two cupboards, and an actual living area where there’s room for some kind of sofa, and a bathroom where the ceiling doesn’t slant. And now, I give you my new apartment…in progress.


This is the entry way. It’s a long, narrow hallway. The bathroom is off to the left.


The bathroom. I have to have two shower curtains to go around the whole tub, but that’s okay. In some apartments in New York, the shower head is not at one end of the tub, but in the middle. I was so excited to see that such was not the case in my apartment. And my little sink with my little mirror. Guess who’s throwing out all kinds of beauty stuff.


My living room/kitchen combo. Finding an apartment with this in my budget was not super easy. There’s enough room in the living room for me to get two loveseats and have an entertainments center of sorts. Amazing. Additionally, I have a fabulous breakfast bar, which means no need for a kitchen table…which I don’t have room for. However, that box under the bar on the right contains the most amazing foldable table that, when not in use, fits right there and will give me FOUR extra drawers. And, in case you were wondering, my kitchen is HUGE by New York standards. Huge!



And here is my bedroom! I have an actual bedroom (I thought for sure I would be in a studio.) And it has TWO windows which means lots of natural light. I just purchased this fabulous bed (still need to finish it) that will actually fit my luggage under it. In New York, it is all about storage space…as in, no one has any, so you have to get creative. I LOVE this bed. (The “bedspread” is a temporary fix…I didn’t have room to pack my bedding on the flight).


The closet you see here is the ONLY one in the entire apartment which means I will have to get creative with my clothes. Thus the bed with four drawers and a cabinet. I will also been purchasing a dresser of some sort. And my shoes…well, I got a shoe rack for the back of my door that will hold 36 pairs. Too bad that’s only about half of my shoes. I’ll figure it out. Part of me figuring it out is me selling all kinds of stuff. Clothes, shoes, books, kitchen things, and a number of pieces of furniture.

If you live in Utah County and want to know what I’m selling, shoot me an email at chloe.elizabeth@yahoo.com.

ch-ch-changes

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This week I said goodbye to a dear friend. (This is not a post about dying…so please don’t worry.) I sold my Honda. Below, you will see the pretty pictures of my happy car. The sale of this car marked the beginning of my big move to the big city. I have been so excited to move to New York. So. Excited. But with the end of school, and now the end of my automobile ownership, I am really starting to feel that this move will not be all sunshine and roses. There will be homesickness and adjustments, missing my friends and my family. And I know there will be lots of moments when I will wish that owning a car in New York city made any kind of sense for me.

Thankfully, the process was not super difficult. I listed it on Craigslist. Received an email the next day. And voila, after a test drive and the buyer’s mechanic checking it out, we had a sale. On Tuesday morning, I met the buyer at the DMV and handed over my title. I felt like a real grown up. It was weird.

This was MY very first car. By that, I don’t mean that it’s the first car I ever drove (that was a VW Rabbit convertible…a super beater car–an ’84 in ’95–and I LOVED it ), but it was the first car that I bought all on my own and it was brand new at the time (something I will likely never do again). I paid it off a little over a year and a half ago. So the car was totally and completely mine. And now it’s totally and completely someone else’s.

And so begins the big move to NYC. I have a couple more weeks before I head out to secure an apartment…just wait until you hear what that entails. I’ll just say this…if you ever want to rent an apartment in New York, you should not have lived with your dad during graduate school. You should have stellar credit. And you must make 40x the rent. It’s going to be a painful experience finding somewhere to live is all I can say.