Settling in - 19-21st April

Having said goodbye to our apartment, we return to the task of organising ourselves at Sweetwater.

Unfortunately I have a 7am start at work on the Monday morning, so I have to get to bed early. My internal alarm then wakes me every hour in case I oversleep my radio alarm, and I finally give up and rise around 5am. I get through my shift, and won't be back in until 3:30pm Tuesday.

At home Beth has been organising the kitchen and her craft room, and I continue the kitchen work, empty most of my clothing bags and get my wardrobe organised, set up the tables in my den, and start moving boxes up into the den. As we put things away we decide that on Tuesday morning we'll visit Bed, Bath and Beyond to get various housewares, as we received a 20% off coupon in the mail as new homeowners, and that's better than the 10% I will soon get as a WalMart employee of three months standing. BB&B is more expensive than WalMart but also offers more variety and in some instances better quality.

On Tuesday morning then we head to BB&B, where we fill multiple carts with bedding, towels, a waffle maker, a blender, two garden recliners, two small garden tables, wastepaper baskets, kitchen scales, bathmats, soap dishes, a kitchen paper-towel dispenser, three doormats, a hair dryer, two shower squeegees, and three wooden toilet seats to replace the current plastic ones.

The BB&B load

The BB&B Till Receipt

It just crams into Beth's station wagon, and we head onto Riley's to arrange the dining table change and look at bookcases and other new furniture.

Around 2pm we head home and unpack, as I have to change for my shift. I'm dog tired, and go through the shift on autopilot, determined to get a good night's sleep after my shift is over at 10:30pm. We shut the sliding doors to keep the cats in the back half of the house, and I am able to get a full 8 hours for the first time in a week.

Wednesday is my one whole day off this week, and after hanging a Union Jack on our flagpole to celebrate the Queen's Birthday, we head back to Riley's to finalise our choices. After measuring and pondering, we had decided on the following (all measurements width x height): two 3' x 5' bookcases in the family room to go either side of the fireplace, a 3' x 5 ' DVD stand, and a corner media center to hold the TV, DVD player, and other TV necessities. Two 4' x 6' bookcases, one for the dining/living room and one for the loft area, to hold  Beth's crafting books. A corner computer desk for Bedroom 4 which will become our office and double as a spare bedroom (it already has a twin bed in it), plus a 3' x 5' bookcase and a small 3-drawer cabinet to hold computer stuff. All items to be made in Western Maple to match our coffee and side tables, as we prefer that to the standard oak. It all adds up to quite a lot, brand new handmade wooden furniture will, but it's good quality to last several lifetimes.

We swing by WinCo on our way home, to replenish our food stocks. With a 14 cu ft chest freezer in the garage, plus the usual fridge/freezer combo in the kitchen, we can now stock a bit more variety, and we each fill a cart, though somehow my cartload was 3x the price of Beth's.

Back home, we continue unpacking and working out where things belong. I've been waiting to get my desktop computer unpacked, since we had nowhere in the apartment to put it, and I use it mainly for computer games as the laptop I am typing on provides all my internet, data and music hosting needs. I can go weeks or months without playing a PC computer game, and then have a period where every spare minute is spent on a game. At present I have no new games, but enjoy replaying ones in my collection that, after thinning out the titles I will never play again, made the trip from London.

The computer is, I discover to my delight, compatible with US power supply (120V) as well as UK (240V), so we pop along to Goodwill, a charity shop, where luckily I find the two power cables I need for the screen and CPU, for just $6. We go on to Fred Meyer to check out a garden patio set we had on a rain check, but on further inspection we decide tahe the color isn't right, and anyway we have our two recliners for BB&B. Eventually we plan on a gazebo with a table and chairs, but none we have seen for sale are quite what we want. On the same trip we visit Riley's again to compile our order and finalise costs.

Back home yet more unpacking and organising, but the piles of untouched boxes are now very small. I have a very long sleep in the afternoon, a full three hours, which gets me back into a reasonable state. In the evening we watch some Dr Who episodes recorded off BBC America, up to the point where David Tennant regenerates into the new bloke who I'm not sure I'm going to like.