We just did two-plus months in a big apartment on the 14th floor of a tower. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a real kitchen. Nice.

The kindly people who live there are coming back from a long summer vacation, so we dragged out all our stuff (and you always bring back more than you take) … to the Teeny Apartment down here in the “suburbs” — where parking is easy but buying groceries is hard.

Gotta admit, it will be an adjustment. To keep from going mad.

At the moment, we are sitting in the living room. Which is one half of the house.

Here are photos Leah took, back in December.

And here is the blog item I did when we first moved in, nine months and a million years ago.

I like to quote whoever-wants-to-take-credit-for the line about how, “Lifestyles are not negotiable downward.”

Well, actually, they can be. If you move into someplace new, and if you don’t have more stuff than can fit into it … you can deal with a smaller place. We did it in Hong Kong. We did it the first time here, when we had nothing more than the two suitcases we brought with us from California.

What is making me a little twitchy today is that we not only lost about 80 percent of our square footage, and two bathrooms and two bedrooms … we have just carried more stuff into the Teeny Apartment than we can put away. We have no storage here. We’re still surrounded by bags, and where the stuff inside will be stuck … beats me.

That’s what makes this feel like a major movement down the social ladder.

And, of course, if you have followed this blog at all … we have had major battles here with gnats and then two types of ants; we have been flooded by water pouring through leaking windowsills; and of late the bedroom has turned into a swamp because the AC blower above the bed had a clogged condensation drain.

Yeah, nothing says “welcome home” than a soggy and moldy bedroom unit.

So … now we wait out the end of this lease. I look forward to the day when we can walk out of here and find someplace far, far better for much, much less cost (thankfully,  the overheated housing market here has gone cold) by the middle of December.

If we don’t go mad in the three months till then.