The Apartment

We have furniture!!!!!!!

9 weeks after arriving in Australia we finally have furniture in our apartment.  No more sleeping on an air mattress (or getting yelled at while carrying a blown-up air mattress from Matt's aparmtent to our apartment - "yeah, you and your air mattress get out of here!!").  Along with the furniture I am also so happy to have kitchenware, diet mountain dew, and the rest of my shoes! It truly is the little things in life :)

Our furniture was delivered last Monday morning, which conveniently coincided with our first day back at work so that I could ease back into work with only a halfday.  I started opening boxes while the movers were still carrying things in. I wanted to make sure that my Diet Mountain Dew arrived safely.  I immediately texted a picture to Kelly to prove to her that it actually made it.  We are not crazy we just really like our Diet Mountain Dew.  Now that I know it made it through customs I wish I would have shipped about 100 more of them.  Eight each is not going to last very long!

This weekend we went to Ikea to complete our apartment.  We purchased a coffee table, TV stand, and shelves.  The apartment finally looks like home!  We just need a few more pictures on the wall, a bigger TV, and a washing machine and we will be all set.

Here is a picture of the living room:



Notice the sandstone bowl on the coffee table from Kenya- my favorite travel purchase!


As most of you would expect my bed is not made and there are clothes on the floor so no bedroom picture at the moment.  I'll try to post one soon. My "new" headboard looks quite nice (my old headboard spray painted black by my wonderful mama).  There are also lots of pictures to remind me of home!

Of course no apartment would be complete without a few mishaps - here are a few of ours:

• Returning from Fiji I discovered that the carpet in the corner of my bedroom was slightly damp.  A fan did no good drying it out so I called the landlord on Monday morning.  Turns out a pipe had burst in the apartment above me.  Amazingly only a bit of paint on the wall bubbled up and the wet carpet was discoverd before my furniture arrived so nothing was ruined.
• Also upon our return from Fiji we noticed the fridge was making a VERY loud humming sound.  Over the next few days the temperature continued to increase in the fridge until it was not cold at all - although the freezer was still working.  That too eventually died.  We had bought the fridge secondhand so we were nervous we were going to have to buy a new one.  Luckily Kelly contacted the guy we had purchased it from and he came to fix it last night (at 10 pm).
• As I mentioned above we made a few Ikea purchases this weekend - coffee table, TV stand, and shelves -all in black-brown.  We are grown up now and thought we should actually have matching furniture. Our items were delivered Monday morning.  Turns out our TV stand is white and not black-brown.  At Ikea the home delivery counter is after the checkout, which means that we had to wheel our purchase over to home delivery so there is little chance that we can blame this on the Ikea staff.  Although we are going to continue to try.  This is one time that not having a car is pretty annoying as we now have to figure out how to get it back to the store and exchange it.
• We finally got internet set up in the apartment.  We paid $150 for installation (basically a guy coming to the apartment and telling us the internet was already on).  Unfortunately after that we couldn't get the internet to work.  We finally got through to customer service and got the internet connected (we were using the wrong password - even though the directions told us the password was admin! how were we supposed to know?).  I then asked them to help us set up the wireless - since I am POSITIVE that I ordered a wireless modem  Turns out our modem is not wireless so we have to figure out if we can return that as well.

Other than that we love our apartment (although Kelly is dying with only 5 TV channels).  We are planning on having a housewarming party in February so there will be more pictures then.

Other news from the weekend:
Friday night after work I had drinks with my start group.  Good to see everyone after we were all doing our own thing over Christmas break.  It was gorgeous outside and we sat outside at Beer Deluxe in Federation Square - after dinner drinks turning into most of the night drinks. Beer Deluxe has a great burger and fries for only $10.50 - cheap as chips!  And it was the biggest burger ever.

Saturday night Kelly and I went out to eat with some girls from PwC.  We went to Mamasita's - a family-style Mexican restaurant in the city.  I'll admit I was a little skeptical - how good can Mexican food be so far away from Mexico?  I was wrong - It was amazing!  The shrimp taco and mexican truffle quesadilla were my favorite - and the margarita! The food definitely was worth the wait (Amy put our name in at 6 and we got a table around 8:30).  The restaurant actually took our number and we could go somewhere else and get drinks and then they call you shortly before the table is going to be ready. I swear that would never happen in the US!  Way better than standing in line on the stairs leading up to the restaurant like a lot of people were doing.  While we waited for our table we had some drinks at Society on Bourke Street.  Of course the waiter and the owner instantly fell in love with Amy and gave her 9 free drink tickets. 

After dinner we went to Society where Amy's friendliness scored all 7 of us 3 drinks each.  Thanks for that Amy - I need to go out with you more often!