We're Back!!

And of course, what better way to celebrate your first weekend in your new home than to drive to Oakland to see your favorite baseball team? (Better luck next season, boys.)

Soooo...It’s been something like two weeks since we posted an entry. This might be a longish entry, but I promise to put salient points at the fronts of paragraphs so you can kind of skim through if you’re not wildly interested in all of the details.

Our friend Job flew in the night before our big move to our big new place. The original plan was to take him to see a Sox game in Oakland, but it just happened to work out that he was there to help us get settled. It was awesome. If any of you are considering moving, allow us to recommend becoming close friends with Job. He unpacked our entire kitchen while he was here and generally had all of the steam we didn’t when it came to getting things done. Thank you Job!

One of the best features of this new place, as far as Elise is concerned, at least, is the play room.

As you can see, Flapjack is also a fan. From this window, you can see (but only sort of hear) airplanes landing at SJC. Cool!

Faithful readers will no doubt recall an earlier rant about utilities/services here. It gets worse. Earthlink couldn’t find us to establish service, but they were our first telemarketing call! We have DSL through AT&T but that took a week. DirecTV was pretty inept and I don’t recommend their “Easy Move” program to anyone. The installer guy was great, but the rest of them were what one good friend would describe as “a @#$%ing clown school.” We’re glad to be basically established, though, and will blissfully forget about all of this nonsense now that it’s been complained about in a public forum.

After a week of wrestling with utilities, Heather was off on a whirlwind trip to Chicago. The leader of the Hump Night Thumpers and his lovely bride threw about the most awesome wedding imaginable, and of course the band was there to play! It was a blast.

And, once again Job manages to carry the day by granting a poor jug band musician use of his apartment for the weekend. We’ve been wracking our brains for an appropriate way to show our appreciation for a friend who regularly does such nice things. Please mail us if you have any ideas!

This week has been busy with unpacking boxes and laundry. Elise likes to help with the laundry quite a bit.

Happily, our new laundry-doing machines are high-efficiency and insane capacity so it’s going pretty well. We finally got every last box out of the kitchen and dining room yesterday, so it feels like a real home! (The rest of the boxes are of course scattered about the house and mucking up everything else.)

It’s been getting chilly at night, as you can see from the clothing choices of Elise and Teri Bear.
Tomorrow, we trek to the San Francisco airport at rush hour to claim Uncle Peter and Auntie Roni for a day and a half before they fly back to New Zealand. Woo hoo!!!!! All kinds of plans for fun with them...

And, believe it or not, after that we’re expecting a little peace and quiet. Elise has been sleeping in until about 7am every day-it’s amazing what a quiet house and neighborhood can do for a family’s sleep!!

One of these days we are going to tackle the monumental task of notifying everyone we can think of about our change of address. That might be early next week-if you don’t get a close, personal e-mail from us please drop a note. We’re a little scattered still and can nearly guarantee we’ve lost some addresses somewhere in the move.

From our home to yours-we hope you’re well! Thanks for bearing with us during the long silence of the shifting and settling.