Busy week

This past week has been a good week for not having Todd around (as we have all summer), as it's been jam-packed with activity. Lots of long lunches during the week as we sorted out apartment stuff. Lots of social activities, too! Monday was dinner and games night with Leah and John-Paul, Tuesday was crepes night to bid farewell to a couple heading to Texas, Friday was a mini UCSB Geeks reunion as several out-of-towners from all over (the Bay Area, LA, New York City, Ohio) converged onto SB. We stayed up late (well, these days 11pm is considered late for me :-P) talking and catching up and reminiscing about some of the wild and wacky times we had here at UCSB. And still doing crazy shenanigans, like Ingrid volunteering to test the "myth" that a person cannot swallow a tablespoon full of pure cinnamon. I think the most amusing part of that little adventure was everyone following her to the kitchen, laden with cameras to capture the event :-) YouTube, here we come! ;-) Apparently we still had plenty of catching up to do, for we met for breakfast the next day, where we received the news that John and Golnaz had gotten engaged this morning! Welcome to the club ;-)

The rest of the weekend has been a blur of packing and unpacking stuff. We picked up the keys to our new apartment on Friday. It's still a 1-bedroom, but the square footage is nearly twice that of our current apartment. We spent time packing up little things-- clothes, kitchen utensils, toys, books, etc... and hauling a car full of boxes to the new place, unpacking the stuff, and bringing the empty boxes back for another round. Will continue to do this all week so that by the end of the week, all that remains is the large furniture, just in time for the movers to come pick it up on Saturday morning!

We also managed to get rid of a few unneeded items. Our work has a Bulletin mailing list that pretty much serves as the name implies-- a bulletin board. People use it to list stuff for sale, list stuff wanted, obtain recommendations for various services, etc, etc... It's like our own internal Craigslist, except it's done over email. Well, it served me well-- last night at midnight I listed the stuff we had for "sale" and by 7am this morning I had several responses. I never had to resort to using the actual Craigslist, after all. Which is a good thing-- much easier to deal with colleagues than strangers responding to online ads.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward getting settled and to 1) not having noisy upstairs neighbors to deal with anymore, 2) being able to walk to work-- it's only a 10-minute walk and 3) being able to have easy access to a workout room AND a swimming pool so I can finally get some much-needed exercise! What I'm not looking forward to is the increase in rent (by $1000/month) and having to pay for all utilities, but there's nothing to be done about that. With Allan graduating this summer, we would've had to vacate family student housing by the end of August, so it's just as well that we do it now, during the summer, before Todd starts school again and will be underfoot during most of this, esp the cleaning of the old apartment next weekend (fun!).

Here's to another busy, productive week!