The Zereps

Unfortunately, even though I’ve been sleeping a lot, I still don’t feel that rested. And today we didn’t get as much accomplished as I had hoped to–and still no jobs.. 🙁

Candice is trying out this ‘raw food’ diet thing that our friends here have been doing for a couple weeks. I’m sure she’ll write more about that later, but basically you can eat anything (and as much as you want) as long as it’s fresh and not cooked. Surprisingly, there are quite a few things you can make, and with some good recipes you can make some pretty tasty foods–from Hors d’oeuveres to soups to sauces to ice cream. Anyway.. I’m not trying it ’cause if I did after 4 weeks I would end up only weighing about 80 pounds or so.

well, here’s some pics of jabba and his friends at lorrie’s house. he’s been having lots of fun while we are busy getting situated.

jabba chowing down

frieda the little monkey

eric and frankie

cute lola

[sorry for the poor quality pics…no tengo photoshop anymore]

eric failed to mention the cuteness of the apartment. it has white crown molding throughout. the windows are the tall old-fashioned ones. there’s the old-fashioned radiators for heat, too. they’re also installing a new dishwasher for us. the bathroom is really kitchy. it’s green tiles! 🙂 i also got to pick out nice colors for everything and we’re getting wood floors. so, if everything works out like planned, we’ll have a great place. the cielings are also really high, like 10 ft. the rooms are huge, especially the bedroom. like i said, if everything ends up being as planned, it will be WAY better than we *ever* thought we could get, even at the upper end of our rent budget. oh, almost all the handles are the old-fashioned glass door knobs. 🙂 i’m trying to reign in my excitement in case something doesn’t go as planned, but it’s really hard.
in other news…i’m seriously contemplating going on the raw food diet. matt and samantha are on it and feel great. the food looks really good, too. it’s not heavy which is great for me in the summer.
anyhoo…toodle-loo!

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!