Superbowl Sunday

This has been a bad weekend for Hawaii sporting folks eh? BJ Penn lost... sic was spectacularly owned on Saturday (see it on youtube) and Travis Laboy of the Arizona Cardinals, well... he was on the team. The only shining point for Hawaii was that Obama ended the use of "war on terror" as part of the national rhetoric.

We spent the SB with the small group peoples from Mosaic. It was a nice gathering with food in front of a fireplace and a big TV. We played some street football during halftime, thanking Janet Jackson for being the last interesting halftime performance since now they've gone to booking people from the music hall of fame retirement home. It's cold, but it was nice to run around without any snow, rain, or fog. (Did I mention that snow is seriously overrated?)

Other than that... things have been fine. We had a couple adventures with moving trucks. I rented a U-Haul 10' truck and drove across town to IKEA and bought bunch of furniture and picked up our stuff from the freight service warehouse. Almost everything arrived okay, the only casualty was a plate. Much thanks to the Changs for helping us setup our rental...

So we finally found an apartment to rent. It's a little more than we budgeted for but it's a nice place. It was pretty tiring, worrisome, and frustrating trying to find a place to live in. Anyway, it's a one bedroom apartment in an apartment community west of downtown, between downtown and Beaverton. It's about 50 sq. feet bigger than our condo (although it doesn't feel much bigger because our condo unit had a really good layout). We especially liked that there is a washer & dryer in the unit and a fitness room where we can work out (not a 24 Hour Fitness) in this cold weather.

We also picked up some nice furniture from Scan Designs (if Scan is Scandinavian, it means all our furniture are international pieces since we have a lot of Swedish furniture too!). They had a sale (but it wasn't cheap... take $50 off of $1k and you still have some real overpriced #@$*). Luckily we found the warehouse sale and bought furniture priced $1600 for (C) $400. We bought a cosmetically damaged cherry dining sideboard and we are going to use it for our dresser. Not ideal, but drawers need to be sturdy because... well... I affectionately call my wife, Karen the Destroyer (vis-a-vie Conan, not Gozer [Ghostbusters anyone? Do... Re... Egonnnn]. Much like the times now... it's certainly not perfect (unemployment rate is 2-3% higher than the national average of 7%), but we'll make it work for us.

In short, Karen's been studying for the bar, I've been applying for jobs but haven't heard back from anyone yet (I think maybe my rejection letters are being mailed to Hawaii, hmmm...) but we're optimistic that I'll be a provider yet by working at Costco or doing temp work.

That's all for now... stay tuned for pictures of our 'crib! Feel free to email me if you want our address.