Our house!

Well, we are finally done unpacking and hanging stuff up on the walls. Now, I know there are two types of people out there. People who LOVE to see the inside of other people's houses OR people who have no interest in other houses at all. Personally, I think most people are interested in other houses, so this blog is for you! I've taken some pictures and stitched them together with panoramic software. The panoramics make the place look HUGE, which it is not. But it is a vast improvement in size over our little joint over a garage on Cape Cod.

Guest room with Grandma Barber's quilt and our kitties

Office, not in a neat state but it is now!

Our bedroom

Family room

Great room - not as huge as it looks but big for us!

Kitchen

And I thought I would throw in a picture from the Skagit River. We drove west this weekend to check out the town of Concrete because we read that bald eagles congregate there in the hundreds in January. We were hoping to see some stragglers from this gathering, but we only spotted about five. Bummer. In either case, we had a nice little lunch with homemade mocha in the thermos by the Skagit River. This provided us with awesome views of the river, clearcuts (boo hiss), and Cascade Mountains. AND we visited the Birdsview Brewing Company. The beer was O.K. but the hospitality was incredible. They had a collection of growlers hanging around their massive YURT (my favorite) that was their bar - and guess what? They had a growler from the Coddington Brewing Company in Newport, RI. We almost fell out of our seats in shock. Small world stuff.

Mountain time!

What a weekend! We were treated to a visit from our dear friend Erik, an old Rhody pal. Sadly, his wife and our friend, Natalie, had to work on too many papers for her PhD and couldn't join us. There were many cheers to Natalie and we missed her. BUT - despite missing her, we had far too much fun. We had not seen Erik since the party at Colt State Park, RI in October 2007! He took the train up from Eugene, OR and we hit immediately hit the Skagit River Brewery . Tasty, especially when the bartender took a liking to us and started giving us free samples of some brews that were not on tap. Crustacean-themed cookies were baked that night in honor of the Mt. Baker ski gods because.....the next day we headed off to Mt.Baker for a day of skiing! I had been thinking we couldn't afford such a splurge....but Mt. Baker keeps it real in terms of prices, so we could go! Wow. Mt. Baker sure is purdy. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and all the peaks were blazing in the sun. We had some truly incredible views of the northern Cascade Range and all of us agree that we were spending more time staring at the mountains and not enough time paying attention to where we were headed down the mountain. This resulted in some classic tumbles, perhaps with Jay winning the award for the most massive wipeout (sadly, not documented).


Here is a link to Erik's pictures, ours are not up yet due to constant fighting with my old computer that may be dying a slow death.
http://picasaweb.google.com/eendrulat/20090215WashingtonMtBakerTele?feat=email#

All of these pictures but the one of Jay and Erik by our car are actually Erik's pictures, not ours!

Jay's a carpenter!

Who knew? But look at this bookcase he built us!!! Isn't it gorgeous?

Darwin likes to sleep on scratching posts....

Julie's parents bought Da Bird for da cats. They LOVE chasing da bird.

Lester is a real athlete. You should see how high he can leap! I've got to try and get that on video.

A hint of things to come

Here is a treat! I hope we have a lot more treats for you in the future. Before the movers came, Jay and I went through all of our pictures from French Polynesia. We stitched together our panoramas and put together a slideshow of the best shots.
As time goes on, we hope to do this for each country!!

http://picasaweb.google.com/globalscents/TheBestOfFrenchPolynesia#
Use slideshow mode for the best views!

A real home!

Great news! We got our stuff, and the most amazing part is that it all seems to be here. A few pieces of furniture were broken (but we think these can be fixed). It is pretty neat to unpack, we haven't seen most of this stuff for around 15 months! We can't believe how much crap we have - why so many clothes?! It also takes a long time to unpack - especially when your nice house has crappy shelving or no shelving in the closets. So, we have to get creative about where to store our loads of junk (knitting stuff, soap-making stuff, ski stuff, camp stuff, beer stuff, camera stuff, computer stuff, etc.).
I was beginning to really hate our house because it was so empty and now I love it so much more. Our sweet kitties went back to being scared because of all the new stuff, although Darwin remains more brave than Lester. Anyway - happy day!

Yikes! Look at how this truck was packed!

Happy to have chairs and wine glasses!