(no subject)

So! We are moved.

I am extremely happy, even though we aren't even all unpacked yet. The new house is so bright and clean and airy and calm. There's natural light in every single room (even the interior bathroom, though it's via a skylight in there), and in the office it's a beautiful but indirect light, so there's no glare or squinting into the sun. The office has a view of Lake Union and, beyond it, First Hill and downtown. There's green all around the house, huge green trees, some of them blossoming. And the house itself is just lovely, the right size for us, very... I don't know, soothing? It's just a restful place to be.

We moved on Friday with help from a moving company called TempStore/Gentle Giants. (The former is the current Seattle-area name; the latter is a Boston company they merged with, and will be the new name later this year.) If anyone in the Seattle area needs Washington-area movers, I can definitely recommend these people. It took 5 hours to move completely out of the other house and into this one, and that includes several difficult pieces of furniture and approximately ten thousand boxes of books. At $80 an hour (for 6 hours total, since travel time to/from their warehouse is counted), not a bad deal, and it meant that for the first time ever, the move didn't make me want to die. ;)

Since then we've been unpacking and shopping to stock the house. We unpacked the kitchen first, so that I could start cooking as soon as possible. I made sourdough out of my starter (the flavor is really good, but it was a little dense -- I think I need to give it a longer rising time, and if that doesn't help, perhaps let my starter develop a bit more; still, the dough rose, which means it's alive and kicking). We went shopping at Uwajimaya, and I bought a lot of things, including chicken feet for making stock with. We unpacked most of the living room and the office, and are now working on the bedroom and all the books and DVDs (the latter of which need a new storage option).

It's just... really nice. Really really nice.

Tonight I'm making slow-roasted roast beef, and then I'll tackle a few more boxes and then kick back and watch some Alton. Good times.

(no subject)

Two more boxes unpacked! Well, three, but then I started to fill an empty box with things wot I want to keep but don't need immediate access to, like my diploma and graduation comment book and photographs and stuff. (I'm going to do my darndest to keep that to one filing-box size box, though, to keep down the number of storage boxes we have....) So the net number of boxes removed is two.

Progress, it is being made! Four or five days of this will take care of all the boxes we have. This makes me feel hopeful.

Also, I made slow-roast roast beef (a good way to cook a good-but-not-great cut of meat -- sear until brown on at least two sides, then put in a 225F oven until the internal temp reads 115 [for med-rare] or 120 [for medium or above], then turn off the oven without opening it and let the temperature coast to the final desired doneness), and bleu cheese mashed potatoes. We'll be eating lighter the rest of the week, but it was very tasty indeed.

I have also, thus far:

* Broken the towel bar in the bathroom. (I slipped on the tile floor and grabbed it for support, and it, uh, didn't like that.) We sort of got it back on, but now it's finicky. I think it will need replacing. Sigh.
* Set off the smoke alarm twice. Because that's apparently how I get used to a new oven/stove.
* Messed up the garage door. See, I have never had an automatic garage door, and so, when left to close it, I reached for the cord.... which is apparently the emergency release. We had to take the car back out and get on a stepladder to fix it, but fortunately it was easily fixed once that happened. So it is unbroken. Still, I feel dumb.

All things considered, though, the moving process has gone very smoothly! We even only broke two glasses, out of all our belongings, and that's a pretty good record.

Also, this weekend we saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I thought it was pretty good -- obviously not perfect, but pretty good. Then again, I went into it wanting to like it, and it featured a character I love (I mean, even one besides Indy himself, and I had such a crush on Indiana Jones in my formative years), so I was forgiving. (It also played the 'don't bother nitpicking the plausibility' card early on, so I just stopped asking questions and enjoyed the ride.) Conclusion: not as good as my favorite (Last Crusade, for a great many reasons) but much better than my least favorite (Temple of Stereotypes Doom), and more a coda to the original trilogy than a true sequel, but still fun. I may post more on that later.