Settling In

Just a rad bus.

What a crazy couple of weeks its been!  The day we finally got our household goods was like Christmas! Our delicious giant couches that had to be brought in through the living room window, our cushy mattress, our wonderful cookware, all my art supplies, my book collection (and my boot collection), all our art, the GRILL, a place to sit and eat...the JOY!!  We worked for three straight days getting everything unpacked, dusted, and put in its perfect place and hung in the perfect spot.  At the end, it felt so good.  We really, really love our little house.  A few excess things had to go, including my obnoxiously heavy file cabinet (replaced by a much smaller version) and the wine rack (sad, but its prime is long gone).  Serendipitously, the extraction of my wine rack left the perfect space for a new chest freezer that a neighbor couldn't fit in their house, so we will be filling that with delicious clean meat from the farm shop this weekend! Hooray!  It is so nice to be in a place that is easy and enjoyable to keep clean, rather than the bottom of a dust bowl.  I bought a new vacuum and I have never loved a vacuum so much in my life.  It is light, bagless, a sexy shade of red, and it will suck your face off.  Its funny how the things we get excited about change with age.  It is also a really strange but nice feeling knowing that we are going to be here for 4 years.  That is the longest I have ever lived in one house since I moved out of my parents' house 11 years ago.  Even when I lived in Seattle for 5 years, I lived in 3 different places throughout that time. So even though we know we will be leaving after 4 years, it feels like 'us'.  My husband has his man cave, I have my office/studio, and we have our room, our yard, our patio.  It is perfectly wonderful. 

 

The new job is going fabulously, I work with a great group of people and the work is constant.  It is definitely interesting coming on a few weeks before the biggest event of the year, but it has allowed me to dive in head first and learn the ropes quickly, which I love.  Another bonus of getting our household goods was having extra art to decorate my office with, so it is starting to feel much more like 'mine'.  I still have a massive blank wall that I would love to mural, but I have to get some pre-approval so we'll see what happens there.  I also adopted an abandoned plant from an office down the hall and am nursing it back to health.  I should have taken before and after pictures, it was quite a sad sight.  I am also trying my hand at planting some flowers at home, we'll see how that goes.  I'm hoping to channel my Gram and make her proud. 

 

We got the list of holidays and three day weekends for the next year, so the trip planning has begun.  Top of the list are: Canary Islands, Norway, Iceland, St. Petersburg, Prague and Croatia. There will be others of course, but we don't want to leave here without checking those off the list.

 

*Side note: As I sit here on my lunch break writing this blog, a torrential rainstorm has suddenly enveloped Lakenheath.  It literally looks like a river is pouring out of the sky.  Running from the car to my building resulted in completely drenched pants and an inside-out umbrella. The bonus to working in a really old British dorm building is that the bathroom down the hall from my office is flooding like mad and it has turned into a fun game to see if the puddle growing on the carpet is going to make it to my office before the maintenance guys figure out how to stop it.  I wonder how they are faring on the floor below mine. **Update: It is once again sunny outside and apparently the bathroom flood was unassociated with the storm, just pure coincidence.  And I thought Montana weather was temperamental.  

 

Otherwise, we have just been settling into a routine with work schedules and working out... given the very limited CrossFit situation here that is not conducive to my work schedule, I have purchased my own equipment and am doing it at home in the mornings before work.  Its working out really well so far, and saves a lot of time not having to drive somewhere and deal with traffic but just being able to get up, do it, and then walk the 5 feet to the shower.  Magnificent.  I really really miss my old workout crew at Luke, however.  It is definitely not the same without you!! 

 

Life is good. Onward and upward...