Ding!

Like a well timed meal, there is little that is more satisfying to me than a series of things coming to completion at the same time. Ding! Everything is in order, all the food hits the table perfectly done and piping hot.

Similarly with a move. I get a little thrill with each box of kleenex finished in the last couple days, each jar of jam, every task completed at just the right time so there isn't a crunch. This move, getting a job offer the day before my last day at MDC exemplified this.

I am willing to put a lot of effort into making these little successes. Last weekend we had a "potluck/take stuff from our pantry" party in an effort to make sure we didn't waste too much food before the move. I planned an entire main dish of chicken just to use up a packet of soup mix. But boy was I pleased to have found a good (and truly delicious!) way to use up that little packet.

I've also been having fun using up some of our more expensive baking ingredients. With all the gluten-free cooking we do, some of the flours are expensive/hard to find so the thought of them mouldering in storage going bad is hard to handle. So this week I baked these little delights:

Gluten-Free Cherry Sour Cream Muffins. Making these muffins used up the last of our sour cream, frozen cherries, sugar, Egg Beaters, muffin cups and *almost* the last of the butter. Plus we were almost out of breakfast cereal so this prevented us from having to purchase more. Ding!

Today is our last big purging/organizing push before the movers come tomorrow. We have a TON of stuff to get through, but I'm hoping that at the end of the day everything will be ready and we'll be able to keep going with minimal stress!

New Job!

Ok so I haven't posted in a while. I'll keep it brief:

I GOT A JOB!! :D Hooray.

Almost exactly four months since I had my last day at IL. Weird. Today marks four months since I arrived in Florida, and I'd say things are going very well! Meets and/or exceeds expectations. hah.

So this is where things start to get really busy, I guess. Am looking forward to the excitement. This job promises to challenge me in a lot of ways, and I think it's going to be awesome.

A quick synopsis of other goings-on:
~Canned homemade apple sauce and apple butter.
~A lovely congratulations party, which involved getting plants!
~Helping get the plants situated in the backyard. Hopefully my cilantro doesn't get rained to death.
~Snorkeling! Nurse shark, jelly fish, playing with schools of fish, giant conchs, cleaner fish... No sunburn!
~Finally got my license plate! That saga is enough for a post on its own.
~Making good progress on the house! Got the bathrooms outfitted, and working on a picture project for the bedroom.
~My family is coming to visit in December! For a whole week ^^ I get bouncy every time I think of it.

Ok that's enough. Hooray things are going so well!

New place in Doral

Pictures of the New Place: the Annotated Version

Per requests, we have finally taken pictures of the new place! So I present to you a virtual, annotated tour of our new house. Click on the images to make them bigger.
Starting from the front door...

Ahh the living room:


Garage. Look at all the toys!


Downstairs bathroom. I know you can't tell, but this paint job is *amazing* compared to what it used to be. You can still see the old horrendous orange in some poorly-painted places. Also, I spent an hour in that tiny room scraping various colors of paint off the tiles. In the upstairs bathroom there was even paint in the toilet!


Our gigantic kitchen:


One of the funny things about combining our two kitchens was the ridiculous amount of spices we had. This is from the day I loaded the spice cupboard - not including about 5 huge containers already put away:


And heading upstairs, I present... The hallway (from our bedroom door):


A scene from The Office:


Our bedroom. I think the gold walls are actually starting to grow on me. Can't wait to get dressers though!


Two things you can't see from here - the gigantic walk-in closet off to the right, and the new shower head (that bf is very excited about). Not sure if the walls are green? off-yellow? some days they look like they've got some orange in them...


I hope you have enjoyed your tour! I'll let y'all know when we're ready for overnight guests :)

Not pictured: guest bedroom AKA "I don't know where to put this!" storage room, for now; walk-in closet; guest bathroom; front of house (really not that exciting, I promise).

Moving

we've been moving for the last 4 days - pack, move, unpack, unpack unpack... pack pack move.. with some swearing and laughter and adventures in there too.

will post stories, as soon as i figure out where the pieces are to transfer pics from the camera!

the problem with snorkeling...

is that i really like it. and when i take my very pale skin and put it by the water in florida, even with sunscreen i have to be careful about burning. but snorkeling is SO fun! i have a tendency to get distracted, and an hour later i look like the lobsters i'd been chasing by the reef (if they were cooked and tossed on your plate). thankfully today it's just my back that got burned. hooray for pennekamp state park and its lovely, engrossing reefs. ^_^

we went down to key largo early and bf bought a new kayak. quite a steal as the place we got it from sells all their merchandise at cost right before the hurricane season (can't get insurance in the keys, may as well sell it so there's less loss if a hurricane washes away your store). so now we have two kayaks! that means quick evening trips and lots of exploration. can't wait.

so, things are going well. our offer on an apartment was accepted, we're just waiting on the homeowners' association to verify that we are of high enough quality to actually move in. our icecream maker came last week and is a ton of fun. we made vanilla with cherries and mini chocolate chips and it is super yummy.

tomorrow's projects: coconut rum icecream and further apartment cleaning. hopefully we'll be moving by the end of the week!

Not-the-4th

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..?'