Welcome to 2010 Cribs

I realized that i haven't posted many picture of our apartment recently. This'll also be a 2009 year in summary. So here we go:
First off: here's our living room.

Mostly every piece of furniture here has a story. Just a highlight a few, the shelving unit on the right wall. I bought that from a Portland company going under, really cheap. Only problem was the office was on the third floor on a building built in the 20s. Lots of stairs, no elevator, closest parking was one block away, and only 2 hours in the parking meter. Ended up running with the last load on my Costco magnum handtruck and got there with 2 minutes to spare.You all remember the 6' tall cathouse (in the background) that I rescued and from the trash that smelled like pee? Yeah... back then it was 100 degree weather so it was that much more fragrant before I sanded and stained a whole bunch. There's also the digital TV antenna I made with welding rods and cardboard. The IKEA table we bought when we first moved with no jobs. There's small sectional (fits two small asians perfectly) that we got from a furniture liquidators store.

Next up, the spare room. There's our bikes we bought when we both finally had jobs and it was summer. I logged about 200+ miles on mine so far, but it's winter now so the only moving they did was from the living room to the spare room. You'll also notice our cat, who is now almost 2 years old, acts as a theme to the photos. If you don't see him in a photo, you can assume he's standing near my feet. He follows me around and sleeps in our bed every night.

There's a bookshelf, desk, and office chair we got really cheap from the liquidators. The bad economy is good sometimes. I got that laser printer for $50 (normally $120 as office depot) from slickdeals.net. Check it out. Also in the picture, another cathouse that was given to us in Seattle. Yep, fun times loading a 5' cathouse into a Prius and driving  with wife, a couple suitcases, and a cat drugged on half-a valium, to start a new life in Portland on Jan 22nd.

Our kitchen: it's a lot bigger than it looks. Lots of cabinet space. There's the stand mixer than Karen found on sale. Good for all the baking she does. There's ohagi in the containers there and we're making chicken soup from Costco rotisserie chicken in the crock pot.

Here's our bedroom. Nothing much to say here other than the Novafoam mattress from Costco is really good. It's also a lot cheaper than it was when we bought it. On a side note, there's the lamp on the left hand side of the picture as well as our two nightstands that I rescued from the dumpster. Upon writing this, I realize that I spend a lot of time in the trash. It's worth it sometimes though, especially when we just got our first jobs here and were living off our savings. I got my job in March (about two months in Portland) and Karen got hers in July/August? That was stressful, I am convinced that you can hate your job, but keep in perspective that it's worse not having one. Fortunately, I don't hate mine and I dream of working at PSU as an advisor there. Stay tuned.

We also celebrated the cat's one year birthday. His face isn't as skinny as it was before, but it's hard to tell since it's winter and he's puffy. He wasn't very keen on Karen putting a party hat on his head, but he liked the peanut butter cat treats she baked him using a Rachael Ray recipe. Anyhow, will post more later.