Our first apartment here was a great place to get started. Cheerful and sunny, with lots of cozy nooks for the cats. I miss the little gas stove and exposed brick walls already. But it just a bit too small for our situation...more of an expanded studio with bit of a dividing wall than a real one bedroom. The lovely little skylights didn't have blinds (and let way too much light into our room on weekend mornings) and stove was closer to our bed (and the cats' litter box) than it was to the exhaust vent...
We decided it would be worth the effort to pack up our things and move to a bigger spot -one that was closer to the downtown area and where we could have a second car.
Otto was not impressed by the move...and he let us know by single-handedly (on single-pawedly) putting a big damper on the whole weekend. Not only did he keep us up a few nights in a row (scratching on every closed door he could find), he managed to get himself impossibly stuck (not once, but twice) behind the washer/dryer unit in the apartment.
As our landlord here put it...it's been good practice for home ownership. On Sunday we (or rather H and the landlord) wrestled the whole machine out to rescue him. When it happened again yesterday, we decided it would be better just to get some tools and take the machine apart so that Otto could squeeze out the between the washer and dryer (it's one of those one-on-of-top-of-the-other things) - it was a much easier solution on H's back...but it wasn't without its challenges.
We were impossibly tired when we set out on the task (didn't even make coffee first, thinking we would find some along the way), and it took us a good 90 minutes to find the Home Depot even though we have a GPS...embarrassing. The no left turn thing in New Jersey didn't help. Neither did the fact that we never found a coffee spot (seems like my wish to not have a Starbucks on every corner finally came true).
When we were just about ready to give up, we spotted the big orange sign we were looking for off Rt 46. The strip mall where it was located was as charmless as they come, but it had a dive-y little pizza place that touted a sign for cappuccinos. We decided it would be best to take a quick moment of down-time there before tackling the whole tool buying thing. The pizza was a pretty greasy (especially because it wasn't even noon yet), but the darn cappuccinos were the best we've had since arriving. The place even had a stack of good gossip magazines and tons of Italian football memorabilia to take our minds of all the things we still had to do - all in all, it made for a lovely little (and much needed) interlude in an unexpected spot.
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