Move

I'm done with Blogger. You can find my new blog here: gasstovegirl.wordpress.com.

Utah!

Dane and I shared the picture taking duties on this trip, but he is a far better and more patient photographer than I am. Chances are good that if you like the photo it is his.

The desert was in bloom:

This is an ancient grainery (place for storing grain) in the Needles District of Canyonlands.

See all that bumpy ground? That's cryptobiotic crust. It's a community of lichens, mosses, bacteria and other little critters that develops on bare ground. It helps stabilize the soil and takes decades to form. This is one of the best examples I've ever seem.

This is the backside of Castle Valley. You can see the "castle" in the middle of the photo way off in the distance.

The Apartment

I'll start with pictures of the apartment and move on to the trip. I love how there is neatly framed art on the walls and random crap spread all over the floor. We've cleaned it up a little bit, but it's impossible to get it too tidy when we don't have things like hangers, dressers or desks. The movers will bring those things in a few weeks. We are hoping sooner rather than later, but it's looking like later. Boo to them!!

Below is a picture of the front entry and kitchen. The bathroom is just to the left as you enter.

Here is another angle from the corner of the living room.

Here is the bedroom looking into the living room and kitchen!

And that's it! It's a cute space and I'm excited to get to know all it's nooks and crannies as we figure out how to make a 2 bedroom, 1000 square foot apartment fit into a 1 bedroom 700 square foot space. I think I'm up for the challenge.

A New Home

We did it! I'm writing this blog post from inside our new apartment!

Within 24 hours of arriving in the city and after looking at only two apartments (and literally hundreds of craigslist ads), we made what may look like a very rash decision. We agreed to buy the equivalent of an MacBook Pro, an iPad, and an iPod Touch for our landlords every single month for a year. Yikes. I can already tell my sense of reality slipping away from me. However, in our defense, it met absolutely all of our requirements for an apartment and was even 100-200 dollars less per month than our maximum willingness to pay.

It's a one bedroom apartment on the third story of a five story building right at the edge of downtown Berkeley. We have the city out our front door and neighborhoods and park out the back. We're 4 blocks from the downtown Berkeley BART (the subway) so it's relatively easy for Dane to commute.

The kitchen has a gas stove (!), dishwasher, built-in microwave, and garbage disposal. I know those may all seem like pretty standard kitchen items, but it was really hard to find them in this city. I don't care about stuff like granite counter tops, but we also have those too. Nerd Alert: Technically it is not granite because granite is a specific kind of intrusive igneous rock.

The unit includes a high efficiency washer and dryer! For some reason the first load turned our new white towels a very pale green. Hopefully that won't continue to happen. I think it's nothing a little bleach can't fix. I believe it's because it's a brand new washer. I don't think I mentioned earlier that this is a brand new, never-been-occupied building.

There's a cute dining room with a pass over counter from the kitchen. The living room is small, but we can deal. The bedroom is big enough that I think we may be able to keep some of the stuff we thought we would have to get rid of for sure. I think we have enough closet space to keep all of our camping gear.

We have a secure assigned parking spot in the lot below the complex. It's so nice to be able to leave the car and forget about it.

I'll take pictures and post them when we get the place cleaned up a bit. I also need to fill you in on the rest of our road trip. Since I last wrote we've been to Death Valley, Bodie (a ghost town), Mono Lake, Reno, the Cascades, and Bend, Oregon. Plus I need to upload pictures of the entire thing. There is much to do and I finally feel like I have plenty of time to do it.