Hiatus? No, Just Busy-ness

If you're reading this, my thanks go to you for not giving up on my now pitifully backlogged blog. I have been so busy with school and life in general that updating my blog has seemed more frivolous an exercise than knitting, although I guess that doesn't mean much coming from me. GP and I have been very busy on many fronts, so allow me to update you, dear reader.

On October 1st we moved to a new and, happily, better living situation. I'll give you the bad news first: There is only one window that opens and it is in the bedroom and it faces a somewhat noisy street, so we can't really have fresh air at night without listening to noise. I guess that's the only bad news about this place... Oh, wait, no, our neighbours often have noisy sex. But that's kind of entertaining, so I'm not sure it can be counted as bad news, except that they are very unnattractive. They tend to talk a lot (weird...) and I'll admit that GP and I have sidled up to the wall to hear what they're saying on more than one occasion. I wish they would enunciate more because their words are very muffled. The only other thing I can think of negatively about this place is that it is on the second level and let me tell you, that sure was a bitch when we were moving our heavy furniture. Thank god we had done P90X not long before, otherwise we would've been passed out half-way through the gruelling 24-hour move. Yup, getting stuff packed up and put into the truck took around 12 hours and taking it all out again took another entire day. All I can say about that is thank you, U-Haul.

I would put a picture of the mess that was our furniture and earthly belongings, taking up most of the parking lot on the day we moved here, but we were too tired to even think of taking pictures. We were obscenely lucky that it was a sunny day.

Here are the great things about our new place: the second floor part makes me feel slightly safer, even though anyone could climb the stairs to our place because they are on the outside of the building. I can also imagine it being noisier on street-level, especially when the guy with the huge Dodge truck leaves for work in the morning. (Incidentally, that guy is the one living next to us and we are fairly certain from the sounds we hear from his girlfriend that he has that truck for a reason, if you know what I mean. Sorry, too much information?) The balcony is spacious enough for our BBQ, various gardening stuff, and a little table and chairs. My mum is even going to build us some boxes to put on the railing so that we can have flowers in the spring and veggies in the summer. I can't wait to get planting! Our worms had to come inside, now that it's getting chillier, and they seem happy in the kitchen. The good news is that there is a lot more room in this place, so we can actually fit the giant worm box inside without having to knock a wall down. And no, it doesn't smell because we are exceptional worm stewards. The new place has carpets in the spare bedroom/Kim's office and in the master bedroom. The only bad thing about that is that Friskies loves scratching it, so we've had to put up a kitty gate that she still manages to climb over:
She should talk to Alanna Kostiw about going climbing sometime because even after us having made an overhang, she STILL gets over the damn thing. Besides that, though, she has adjusted well.

Another great thing about this place is that it's SO much brighter than the last place. We are facing east, so we get the morning sunshine, whereas our last place was facing north so we got... Bupkiss. Also, this place has a full-size dishwasher, which is awesome because now I can cook whatever the hell I want and GP can stay as happy cleaning it up as he was when he was eating it, and I can bake and cook all sorts of amazing food with my Kitchenaid and Cuisinart and not worry about having to hand wash the damn things when I'm done. What have I made so far? Well here's the first dinner we had here:
A simple but delicious meal of roasted chicken and root veggies (parsnips, carrots and beets, to be exact). And a few weeks ago I marinated some chicken in red wine (surprising, I know) and sundry other delectable things and made a salad to go along with it. Needless to say it was delightful.
The picture doesn't do it justice, so just believe me when I say it was yummy.

I think that's enough of an update for now. I'm trying to limit myself to only spending half an hour on this and my time is almost up. I'll try my darnedest (weird spelling) to make sure this hiatus was a one-off and, as I said before, I'll post soon about my new phone, about which I still feel ambivalent.