What You Missed (not much)

Hi everyone!  I cannot believe 2 weeks have gone by since I posted from the hotel room.  It sort of feels like one extremely long day.

The good news is that we are all settled in our new apartment.  All of the boxes are unpacked and (mostly) put away.  The minor household dramas (where are the lightbulbs?  what happened to the TV remote?) seem to be subsiding.  Sure, we are discovering new challenges as we learn to cook on an electric stove, but the truth is that we never liked that spatula anyway and if we had been able to actually eat that dinner after the spatula melted all over it, then the left-over pizza would have gone to waste.  And, let’s face it — wasn’t that what we really wanted to eat anyway?

(Note to self: kitchen still smells like smoke.  Would like to burn a nice scented candle in there, but the movers threw away matches.)

We have real jackets now.  On Monday, we decided that we had earned a few hours of fun so we thought we would head to the Bellevue Botanical Garden.  Now everyone we have met so far has assured us that the secret to being happy here is to not let the weather change your plans.  Never cancel just because it’s raining.  Otherwise, you’ll be miserable.

So on Monday, when we woke up to rain, we thought — no problem, we’ll go to the garden anyway.  We have jackets.

Except that Monday it rained quite a bit harder than any other day since we’ve arrived.  The other days were more like a gentle mist.  We drove to the garden, glancing at each other nervously as the rain picked up.  It’s really raining now.  Do people really go to the garden in these conditions?  This is insane!  How will they see the plants?  Surely, when we tell people what we did over the weekend — they will tell us that we were crazy and that what they meant is that we should still go to the mall or a movie or maybe Starbuck’s.

We arrive, and there is one other car in the parking lot.  It’s official.  We’re crazy, but we’re committed.  We want to try out our new jackets.  We took a few pictures for you — as close to the car as possible so as not to get the camera soaked.  We did take a full lap around the garden, laughing the whole time, but I’m afraid I don’t have a shred of proof.  You’ll just have to take my word for it.  We are so legit now.

I have so much more to share!  I think I’ll do some completely unstaged, non-glamorized photos of the apartment so you can see our Tetris-like furniture arrangement.  Plus my strike-offs arrived and I can now reveal the full fabric collection in all its glory!  There are so many things going on — more from me soon!