The Zereps

Well, as Candice mentioned before… we found an apartment in Astoria (a city in the bourough of Queens in New York) pretty close to where our friends live. We went and met the landlord again and signed the lease at our favorite cafe here Freeze Peach (it’s the one our friends here operate.) As with any place, there are some compromises… it’s about a 15 minute walk away from the subway. 🙁 (which doesn’t sound like much, but when it’s 100 or -20 outside, it makes a big difference.) It’s really big though…I have my own little office (Candice hates all my computer stuff being in the bedroom or living room) and it’s on a quiet street in a residential area. The landlord, Gary, is from India and also works in jewels and is a postal employee. We found his listing on craigslist.org, but since he is also the mailman for the place we’re staying at, our friend Matt asked Gary when he was on his route if he knew of any open places and he told Matt of the same place. Anyway. It’s pretty junky right now, but Candice got to choose her own colors for the walls (which the landlord is going to have painted.) AND he’s going to put in new wooden floors to replace the torn up carpeted areas in the house. We should be moved in (initially) by this Sunday. Two days here and we already have a place! that’s a relief… now, jobs… that’s another thing… we’re still looking. Candice is going to start at a temp agency on Monday and I’m still scouring over monster.com and craigslist and emailing my resume. New pictures to come soon…

hey hey hey….well, we kinda found a place today. we didn’t like it at first, but did after we saw the inside. we gave a partial deposit and sign the lease tomorrow. we’ll keep you guys hanging as to the exact details until after tomorrow. i’m still nervous that this is all too good to be true so if something goes wrong, i won’t bee *too* dissapointed. wish us luck!

Well, as you can probably tell, this is our first attempt at blogging. We’re trying to put relevent things in here that we thing people might want to read, but I know sometimes that doesn’t happen. Hopefully, we’ll be able to keep up and at least write something in it on a regular basis. (And hopefully, somebody will actually be reading!)

Hopefully, Candice will resize some picture soon, and we can get some pictures of the dogs that Jabba is staying with–they’re really cute. And he’s getting along just fine with them. We were so lucky to be able to hook up with Lorrie (the woman who is taking care of him for us while we are apartment searching.)

The weather here is very hot–about 95 degrees, but we’re used to that in California. It’s pretty humid here though and it doesn’t cool off that much at night. We get quite a bit of exercise walking back and forth everywhere and to the subway. Today we slept in a bit to recover a bit from our 7-day trek across the country. We then hit the phones and the street looking for apartments, managing our student loans, and taking care of other business that needed looking after. It’s almost midnight, so I’m going to head to bed–we’ve got another long day ahead of us tomorrow.

well, we looked at an apartment today. it was just our first one so we weren’t too serious, which was good. it was at a busy intersection and in a not so interesting area. long walk from the train, too.
we’re going to try again tomorrow. the sooner we can get a place, the sooner we get jabba back 🙂 we miss our puppy and he really misses us, too.
oh my goodness it’s hot here, but not really hotter than anywhere else at this time of year. thank goodness for a/c! we finally found lots of places that sell malta. that was really exciting. the first place was this little restaurant up where we went to view the apartment. they also had a wide variety of empanadas….mmmmm! it was called Papas Empanadas. we later found a store that had tons of 6-packs so we got more. i still can’t find diet malta like i had in PR, but oh well!
i also had a yummy black iced tea. i love black iced tea. here’s the place where i got that: FreezePeach. why am i talking about what i drank today? -shrug-
goodnight!

we are officially in new york city, well astoria at least. we rolled in from new jersey around 2.30 and got majorly bogged down in traffic. once we were accross the g. w. bridge we took the wrong exit and got majorly lost. but thanks to a gas station attendent and cell phones, we made it safely. we dropped jabba off at lorrie’s place. he’s getting along with the other dogs, but having trouble with the plastic eyes he swollowed last night. 🙁 we took the car back to the airport, too. i love national car rental. they’re the best! we used ‘quick rent’ and just went to the lot and tried out all the cars and picked the one i wanted and drove out (after scanning my credit card). the drop off was just as easy. justed stopped, the guy glanced at the car and charged us. so easy!
well, we’re both really tired right now. we also don’t have many clean clothes, which is gross. tomorrow we’ll visit jabba and start our search for an apartment. (i miss jabba!!!)
goodnight!

Candice and I are at our final destination before we hit NYC. We are currently at the Super 8 motel in Harrisville, PA… but it’s not really in Harrisville, it’s in a place called Barkeyville… weird. What they told us was that Harrisville was not big enough to have a post office, so that’s why their mailing address is different from their physical location. But it’s the mailing address that is posted on the web site. That made it kind of confusing to find. Anyway.. We ordered pizza to our room again… only they took an hour to deliver it.. 🙁

Tomorrow we have to get up earlier than we have been lately. We’re shooting to by in NYC around 3-4pm (eastern time.) Basically our drive consists of about 300 miles through Pennsylvania and about 50 through New Jersey and New York.

By the way… we found that we liked driving in some states a lot more than others. Here is our list of thumbs up states and thumbs down states.

Thumbs up:
-California (Losta traffic, but that’s where we’re from, so we gotta love it)
-Utah (It’s really pretty around Salt Lake City even though the lake stinks)
-Wyoming, Nebraska (farmland forever but an easy fast drive without much traffic)
-Iowa (I really like Des Moines. It was clean, but modern)

Thumbs down:
-Nevada (boring desert.. what else is there to say?)
-Illinois (traffic around Chicago is horrible!)
-Indiana (truck drivers around here don’t know how to drive)
-Ohio (The worst! Bad drivers AND they have toll roads everywhere. It cost us about 9 dollars just to drive through Ohio!)

By the way… Cingular lies about their coverage areas. According to the coverage map on their web site, they have coverage all across i-80 from coast to coast, but it is far from that. In Wyoming, we didn’t have coverage at all for several hundred miles.

Hopefully we’ll have some more pictures up soon.. Unfortunately, today’s drive was pretty boring.. We didn’t even stop anywhere that was interesting, so it will probably just be more pictures that we took of the dog. 😉

i forgot to comment on the pics eric posted last night. there were two things on this trip i was looking foward to seeing, one was the continental divide and the other was the mississippi. neither of those two landmarks had any sort of stop at them! i really wanted to see the divide but all we saw was a sign, same for the river…oh well…:)
oh yeah, jabba has taken to life on the road quite well! he loves camping in the little cabins and all the ‘smells’ of hotel rooms…hehe…he also loves to get hair all over the car and he especially loves to sneeze boogers on us in the car 🙂
gotta go! we’re getting a late start today!

As Candice mentioned before, we’re at the KOA Kampground in Granger, IN. 430 mile trip today. Only two days on the road left for us… and luckily for us they’re relatively shorter.. 350 miles each. We should reach New York City by around 4pm on Saturday. Candice shrunk down some more pictures that we’ve taken. Here is the link:

New Pictures