The Zereps

e: Candice and I have been working hard cleaning and straightening up things around here. We’re eagerly awaiting the boxes that Chris Robinson shipped for us to arrive so we can get this place more livable. We’re also waiting for our IKEA furniture to come on Thursday. It’s not very fun having to sit on an ice chest and lean against the wall to eat and use the laptop. My back is pretty sore…

We got our cable internet hooked up today. It’s supposed to be up to 5mpbs, but I’m not sure if we’re actually getting that much speed. I’ll have to test it on one of those bandwidth test sites and see. We also signed up for Vonage Voice-over-IP telephone service. We don’t have a phone yet though.. 🙁 but we will pretty soon.

Our new place is on a pretty quiet street. We’re away from the center of town, so there aren’t too many stores around… it’s pretty residential. But, we did find a nice little shopping center about 5 min. walk away. It has a ‘Best Yet’ supermarket, a chinese food restaurant a deli/pizza place, a cheap clothing store, and a Bank of America w/ ATM. To get to the main street in town (where most of the shops are) it’s about a 10 minute walk, and to get to the subway it’s about 15 minutes.

Oh. One more thing. I know we’re pretty poor right now ’cause we don’t have jobs yet (but we’re looking!) but I just had to have this: Beyond Microwave (I’m actually counting it as a graduation present so thank you to all who donated funds to us so we could get some nice things for our new place.) This thing is awesome. It’s a microwave, but not just any microwave. It has a barcode scanner on it and a database of 4000 UPC codes built into it. You just scan the barcode on the food item and it cooks it however long it needs to be cooked automatically!

oh my goodness…my feet hurt so bad! anyhoo…

today was comprised of cleaning, cleaning, putting up blinds and more cleaning. the place was really dirty so we’re still not done, but at least it’s rewarding! 🙂 we just got our portable washing machine. i don’t want to set it up yet since we don’t have our furniture so it will just have to hang out.

so yeah…i went to ikea yesterday. it was the most tiring shopping excursion i have ever experienced. i bought a big push cart thing from the grocery store here in astoria and took that on the subway, the bus and into ikea with me so i wouldn’t have to carry bulky bags with me. so my granny basket helped. but on top of having a full granny basket, i also had to manuver a giant flat around ikea pilled with all the furniture i wanted delivered. but it’s such a relief to have it all done. we’ll have a couch, loveseat, coffee table, reciever/dvd player holder, table, chairs, bed and desk on thursday!!!!! i felt funny getting so much, but we just got the cheapest things they had. our couch was only 189.

i can’t believe how fast the summer is going by! it’s almost august. i’m starting to get bummed now that jakki and kit’s wedding is coming up and it’s finally hitting me that i can’t go. 🙁 maybe if i can donate lots of blood….

yup, jabba is back with us! we missed him so much! right now he’s missing his little friends frankie the bichon and freida the affenpincher. freida is really cute. there are only 200 of her breed in the u.s.

okay, the bleach fumes must have gotten to me and caused me to ramble.
goodnight.

We’ll this is the first post that I’m writing from our new place (good thing for ‘rogue’ 802.11 signals, ’cause our Internet doesn’t get hooked up until Tuesday.) As you can see, Candice posted some pictures of it already. Last night was the first night that we stayed the night here. There are still a couple little things that still need to be done, but we’re getting things all cleaned up and turning this place into ‘home.’ We also got Jabba (our puppy) back tonight and this is the first time he’s been over here. He seems to be adjusting well. hopefully we’ll have some more pics up soon when we make some more progress. Candice went back to Ikea today and spent almost the entire day down there picking up our furniture (to be shipped) and some more housewares, while I spent the day straightening up around here. It’s almost midnight and I’m exhausted, so that’s all for now.

okay, here’s some pics of our apartment, empty obviously. i’ll show you the uglier rooms first 😉 however, after i’ve worked my magic, everything will be pretty and clean!!!!

the kitchen!

the bathroom!

the office! (bad pic, it’s actually a little bigger)

the bedroom! (there are two tall windows to the left wall. 2 closets, a door to the hall and a door to the outside)

the living room! (just off the kitchen through arched entryway, the wall is white so as to watch movies on)

here’s a sign we saw on an old apartment building around where jabba’s been staying. we see alot more of them now that we noticed.

Well, sort of. It’s OK for getting to many places, but for a lot of the vast reaches of NYC, it is simply impossible to get there in under 2 hours–including taking buses, the subway, and walking. I was researching ‘alternate’ forms of personal transportation such as scooters and bikes, etc. but found to my dismay they are all illegal. That’s right–even bikes are illegal to ride in the city. Here’s a quote from a legislator:

“In New York City it is rightly illegal for an adult to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk. The average bicycle weighs less than 30 pounds, yet adult bicyclists are too big, too fast and too threatening to safely share space with small children, seniors and other vulnerable pedestrians. Likewise, allowing any motorized scooter, gasoline or electric-powered, to drive on the sidewalk puts children, seniors, persons with disabilities and the blind in danger.”

Apparently, there are just too many people and not enough room. I was wondering why in a city of 10 million, I’ve only seen about 5 bikes thus far. So, I guess it’s only jobs and activities that are accessible from the subway for us… and lots of walking.

i just watched how to make italian dounuts. i’ll definately have to make those for eric as soon as possible. unfortunately i can’t eat them right now since i am now on my second week of raw food. it’s been working out nicely, too. i’ve lost like 5 lbs. i really want to go out to eat though. there’s this one raw food restaurant in manhattan that sounds super yummy, but it’s a too expensive for us at the moment. 🙁
well, today “they” are putting the second coat of varnish on our floors and installing the dishwasher, and WE HAVE THE KEYS!!! yeah! we’ll move our meager possesions over tomorrow and then see jabba and then set off for ikea! there’s a bus that takes you from manhattan to the new jersey ikea for free, which is nice. we can’t bring jabba home though till the varnish smell wears off. i’ll post pics of the bare apartment as soon as i can, i promise! although, don’t expect too much…it’s still just an old apartment in queens.
toodle-loo!
oh yeah, i changed the theme. i got sick of the old, boring one. i’ll make it look better when i get more time and settled in, but for now, the basic stuff will have to do.

Well, I sent my resume in to a number of places on craigslist today, so we’ll see how that goes. I also need to resubmit my resume to monster.com ’cause somehow they screwed the whole thing up and even though I have the confirmation email that says they got it, my resume does not show up at all on the site.

We got a number of errands done today. Candice has been window shopping endlessly on overstock.com and ikea.com for stuff for our new apartment. Matt was kind enough to give us one of the air conditioners that he wasn’t using anymore, so that was nice. We also have one being shipped to us from California. If all goes well, some of our boxes should be here by monday or tuesday. We didn’t get to visit our new place today because the new wood floors are being varnished and it’d be kinda toxic to breathe.