Half Moon Bay

We went to Half Moon Bay on Saturday for a little day trip. It's a little town about an hour south of here. The town itself is a cutesy little tourist town, so we stopped there first and went to some of the shops on their Main Street. Then we kept going to our destination which is technically Half Moon Bay Ocean Course. The drive from the town up to the ocean is almost worth the trip itself. It's so beautiful and semi-mountainous. Though they're not real mountains, it feels just like driving through the mountains with the windy single-lane roads and steep inclines. There were a bunch of produce and plant stands on the side of the road that we stopped at on the way home. Anyway, Half Moon Bay Ocean Course is a golf course/country club, but they have a coastal walking path and a beach that are public access. The views are just beautiful. Here's some pics from the trip.

The Ritz Carlton - where all the ritzy people go

Some House Progress

We've been slowly making progress on making our apartment more homey. We got a couch about a week or so ago, and we spent the weekend on a few little projects (fireplace and plants) that have helped the living room quite a bit. So here's what our place is currently looking like.

Here's a little before of the fireplace:

And after. We removed the brass metal front (laying on the ground in the above photo) that was super hideous and cleaned off the fireplace. Our original plan was to paint the entire exterior of the fireplace white. We got permission from our landlord, but then it turned out that he was passive aggressively upset about it, and we decided to just not go there. So we opted for just repainting the inside and getting some pretty wood. The fireplace is technically functional, but doesn't work well so our landlord doesn't want us to use it. Which is fine by us. Anyway, it looks a lots better now. And, yes, the tile in front of it doesn't extend all the way to the actual fireplace which is a bummer, but we'd rather look at that than at the nasty brass front.

Excuse the pile of pictures we haven't decided where to hang yet.

Artfully taken photos to hide the mess in our bedroom.

Some Pictures

I really don't have much to say anymore now that we're settled, and our lives are back in rhythm so I probably won't really write much here from now on, but I will post pictures from time to time.

I found really cheap tickets to a Passenger concert a few weeks back so we randomly went. We didn't really know any of his songs, but it was still fun.

Shopping by Ghiradelli Square

View from a pier along the north side of San Francisco

Our first In-N-Out experience

Stumbled upon a wax museum

Our local market where we get all our produce really cheap

                                        

                                                Free Matt Nathanson and Neon Trees concert in Golden Gate Park

Pixar is super secretive, but there's a few spots where you can see through the fence

Hike to Panoramic Hill

Sittin' in a Laundromat

Yep, that's what we're doing right now. Sitting in a laundromat for the first time, waiting for our clothes to get done. It's awful. I hate it here. Not only is doing laundry one of my least favorite chores, but now I get to drive a mile to do it and sit on an uncomfortable bench with all the other people doing their laundry and just wait. At least there's wifi.
So we're all out of boxes in our apartment. Our living room and bedroom are still pretty much a mess which is stressing me out a lot because there's really nowhere to relax. We sold our couch though! Hip hip hurray! The girl hasn't picked it up yet, but she already paid us $350 for it and will pick it up Saturday.
We went to look at a couch we saw posted on Craigslist yesterday. It's an IKEA couch that's 2 years old. It's in pretty good condition, comfortable and comes apart easily so we offered the girl $200 which she readily accepted. The plan was for us to pick it up on Thursday with a rented truck. However, she contacted us tonight and said she's going out of town tomorrow and will "let us know when she gets back." I'm not getting my hopes up. It seems a bit sketchy to me, but we didn't give her any money yet, so oh well.
We did have a successful IKEA trip of our own this weekend. Two actually. We went on Saturday to scout for some stuff we might want. Made our decision on Sunday and went back to get a real bed frame and some other bedroom stuff like sheets. BECAUSE we ordered a queen mattress to go with it all. Again, hip hip hurray! We're pretty excited to get a bigger bed that hopefully doesn't sink in the middle.
Anyway, I'm going to go check on our loads but thought I'd give a little update while I have nothing else to do.

We Moved!

We are all moved in! We met the movers Sunday morning and got all of our stuff (which surprisingly all survived really well except for one drinking glass casualty). However, when we got here on Sunday, we realized how dirty the apartment was. I don't think the people before us cleaned at all in the 3 years they lived here and certainly didn't clean for us to move in. That means that we had to leave all our stuff in boxes until we could clean enough to unpack. Everything is covered in a thick layer of scum - the walls, the molding, the baseboards, the blinds. Every square inch of this place needs to be scrubbed. So it's slow going, but I spent two full days on the kitchen/dining area and bathroom, and they're all unpacked now.

Yesterday I got a lot of the living room organized, but it's still not clean yet. We're also in transition of deciding what we want to keep and what goes so there's piles all over. The couch wouldn't fit in the door of the apartment so it's sitting in our shed. We posted it on Craigslist so hopefully we can get rid of it soon.

The bedroom is still a disaster so I didn't post any pictures of that yet. However, I did fit all our clothes into closets which took a lot of creativity. Vic's clothes are in our bedroom closet and mine are in the hall closet. The closets are small but really deep so I had to strategize where to put which clothes. Anyway, here are some pics to satisfy for the time being. I'll post more when we're really settled in and probably after a few trips to IKEA.