Life: Settling In

Two weeks go by very quickly these days. The last week of November is almost a non-existent blur in my memory now. Where did the year go to already?

With the arrival of the freezing cold weather (-40C with windchill) I am very happy that we got our move done when we did. I can't imagine trying to load and unload a truck in these conditions. The people we were going to rent from originally were hopeful they could move before Xmas, but the long term weather looks none to promising for that even though they have a company doing the move for them. When I stopped by to pickup some mail that had made it there before our switch in residence they had all kinds of boxes stacked up waiting to go. I'm glad Aerin and I managed to spare ourselves that fate right now.

Have you ever heard the phrase "A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part"? That's the way things have headed the last week at work as everyone that is moving labs over the holidays wants old chemicals and waste containers dealt with before they move. Our team leader's last day was on Friday before his three and a half weeks of vacation, so we're now short handed with more than enough on our hands to keep us busy. We sent out our 9th waste shipment of the year (compared to just seven last year), and we make one more the end of the week to clear our things so they are not sitting around for a couple of weeks unattended. Certainly never a dull moment at work these days, and I'm certainly looking forward to the time off between Xmas and the New Year we get while campus shuts down.

So the last couple of weeks have been busy with work by day and settling things into the new house by night. Aerin has had some busy nights doing shiatsu treatments for clients. We spent the Monday night after our move at Ikea spending a good chunk of our security deposit on new furniture that we needed but didn't have space for in the old apartment. So we got a new bookcase and a kitchen island amongst others.

The living room and dining room here are as big as the old apartment kitchen and living room/dining room put together. Unfortunately the kitchen doesn't have as much counter space or drawers/cabinets as we had before. The kitchen island has helped a little, but isn't going to quite get us there maybe. We'll continue to look at how to deal with that at a later date once we see how things are going for use with the current setup.

I have a room all to my self for my game stuff. I'll be reorganizing a few things in there, but for the most part I can start setting aside some time work on things without worrying about our tripping over everything or having it out for a few days between the time I have available to work on it.

We have a spare bedroom still that is currently a collection space for everything that hasn't found a permanent home or just needs to be sorted out. So we can host a few more bodies than we could before. Our old place was pretty tight with just the two of us; it was downright crowded once you got to three or four people. And it'll hold all our (mostly my) outdoor gear.

And the bedroom is quite nice too. We got the blackout blind hung yesterday, so that helped me sleep a little better last night. The street light is pretty bright through the existing blinds, so it was nice to have it a little darker for sleeping. I just have to remember to close the spare bedroom door if we plan to sleep in since it's across the hall and lets in a lot of light.

As a bonus we can now have a proper house warming, or even just have a few friends over, since we now have actual space to host people without sitting in each others laps. The house warming will happen some time in the new year.

Time to get some things done here. Cheers!