New House

So in case you missed the memo (and I apologize if you did, and you are offended; I didn't really broadcast it very loudly), we moved. To California. We're renting a house with my brother's family (3x the space for the same amount per month). It's 5 bedroom, 4 bath, which is plenty big enough for 6 people. We've been here just over a week, and we're pretty pleased with it so far. And to appease all the requests for pictures, I will put some up here.

We'll start with the upstairs, where we have occupied 2 of the 5 bedrooms.

Game Room (from the door). Please excuse the few boxes we have yet to unpack; they are the "random stuff" boxes.

Game Room (from the corner directly opposite of the door), complete with a basket of plushies

You'll have to imagine the picture of a master bedroom here, because it was too messy for my conscience to let me take a picture. It's very large though, and very pink. (We can thank the last tenants for that.) And we have our very own bathroom in our master suite, which is pretty awesome.

Next, we'll go downstairs to the common areas.

From the front door looking up the stairs

Living room (taken from next to the piano (see last picture for reference))

Kitchen (carefully censored to not see most of the food on the rest of the counter space)

Please note or kitchen is painfully clean of any crumbs or dirty dishes. This is not because I'm a great housekeeper. It's because Irvine is experiencing a massive ant infestation this year, and any dirty dish that's left out for more than an hour is covered in swarms of sugar ants. It's very good incentive to keep up with the dishes and mess, so I guess it's a blessing in disguise? (Though I don't particularly appreciate them swarming over my bathroom floor, especially since there's no food there anyway.)

Now to the left of the kitchen is a dining area where our kitchen table goes, and next to that is...

The family room (aka perler and Rock Band room)

A close up of my carefully organized perler bead jars

And that concludes the tour! It really is a nice house, ants aside. We have a backyard with a patio and grass, and the location is excellent - pretty much within 15 minutes of anything we could want. 

As far as everything else, we're settling in pretty well. Nathan bikes to school to save on gas and get some exercise, and I'm working from home until the end of October (by which point I hope to find a new job). We toured Google's Irvine campus on Sunday, which was pretty sweet, and we tried out the Veggie Grill on Saturday (Nathan won free entrees there at New Student Orientation). So now I know what chickin' tastes like (soy, wheat, and pea proteins made up into mock chicken), and it's actually pretty decent. 

Hopefully I will get back to posting perler pictures soon! We've made a few new things, despite the frenzy of packing and unpacking, so stay tuned!