First Impressions

Wow..I can't believe how long its been since I've had a moment to spend any amount of time on the internet. It has been so crazy-busy that I haven't had any spare time at all.

Moving...well, what can I say. It was crazy. Everything went smoothly for getting out of our old place. We had a firm plan and plenty of people to do the jobs so all fell into place. Everything made it safely here, on time and in (relatively) one piece. I stayed at the apartment during the furniture moving in order to thoroughly clean it from top to bottom. We were fully out a day earlier than we had to be and only went back to do last minute cleanup like floors and getting rid of garbage. All in all it was the best, calmest move I've ever done.

Then we arrived here at our new place. We got the keys ok and all seemed to be well until we got inside. We were met with the unbelievable filth. Luckily there was no actual garbage, but it was bad. The bathrooms were black on every surface with plenty of dirt and hair on the floors, especially around the toilets. The kitchen, which fortunately I didn't see until some cleaning was done, was completely encrusted. The fridge was black and greasy and the stove was crusted on with, I swear, two years worth of baked on food, inside and out. Even the light switches and baseboards were gunked up with grime. The windows have black mildew in them and greasy fingerprints all over them. The floors, which are beautiful, were filthy and had random clumps of black, gummy crap stuck everywhere. I cannot believe that anyone, especially someone who owns the place, could not only live like this (with kids, too) but leave it that way. Yes, the place was dirty when we viewed it, but you would expect at least a little bit of effort, especially considering what we paid for it.

So I have been cleaning before even trying to sort out where our stuff goes. It has been a slow process, but we are starting to see the end of the tunnel now. We have also been fixing a lot of things..minor 5-minute repairs that the people seemed to be too lazy to do. Our new appliances arrive this week, hurray! The ones that are here are work ok, but they are cheap and old so it will be nice to have new good-quality ones. We are getting new bathroom cabinets in the next couple of weeks and doing fixture changes to modernize everything. We are going to start painting next weekend..fun, but daunting. This place is huge and all of it needs to be done. Besides marks on the walls, the idiots actually hung up pictures with construction nails and large screws..and left them all behind, sticking out in a most unsightly fashion.

When I have had the chance I managed to squeeze in a little bit of knitting here and there. I finished my pretty socks:

And I cast on a new project using Noro Kureyon Sock. It will be another cabled vest in the same design as I made before (details in Ravelry), but in much brighter jeweltones. It makes me very happy to work on and I can't wait until it is all done so that I can wear it. I found that I ended up wearing the last one quite a bit. Even though it is very lightweight it seems to add just enough warmth to the long sleeved t-shirts that I often wear.

Well that's it so far. The girls are adjusting to their new school routines much better than I am, ha ha. They actually got to play outside with other kids in the complex on Saturday..a first for them. The dog and the cat seem to love their newfound freedom to roam about the three levels of this place and have forays out to the back yard. Its really nice..fairly private and completely fenced. Hopefully I will be getting time to work on my still not set up craft room soon.