Video: A Tour of Our Brooklyn Apartment

Less than two weeks after we moved to New York in 2007, this blog was born.

Pay a Visit, I thought, would be a fun way to chronicle what Paul and I were seeing, eating and -- yes -- visiting 500 miles away from our friends and family in Ohio. And, of course, it would be a great forum in which to continue writing until I found a job.

I got a job a month later, and yet the blog continued. And today, after almost six years, I am publishing my 750th blog post.

Thank you all for your interest and encouragement from day 1. I know my life isn't that interesting, but you sure make me think it is.

In honor of this milestone, I have something a little different today: A video tour of our 3-bedroom apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

In many ways it's a typical New York apartment -- compact with no wasted space. We were lucky, however, because the floors and kitchen were largely new when we moved in. Plus the space seems huge to New Yorkers, who are used to living in matchboxes. To Paul and I, coming from a 3-bedroom house in Ohio, the apartment is by no means huge but is certainly adequate.

In fact, I've come to like living in a smaller space because it forces us to keep our "stuff" to a minimum. Of course, when Edith starts crawling, I'm sure I'll appreciate the space we'll have in Ohio.

Without further ado, welcome to our apartment:

Finally Eating at the Restaurant Downstairs

Our apartment, two stories above the awning.

The ground floor of our apartment building was a bar/Mexican restaurant when we moved to Bay Ridge in 2007. It was a happy, happy day when it closed. The food was bad and the crowd it attracted was worse. Middle of the night shouting matches underneath our bedroom window were common occurrences.

The space was empty throughout the summer and much of the fall of 2010, before opening that November as a seafood restaurant.

I was curious about this new restaurant, but also hesitant. The restaurant was completely made-over with lovely glass walls and pleasant outdoor seating. Yet I consistently put off dining there.

"We'll go when it gets too hot to walk to a restaurant further away," I'd tell Paul at the beginning of the summer. "We'll go when the snow's too deep to go elsewhere," I'd say in the winter.

We'd had drinks in the bar area with friends, but we hadn't tried the food. Finally, with our move to Ohio looming, it was now or never. So last weekend we finally ate dinner at Mussels and More.

It was a pleasant night -- one of the last ones before the current heat wave -- and we had Edith in a stroller, so we chose the outdoor seating. Our table was approximately 20 feet from the entrance to our apartment building, and vaguely underneath the window to our kitchen.

We purposefully arrived around 9 p.m., when Edith generally goes to sleep. She was zonked out before the entrees arrived. True to the restaurant's name, we ordered mussels (the classic Prince Edward Island kind) and more (grilled octopus, plus zucchini sticks). The dishes we chose were delicious, as was the complimentary bread that started out the meal -- I didn't expect yummy cinnamon-raisin bread.

By meal's end, I was feeling pretty foolish that we hadn't previously eaten at a place both good and convenient. But whether or not we were patrons, I can definitively say that living above Mussels and More has been a surprisingly great experience. The restaurant and bar added a nice hustle and bustle to the street corner, and a pleasant hum of people enjoying a nice meal out. I'm glad that for at least one night, we were part of it.

Saying So Long to New York Friends

As we're winding down our time in New York City, we wanted to say a goodbye -- I refuse to say "final goodbye" -- to the many friends we've made here.

So we put together an after-work get-together on the eve of Independence Day at the outdoor Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. It worked very well for my 30th birthday party, plus there is plenty of room for a stroller. Score!

It didn't work out quite as planned.

First, it was hot and humid. All week the temperature had been in the 80s and 90s, and last Wednesday was no exception.

And second, the day was littered with pop-up showers. We thought we had outsmarted the clouds, because the sky was blue when the party started. And even when it sprinkled a bit, the drops felt cool and refreshing.

What was not so refreshing was the torrential downpour that lasted a good 10 minutes. I now know the meaning of the phrase "sheets of rain." Those 10 minutes sitting on an outdoor chair with an umbrella in one hand would have been bad enough on its own, but it was even worse when my other hand was holding Edith and the diaper bag, trying to keep both of them dry.

We didn't get too wet, but we weren't taking any more chances. A few friends went home at the first sign of rain, but a couple more made a beeline to a bar across the street: Live Bait. The rest of us followed when the downpour shut down.

The bar area up front was crowded and not stroller-friendly at all, but there was plenty of room in the small restaurant section in the back. Our group of a dozen or so even got to sit together.

As more and more friends left, it was down to just six of us, one of whom was extremely sleepy and ready to nap in her stroller. So we again headed back to the Shake Shack. I ordered a burger and fries during the first round there. This time I got a concrete -- vanilla custard with Brooklyn's own Mast Brothers dark chocolate chunks mixed in.

Although the night didn't go exactly as planned, it was far from being a bust. The worst part wasn't the heat nor the rain. It was the so longs and farewells. Even though we're still in New York for a little while longer, it sort of felt like the beginning of the end.