China: Unpacked

Our dining room furniture was delivered a few weeks ago, and last weekend we finally got around to unpacking our china and putting it in our new china cabinet. This is china we were given for our wedding almost five years ago - most of which had never been out of its original box and most of which has moved with us four times in those five years. Impressively enough, nothing was broken, which I think is more a testament to the wonderful things packaging engineers can do with cardboard these days than to the care of our various moving companies.

So we got it all unwrapped and stacked up, and we discovered we had 10 tea cups, 10 dinner plates, 10 salad plates...and 8 saucers and 6 bread plates. "Do you think this is some kind of practical joke that we're just now getting, five years later?" Randy asked. Hee. Luckily, the next day I found one more small box of china that had 2 saucers and 4 bread plates in it. We're all good now. (The dining room furniture, by the way, looks fantastic. It's like we have a real house, with real furniture, now!)

In other news on the home front: We have finally found someone to re-do the shower in the master bath. It looks like the previous owners put up a surround on their own, and it...really looks like it. So much so that we've actually never used that shower - the big, gaping seams in the surround always seemed like something you would definitely not want to get water near. The rest of the bathroom is great - it looks like they recently replaced the toilets and vanities in all the bathrooms, so it will be nice to finally have an attractive, and usable, shower to go with. The only sad part will be waiting the four-six weeks they estimate it will take until they have our custom-formed replacement surround ready to go. We'll keep you updated!

Back in Blogland

It's been five and a half weeks since our last post. What could possibly have kept us away for so long? Well, here's the answer, in reverse chronological order:

-- We had an A/C guy come by and add more refrigerant. The air is much cooler, now, thankfully.
-- Abby flew back to Kansas. We had a nice time during her visit.
-- We all went for a walk at the McHenry dam one evening. It was very pleasant, except for several swarms of bugs that we had to fight off.
-- We visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. There were many cool exhibits ranging from Leonardo da Vinci, to submarine warfare, to slices of body parts, to virtual reality. On our way back we drove along the lovely Lake Shore Drive.
-- We took a trip to the beach at Lake Michigan. It was sunny and hot (mid-90's), but the water was still very cold.
-- Wendy and Abby did lots and lots of shopping.
-- We "trained our brains" every day, by playing Brain Age, a super-fun game for the Nintendo DS Lite.
-- A plumber came by and fixed a leaky toilet.
-- We went for a nice two-mile jaunt at the nearby Chain O' Lakes State Park.
-- We embarked on a sacred pilgrimage to the Holy Land of Suburbia, otherwise known as IKEA. If you've never been to one on the weekend, it's hard to describe how insanely busy it is. Although we didn't buy anything, we did get some good ideas on how to organize our house.
-- We saw the Prairie Home Companion movie. It was very enjoyable.
-- I went to Meijer late Saturday night on June 10th, and at 12:01 AM Sunday, June 11th, I bought a Nintendo DS Lite. It's a new, improved, and slimmer version of the Nintendo DS, and that was the very earliest you could buy it.
-- I searched all the nearby stores for a DS Lite prior to June 11th, after reading that some places accidentally started selling them early. I did manage to find one several days early at Sears Grand, but it rang up as "Do Not Sell" at the cash register. Thus, I waited until June 11th.
-- Abby came to visit us!
-- We had an insulation guy come by and add more insulation. We hardly had any to speak of, but now it's like our house has a nice thick blanket that keeps all the cool air in.
-- We unpacked a lot, but there are still plenty of half-empty boxes lying around.
-- We spent almost all of Memorial Day Weekend cleaning the townhouse we rented the past year.
-- We moved!
-- I got sick.
-- We packed and packed and packed. And packed.
-- Wendy got sick.

And we're done!

The last box is unpacked, and everything is (more or less) put away. All that's left to do is finish hanging our pictures on the walls, but that shouldn't take very long at all. Everything looks much, much nicer - we'll post new photos in the next day or two.

A few more random things:

- There are a lot of motorcycles here. The other day, we were at a stop light and probably 30 motorcycles in a row turned left in front of us. We're not too far from a Harley-Davidson shop, but I don't know if that really explains the sheer number of them.

- There are a lot of limousines here, too, and not just near the airport. We've seen them at the gas station, at fast food places, driving down suburban streets - pretty much all over.

- Ditto pizza places. There are 121 pizza places in the phone book for McHenry County, 16 in McHenry proper. McHenry has about 20,000 people. I don't really know if that is a lot, statistically speaking, but it sure seems like it.

- Pepsi is having a promotion with iTunes right now, where (so they claim) 1 out of every 3 diet Pepsis will win you a free song from iTunes. I was running 0 for about 11 on the free songs, but over the last 2 days, I'm 2 for 2! I haven't decided which songs I'll get yet. I don't want to squander my winnings on the wrong songs!


And last but definitely not least, Randy's first day at Follett is tomorrow. I'm sure he'd appreciate any good thoughts any of you would like to send his way!

Home sweet home

We're here, and so is our stuff!

We've been here since Friday, when Randy's car (which we shipped) arrived. Sadly, our stuff didn't arrive until yesterday, so we were roughing it a bit until then. We have our bed and our Internet back now, and are very glad for both. A few more days and our Internet withdrawal symptoms might have gotten the better of us.

We've been (relatively) hard at work unpacking since yesterday afternoon, and we're making pretty good progress. The kitchen is totally done, and the bedroom and living room are mostly done. Every other room is at least a little done. You can see some pictures below - we'll try to post some more once everything's in its proper place and we're not quite so overrun with boxes.

The front door - which doesn't actually face the street



Our garage! (and our rental car)



Boxes in our kitchen



Boxes in our loft



The view from our front door - there are two Canada geese that like to hang out in the pond sometimes



On a "different" note: There's a radio station in Boulder that we both used to listen to some of the time called the Mountain. It sounds very independent and their tagline is, "It's different on the Mountain." Perhaps naively, I always assumed this meant they were independent - until we got to Chicago and discovered the Drive. Apparently, it's different on the Drive, too.