94.7 Alternative Portland. I have been spending waaaaaay too much time in my car lately. It feels like all I really do now is dart from one end of town to the other and get into petty disagreements with bitchy chicks.

I am basically updating now because I use the links on this site to get everywhere and I cannot stand to look at that bit about the movie anymore. Enough already. Many Netflix have passed since then, lets all move on. Also, Mom and Andrew updated. Yay!

So, we moved. Our new apartment is larger (or at least, due to a much better floor plan and color scheme, looks much larger) and in an extremely cute neighborhood. I've never spent much time around here, so getting to walk around and find new, fun stuff is great. I keep discovering things. For example, we live only 10 blocks away from a beautiful cemetery. Our building backs right up to a high school football field, and there is a park on the other side. The park is shared, of course, with a large number of homeless men and a few junkies, presumably people who are in the neighborhood because of its easy access to various social services. We live right down the street from a Catholic mission, the Portland Parole & Corrections Office, a soup kitchen, and the warehouse district bridges under which many people bed down for the night. There are yellow and red roses growing underneath the window of the piano room (we have a piano room now!), and a lovely patch of well-tended grass outside our front door (we are on the ground floor now!). The sinks all work, and we have a garbage disposal. In my heart, I have always had a garbage disposal. But now, when I stuff food particles down the sink drain rather than picking them out, which is gross, and why would you ever do that if you had a garbage disposal as every civilized household should?...now, the food doesn't get stuck in the pipes and smell bad. Because there actually is a garbage disposal here. It's not just in my head. Not to mention the dishwasher. I love our dishwasher.

We bought 4 new bookshelves (3 solid oak and another matching pine) from the same store where we purchased our original two, and W has painted them all maroon. They look fantastic, and they now store all of our books, which is a big step up from our previous 60% storage capacity. We even managed to put cookbooks and movies on shelves, instead of bags in closets! Ahhhh...shelf space. It's how you know your life is good.

The Fats, after an initial period of frantic yowling, has settled right in. As soon as she found her spot on the bed and a patch of dirt under the rosebushes to roll around in, she was cool. The weasel doesn't appear to have really noticed the move, with the exception of a few minutes when he couldn't find his under-the-bed tampon & gel insoles stash. Then he was distressed, but only briefly. There happened to be a box of tampons sitting in a bag in the corner of the bathroom, so he replenished his coffers right away.