MACINTOSH MONDAY

I'm sure you've heard me mention the name Winston before. He is our next door neighbour's British bulldog. He is hilarious. Well this week our next door neighbour and Winston will be moving to Ohio. Poor old Macintosh will be left without a playmate and poor old Andrew will be without a train buddy. 

Yesterday became a bit of a farewell occasion as we hung out together and finished up the evening tucking into some barbecue. The two dogs are hilarious together because poor old Winston can't keep up with Mac so he just uses his sheer weight to stop Mac from running around. He simply squashes him! This in turn winds Macintosh up and results in him making his hideous baying sound to try and put Winston off.

We wanted to capture the two of them together, but it was a little tricky. Here are some of the shots we got!

Macintosh is definitely going to miss Winston. Let's hope another cool dog moves in next door.

H

BOXES UPON BOXES

Earlier this week our stuff finally arrived from England - hooray! We had been waiting rather a while for this to happen and had been living in somewhat more sparse conditions than we were accustomed too. We were really looking forward to having some familiar stuff around us including family photos and personal things. 

Anyway we had 30+ boxes to unpack! The men arrived and began unloading. Andrew had hold of Macintosh and a clipboard to stand and check off all the boxes as they came off the lorry. I was inside the house directing operations (as you can well imagine) and beginning to unpack. We wanted to unpack as many boxes as possible before the men left as they would then take away all the empty boxes and packaging. It was a bit of a race to just unpack everything carefully without losing anything (or the dog!) in all the packaging. 

We managed to unpack over half the boxes in that time whilst they unpacked our bits of furniture and kindly put together our bed for us. It was quite a feat unpacking that much and left us in one messy state. See the picture below...

                   

However once they had gone, and we had found a tennis ball to occupy Macintosh and stop him destroying the packaging, we began to get into quite a rhythm meaning that by the time we stopped that evening we had pretty much done the kitchen and the bed was all ready to drop into. We then were able to have our first dinner in about 2 months on one of our dining plates. Bliss!

                    

We have spent the rest of the week beginning to put away the remaining things and are getting there. We have lots of little bits that still need to find a home and clothes that need sorting. I doubt my scarves and woolly jumpers will be needed just yet so could be vacuum packed under the bed. And the garage needs tackling! It's currently rather a mess! 

     

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. We will get there and when we do I can bore you all again with some new updated house tour photos! Yay!

H 

MACINTOSH MONDAY

As most of you will now be aware Macintosh is here in the States with us! The day he arrived I was really quite nervous about the whole proceedings as it involved dealing with paperwork at the airport cargo area and customs but in the end it went more smoothly than planned so that before we knew it we were at the nerve wracking moment of waiting for him to be brought out to us.

He was brought out still in his travel crate and once we opened the door an extremely nosey dog appeared making lots of squeaky noises. It was the first time he had been out of it since the Wednesday morning UK time, so he'd been in there about 12 hours. He had no collar on though so stopping him from running off was a little more tricky than usual. Plus we didn't really want to touch him too much because a dog who had been stuck in a confined space for 12 hours doesn't smell so great as they've been sitting in some...well... not so pleasant stuff! Yeah it wasn't great. But anyway he was happy to see us.

                 

We then had to load him and his extremely smelly travel crate into the back of Victor the Volvo and travel home. The only trouble was by that point the freeway had turned into a car park as everyone was travelling home from work. Our journey instantly became over 2 hours and meant that we became very accustomed with Mac's awful smell. Yuck! 

Since Wednesday Macintosh has had a steep learning curve of getting used to the heat overview and the crazy desert landscape. As a result he hasn't been the most active of dogs as he quickly becomes hot and sweaty. So what you tend to see is him lying around the house in various spots and positions. See...

                 

                 

                              

Occasionally you do find him laying outside in the sun. This doesn't happen too often or for too long as the concrete can get pretty hot and it tends to burn his tummy. But he's a nosey dog and loves to watch people out in the street plus he always enjoyed sunbathing in the UK, he just hasn't realised how different it is here yet! 

                                 

This weekend we have begun to see him moving around more and being a bit more cheeky as he's acclimatised. Knowing Macintosh as I do I would predict he'll be back to his liveliness pretty soon and that only means one thing...chaos!

H

OUR HOUSE

First off we have internet! How great is that?! After a week of no internet other than 3G and what we could glean when at Starbucks we have come to realise that its amazing how much we rely on the internet for our daily life! We have felt rather disconnected from the world and have not enjoyed it! So we're back online and the first thing to do is show you guys pictures of the house!

As a pre-warning there are about to be lots of photos in this post and for those of you who don't really care about our house I'm sorry, you can stop reading now. For those of you who care, enjoy!

Welcome to number 105! Its a townhouse with a huge double garage located at the front of the house! I'm going to walk you through the house so you get a sense of where we are. Remember though none of our stuff from the UK has arrived so it looks a little sparse!

You walk in down the side of the house and come in through a patio area. We have just bought some outdoor chairs so we can enjoy a bit of the Californian sunshine! We are currently working on a plan to gate the area off so that Mr Mac can roam free without escaping. Andrew's chief engineer on that project for obvious reason. You then take a right into a porch area and through our doggy themed front door!

As soon as you step into the house you can see right through the living space and through into our bedroom which is at the back of the house. The main living area is an L shape with the kitchen at the corner of the L, the living room being the main body of the L and the dining area being the bottom of the L. Its very open and airy in there which is hard to capture through photographs. The ceiling goes up to roof height so it feels lovely and big. 

Here's the kitchen.

The living room area. 

Here's the dining room. Its a rather posh dining set. We might eat at our breakfast bar more than we eat there I think. Don't want to ruin the table! One of the doors leads to a closet and the other leads to the second bathroom. It had a laundry mess in there so I wasn't about to photograph that!

From the dining room area you go back on yourself to access the second bedroom. The room is parallel to the kitchen and joins the garage to the rest of the house. Here it is.

Going back into the main living area and through the lounge part into the back of the house you come to our bedroom and the main bathroom. The bedroom isn't much to look at right now as we have no bed in there! Its on its way from England at the moment and should be here soon. We are currently camping out in the second bedroom until it arrives. 

See told you it wasn't much to look at!

From the master bedroom you then have access to a walk in closet and the bathroom. The walk in closest is amazing!! I absolutely love it, but its sort of a mess so again no photos! In the photo below the closest is the door on the left and the bathroom is the next door along with the door on the far right leading back to the lounge. 

Here's the bathroom. The shower you can see in the reflection of the mirror. It's quite something moving into a house that has a shower to start with. Our first house didn't get a shower until March this year. It wasn't the best. 

And finally our bedroom has sliding patio doors which lead out to an additional little patio area. Right now its nothing much and is full of weeds but that's my job whilst I'm at home. 

So there we go! That's number 105. Unfortunately the photos really don't capture the house brilliantly. It is so much bigger than it appears and is so light and airy. It's also not very 'us' at the moment due to the lack of stuff in there. Once the shipment from England arrives and I've tackled the mammoth task of unpacking I'm sure it'll look different and you'll all be treated to another mass of photos to show you how it looks!

The garden, or should I say yard, space is relatively small but across from our house is a mostly fenced off grassy area which Mac is free to use. Our house is also 2 (very small) blocks away from open hills and mountains so his walks will inevitably mean more hill climbing which he has become accustomed too! So overall he hasn't got the large garden we hoped for but he has enough space to roam inside and out and access to enough green space when needed. We hope he'll be alright with it. Guess we'll see in about a week when he arrives. 

For now all that's left to say is that Hotel de Woodruff is almost open for business and we are taking bookings from September onwards! 

H

WE'RE IN!

                               

Today we moved into our new house! It all went smoothly. The furniture arrived and looks good.  We haven't got our stuff  from England yet but that's on it's way hopefully. We managed to check out of the hotel without any problems. We have begun to unpack our bags but we didn't get very far as Andrew's car was ready to be picked up from the garage so we dashed off to get that done too.

 So what you are seeing now is our rented house and our lovely new car (although it's a used car really but new to us!) I will give you a house your and more details on the car when I can. Now though I'm off to sit on our sofa! 

H