I thought I'd take a stab at blogging and give Derek a break. The past couple of weeks have been a flurry of work and mostly I've been covered in paint or food or both.
Since coming home, I've been cooking quite a bit and enjoying the space in this bigger kitchen. I've made spaghetti, pot roast, and a variety of Meatless-Monday inspired dinner options. And after visiting Sunrise Asian Market in town, I've been able to make Japanese dishes like gyoza (potstickers), onigiri (rice rolled into balls with shrimp and seasonings), and takoyaki (skewers of diced octopus breaded and covered in thick BBQ-like sauce). It has been extremely fun and allowed me to flex my creative muscle. Not to mention it's nice to have Derek around to eat whatever is in front of him.
Speaking of creative muscle, I've also been painting up a storm. My studio, aka the dining room, has been ground zero for my repainting of the dining room table (with leaf), and six completed chairs. The table took a little over a week and the chairs took between three and four days apiece. We also just got a farmhouse coffee table from a cute antique store called The Vintage Industry that I just finished painting.While I've been painting, I've been watching (or listening to) an indescribable amount of TV--especially Law and Order SVU--which I do not recommend late at night when you're all alone. Once Upon a Time has started its fifth season and it is still my absolute favorite show. Blindspot and iZombie are also very good in this new fall line-up.
When Derek is at work and I'm not cleaning, painting, or cooking, I'm researching. This apartment is quite a bit bigger that the little house in Bellflower so we've been gathering furniture bit by bit. Since the little house was short on space but large on storage, we've now needed to find furniture that is functional and good to store items. I scour through craigslist ads and check through Goodwill and several other thrift shops, antique stores, or places like Ross, Home Goods, Marshall's, and Hobby Lobby. We've found some pretty great (and affordable!) stuff including a cute white iron bed frame for our spare bedroom we call the Library. Which was perfect timing since our friends came up to visit at the end of the month.
Which reminds me, anyone who's interested is always welcome to pay us a visit, especially now that we have a room set up to accommodate guests!
I've also decorated the apartment up in Halloween fun, now changed to Thanksgiving decor, and thanks to Costco, we have a big bowl of candy that I'm currently picking through as I write this.
Every Monday we go to the Eugene library and really enjoy it. It's a four-story building, so there's a lot to see.
We also rented a table at the Community Yard Sale in the gymnasium of our leasing office, hoping to meet some of our neighbors and make a little bit of money. I sold several pairs of shoes, clothes, and accessories and made $50. I might have made more or met more people if it hadn't rained though...so that was kind of a bummer. But then I took a few more of my shoes to a consignment shop and made $20 to put back into my furniture search.
And now over to Derek, with the weather.
Thanks, Courtney. The weather's been getting colder here, The days have become shorter, usually in the 70's, and it can get down to the 40's at night. It's been raining quite a bit, too.
Work's been going well. It's been difficult, at times, adjusting to the new schedule (9:30 pm to 6 am). But I'm enjoying the kind of work I'm doing now. It's beginning to look more and more like I'll be taking over the evening shift of the reference department when the woman who currently holds that shift, and who has been training me, moves to days. And, as part of my training, I'm changing shifts yet again starting today. It's just a small change this time, I'll be working from 8 pm to 4:30 am.
For the past few weeks, Courtney and I have been playing around with a phone app called Duolingo, which is a language-learning software. We're both taking the Dutch course, learning vocabulary and some sentence structure. It's been fun to go through the short lessons, which the app makes very intuitive. I'm not sure how much Dutch we're actually going to learn, but it's been interesting to experiment with it.
Last week we had some visitors, our friends Nathan and Nikki. It was nice to catch up with them for a few hours while they were passing through, and we got to take them to Sushi Island, our favorite Eugene restaurant (so far), where the sushi goes around the restaurant on conveyor belts.
I'll end the post with some pictures of how the apartment's looking now, including the furniture my mom and I picked up at Ikea that I (eventually) put together.
Newly painted dining room table and chairs
Library
Entry-way, with new shoe cabinet and bench
Living room, with new couch and coffee table
Other half of living room, with entertainment center
New bedroom dresser
