The Zereps

Well. Today has been a busy day so far… our Ikea furniture arrived and subsequently filled up our entire living room with boxes (pictures of the furniture soon.) We had been pretty busy most of the rest of the day putting together couches, chairs, tables, desks, etc. when another ring on the doorbell and henceforth comes none other than the Fed Ex man with 10 huge boxes of our stuff from California. Hurrah! Thanks again, Chris!

Today is a lot better than yesterday as far as the weather goes. It was really muggy and another record energy day as a heat wave covered not just New York, but most of the country so I hear. Today it’s only supposed to be about 80 degrees for the high (vs. 95 for yesterday.)

Oh yeah. I also had another interview yesterday with an IT placement firm in Manhattan, so we’ll see how that goes. Today I’ve been sending off my resume to more places on craigslist and I had another placement firm call me. Wish me luck…

good evening…

today was another super swealtering day here in the middle of a heat wave. it was so bad that we took a cab to the train stop this afternoon. it was well worth the 6 bucks *believe me.* we took jabba to lorrie’s place for a play day while we scooted off to manhattan to do some household goods shopping. eric had an unexpected job interview at the last minute so he went to that and then met up with me around w. 34th and 7th, also known as kmart. we accidentally ended up in penn station, i think, and walked through there. then we came on back to good old astoria and hung out at freezepeach while a thunderstorm was in progress.

one thing we did notice today is that for the first time we actually saw police at the subway, even here in queens. nobody stopped us for “random” searches, though. gee…i wonder who they profiled, oh, i mean stopped. we even took jabba on his 2nd ever train ride. he’s still scared, but it’s better than walking in this heat!

tomorrow our furniture comes and i am very excited. no more sitting on the hard floor or sleeping on an air mattress for us! we’re moving up in the world…and we owe it all to visa…it’s everything we can’t really afford. [this statement has not been evaluated by the fcc.]

here is eric sitting in his closet on the ice chest using his very high-tech laptop. [ps: we have no furniture yet ;)]

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.