Happy Not-the-Fourth everyone! so far, based on fb updates, it seems that most people made it without too bad of injuries, which is heartening. i learned today that in south Florida, the blood banks stay open on 4th of July weekend because of 'increased need for blood, due to the holiday'. hopefully people who donate on the 4th have the sense to not go get drunk afterwards. i'm going to give a donation tomorrow, which is exciting as i don't know my blood type. yeah i know, weird, right?
we spent our holiday weekend watching movies/tv from other countries, apartment hunting and hanging out with bf's coworkers. non-american media included: IT Crowd (an absolutely hilarious britcom about the IT department in a company), Slumdog Millionaire, Wii, Mushishi (beautiful Japanese anime), and The Reader (which happens in post-WWII Germany - lovely and impactful).
apartment hunting in Miami is turning out to be quite the experience. on Friday we saw 8 places. definitely liked a couple. the one that would have been perfect had definitely been smoked in, and we were both getting stuffy by the time we were there for 10 minutes. too bad. another apartment that looked amazing in pictures and lovely from the outside was quite the curiosity on the inside. first off, the carpet in the entire apartment looked like it was put in by a first grader. it wasn't stapled down and every edge was ragged. crooked. ugly. and secondly, it hadn't been cleaned. and by not cleaned i mean that there were clothes in the dryer and dishes in the dishwasher! no one was living there, it just hadn't been looked at since they left. totally bizarre. we told the realtor that we might be interested if they fixed it up, and the response was that we'd need to sign a contract in order to get them to do anything. not happening. oh well.
we did find one that is lovely. 1900 square feet, which is WAY more than we need, but a large portion of that is in the kitchen which is pretty cool. small garage, 3 bedrooms, 2.5 bath including a roman tub upstairs. and it has a cute little patio off the kitchen. we put in an offer for that one at $200/mo less than they were asking. which they might not accept, but if they do we'll jump on it! it will be nice to have that all taken care of. if for no other reason than that it will give me a big project to work on. :)
the 4th with bf's coworkers was lots of fun. they're a very laid back group and quite geeky, which made me giggle. after the fireworks, we walked the 2 miles back only to find the gate to the community closed. the clicker didn't work to open it, and after some head scratching there was a brief conversation about the science of the gate. bf noted that they work based on magnetics, so if we could find a piece of metal large enough, the gate should open. as soon as he mentioned this, one of his coworkers disappeared and returned with a shopping cart. everyone laughed and there were a couple murmurs of 'no way!', but when he placed it on the sensor pad, it worked! apparently there was enough metal in the mostly-plastic cart to catch the magnets in the cement. tada!
i'm sure there's a joke in there about 'how many government scientists does it take..?'
