Becoming a grown up

I've been living in my house for about two and a half weeks. It's been a great experience so far. My sister has been subletting from one of my roommates for the summer. She and I have been shopping and cooking together. (My other roommate has mostly been eating at her fiance's apartment.) I've made a price book (result: food is CHEAP here!) and a coupon folder and have signed up for rewards cards. So far, I've been enjoying this taste of adult life. We'll see whether I still like it a year from now!

My biggest hassle has been transportation. I don't have a car, so I've been riding my bicycle everywhere. I got a trailer so that I could carry a lot of stuff, so I've even been grocery shopping with my bike. This is fine, in theory, but there are two big problems: The first is that it's fairly warm here, and so I wind up covered in sweat. That's not great at work and it's no fun to get home and just need to collapse and dry off. The second, bigger problem is that I don't live in a very convenient place to do all my shopping and travel by bike. There are not a lot of sidewalks in places you'd want them to be (hello, the mall?). I need to investigate the bus a bit and see if that can make up for some of the missing sidewalks. There is still the problem that a lot of local drivers don't seem to realize that bikes can be part of traffic. I try to stick to sidewalks so I don't die. (Yes, I realize I'm enabling their bad driving. No, I don't care; when cars nearly run over a BABY TRAILER, I'm not sacrificing myself on the altar of a principle.)

My plans for the next few days are to finish unpacking/organizing my room and to get some supplies to make jam. We don't have the right size pots, but I am going to try it anyway before I buy more because pots are expensive. I might be able to just make smaller batches. I'll keep you updated!