The Zereps

It is now midnight and I almost went to bed without updating the blog. ::gasp::

As I said above, the hour of 12am has struck and this is the current weather outside:

# Temp: 82°F
# Heat Index: 86°F
# Humidity: 66%

82 degrees, but it feels like 86. ::shaking head in disbelief::

Not much new or exciting happened today. Had my interview, but they were looking for a different set of skills than the ones I have. Went grocery shopping, like I do almost every day–you’d be suprised how much less you buy on a single trip to the store when you have to carry everything back home on foot. Searched for jobs on the internet some more. And that’s about it….

Well.. today we got a lot done on our new place. 10 more boxes of our boxes shipped via Fedex came today. Feels more and more like home the more of our stuff that we get here–and it saves us tons and tons of money from having to buy everything over again. Thanks to Chris, we even got our air conditioner here from CA to NY for 3 bucks!

Secondly, Candice spent a lot of the day putting up contact paper in the kitchen and cleaning various things. I, on the other hand, did my duty as the household electrician and put in completely new light switches and outlets all over the house. Much to my suprise, all but two of the outlets in the house are grounded, even though there are only two wires going into the outlets (I think the holder boxes inside act as the ground.) That made me happy as I was not looking foward to plugging my computer into an ungrounded outlet (even with my new UPS.) Unfortunately for me, one of the two ungrounded outlets is in the office. =( So, I guess I’ll just have to use the other one on the other side of the room. (note: for all you mothers and grandmothers out there who worry about electrical safety and whatnot, you will be glad to learn that, yes, I did completely turn off all the electricity to the whole house while I was working so there was no chance of me killing myself.)

And, the third major event of the day was the arrival of my new Super Microwave:

Unfortunately, the only things we have in the house that are microwavable (and that have bar codes) are two TV dinners. So, I’ll be off to the store tomorrow to buy more microwavable foods.

Also, I have another job interview tomorrow. It’s a temporary, 3-month position with the ability to turn into a full-time one….

eric will write more text in a few, but here are some highlights of the day.

eric worked on almost every single outlet/switch in the place today. first, though, he had to go downstairs into the neighboors ‘visitors’ ‘basement’ and turn all the power off.

here’s eric at work on an outlet *that’s acutally grounded!!*

here is a typical outlet that is *not* grounded. notice the fabric surrounding the very old wiring.

I see Candice posted picture of our bed and dressers. Our house IS basically a big advertisement from IKEA. Today we took a walk to the ‘main street’ in town and got some dog food for Jabba and some stuff for the house. Shopping for good dog food is a pretty hard thing to do, let me tell you. Most of the crap out there they call dog food is like processed corn meal with wood chips and chicken beaks in it. So we try hard to get our ‘baby’ good, healthy food.

Moving on… since we bought so much stuff from IKEA, and stuff from IKEA comes in boxes that you assemble yourself, we had a piles of cardboard 6 feet high (or so.) So today we decided to try to clean up some of this cardboard and styrofoam mess and whilst doing so came upon this:

… a very scared, probably homeless or lost dark grey cat. Mind you, we live on the second story of a two-family house and this cat found it’s way up to our entry-way balcony full of boxes. Candice thought it probably had some disease, but we didn’t really want to find out so we eventually got it to go back downstairs where it hid in the corner of our downstairs neighbors door for about an hour and then we didn’t see it again after that.

okay! we finally have a duvet cover for the bed so i can take a picture! yeah, i know it has flowers on it and neither eric nor i really care for flowers, but it was the only one we could agree upon and i like the colors. we have another really nice faux suede chocolate one, but that hasn’t come yet.

here’s a dresser and lamp. very exciting.

our place looks like an ikea showroom now. it’s a little weird, but it’s the only thing we can afford!

i ordered curtains yesterday because they were all way to expensive in the stores. god bless overstock.com….

welp…i’m off to the hardware store to buy contact paper and then to the pet store to get food for our perrito. tons of fun, i know. oh, i’ll be sure to post a pic of my granny basket soon. eric may make fun of it, but it saved him from carrying 50 lbs of stuff on the subway yesterday!

Well, Candice and I made another trip to IKEA today. It was actually the first time that we left Jabba home by himself at our new place for more than an hour. He didn’t take it too well and started whining really loudly and scratching wildly on the door after we closed it… poor guy. He was really glad to see us though when we got back and he is so good–no accidents in the house. At IKEA we got some shelves for the walls, some table lamps, rugs to go by the bed and some other misc. things. Pics to follow soon…

Today we took a quick trip to the grocery store. It’s a bit easier to carry groceries a quarter-mile using Candice’s little push cart thingie she bought here than carrying the bags by themselves. The rest of the day we pretty much spent at home–me scouring craigslist, dice.com, and monster.com and submitting my resume to as many places as I could and Candice staining our table and dresser and touch-up painting our door frames, etc. Yeah. All-in-all a pretty boring day. Were you expecting something more exciting? 😉

okay…here’re are a couple snapshots from our work today.

me taking a break after assembling 2 kitchen chairs, a table and the couch.

eric assembling the bed after he assembled his office desk and brought up fedex boxes.

the living room as it looks now. i know, the walls are bare, but we’ll fix that eventually. at least we have a place to sit. just ignore me in the picture, please.