Update

Here's a picture of what remains of the excitement last night. Turns out it was two buildings back from ours. There was a big yellow building I didn't even know about between us and the fire.

Anyhow. Yeesh! This looks like a storage shed or something that was attached to the back of some law offices. Not much of a storage shed any longer! What we saw last night, were the firefighters walking on the roof of the brick building. I think, for the owners, it was fortunate that it was a brick building and not a wood one. Scary.

Not exactly what you want to hear at 3 am.

The light flicks on in the courtyard area behind our apartment, shining through our blinds and onto the ceiling.

People are talking, though, through the window it's hard to hear what they're saying beyond murmured mumbles.

A chorus of sirens whines through the night, but that's not unusual since we live relatively close to a hospital.

Somehow Charlie and I both wake up right about the time that we hear the neighbor out in the courtyard say, in a flat, alarm-less voice, "Fire."

We look at one another, and I don't remember who it was that asked, "Should we go see what's going on?" but, we both throw sweatshirts on and walk out in our pjs.

The back courtyard is full of red flashing lights, and we can see them strobing in through our kitchen window.

We look out the front windows, and there are three or four big fire trucks parked in the street directly in front of our apartment building.

Putting flip-flops on, we go outside to try and see what's happening. Our neighbor from upstairs is on the porch next to ours, smoking a cigarette. He's in his pj's too. We talk for a minute: no, it's not our building that's on fire. He says that he thought about starting to pitch his worldly belongings from the window for a moment, though.

Idiotically, I say something to the tune of, "Wow, I think I can smell smoke or something," forgetting, of course that he's standing there smoking. Obviously, it's 3 am, and even though I feel wide-awake, my brain isn't firing on all cylinders yet. I try to cover it up by saying something to the effect of, "I thought I smelled something when I woke up, too."

Charlie and I decide to see if we can see better what's going on, and head part way around the block in one direction and then the other. We pause by the alley long enough to watch the fire fighters put a ladder up against a building just to the rear of ours. They climb onto the roof and stomp around.

There's water from their hoses all over the ground.

It's all kind of anonymous and dream-like. Some guy (I think he lives in our building, but I could be wrong, it was late, but he looked vaguely familiar), stops and asks if we're checking out the excitement in the neighborhood. We nod and mutter something inane and inarticulate, transfixed by the alien men in full-body equipment and the red blinking lights.

Then, assured that everything is under control, and that our building isn't going to burn down around our ears, we try to go back to bed and back to sleep. I distinctly remember Charlie's watch beeping at 4 am, however, and I think it was light out before I really, really fell back into any sort of a restful sleep.



In other surreal-ness, when I got up this morning, there was a lone bagpiper playing somewhere outside. I think he was practicing. It went on, quite literally, for TWO HOURS. Hello alternate reality Boise universe.

Some photos from the moving in process.

I've uploaded a whole slew of photos to my flickrstream. You, of course, can see the entire batch of our moving pictures there.
In the meantime, however, here are a select few to flesh out the longer post below.



As you can see, we are all still smiling. :)

This is at our first break in The Dalles. Charlie's wearing the awesome Woodpecker Trucking cap his parents found for him. It matches the giant Penske truck (for the record, I wussed out and refused to drive that truck AT ALL; Charlie is the real champ for driving it across Oregon and into Idaho).



Thank goodness for the fact that Charlie and I are cohabitating. This picture proves my crazy plant-lady tendencies. My car was packed to the gills with plants, cleaning supplies, and the cat.

All I need now is a scary Ms. Havisham cake.



We ended up having quite a bit of furniture that needed assembling. Our new Ikea loveseat is included in the tally. It was far simpler to put together than the cube of materials and 30-page booklet may have implied. We were even able to put it together as our brains slowly melted into the new hot weather.



NICE, isn't it? This was our scary view for the first couple of days. It looks like a garage! I think it's safe to say that it doesn't look like this any longer. I've taken the first couple of photos of the "finished" rooms, and will be getting them up here before long.

Finally a post about something more than the internet

Even though the internet drama is still in the works (the internet is in a box on our couch, our property manager has verified that we have no normal phone jack, and she’s calling the owner and the phone company to see what happens next), I decided it was only fair to take a little time to type up a few observations about moving in, our experiences so far in Idaho, and getting used to living in an apartment again.

To begin, we had such a welcome send off from Portland and arrival in Boise on our moving day. Charlie’s mom and dad drove down to Portland so that his dad could assist us in driving our two cars and the moving van cross-state. It was such an amazing help to have that third person for the driving. We made a quick stop for a lovely warm breakfast (both the food and the people!) at the home of relatives of Charlie’s that live in Hillsboro, Oregon. After hugs and bon voyages, we hit the road.

There’s not a ton to say about being on the road. We drove. And drove and drove and drove. I’d had a bad experience the night before at an Oil Can Henry’s in which they essentially told me my car wouldn’t make it back to my house that night—let along all the way to Idaho!—so I was a little anxious about that most of the way. Suffice to say we made it here just fine. The cat survived the trip, too. We wedged the carrier into the front seat next to me, and he alternately meowed indignantly and slept with his back to me for the entire eight hours.

When we arrived here in Boise, family friends of Charlie’s showed up with tennis shoes and open arms and helped us unload the van. It was such an amazing help. We had six people in total helping us carry boxes from the street into our apartment. After spending the better part of two days painstaking loading things into the van, it was remarkable how fast we were able to empty it out. We then all hoofed it up to a bar and grill just up the road for a beer and a light dinner. After all the driving, and then a little drama with our apartment keys (the post office started forwarding my mail two days early, and thus the priority mail package containing our keys never made it to us in Portland—fortunately, our property manager lives within walking distance and could bring extra keys over), it was amazing to just relax and enjoy good food and such welcoming company.

Beyond that, our first week was concerned primarily with unloading boxes and trying to find things like clean underwear and the little Ziploc baggies we’d packed full of our furniture assembling hardware. In the process of opening and breaking down boxes, it was hilarious how many knives accumulated all around our house. We decided that 1) we felt exceptionally safe in case of a home intrusion (there were weapons hidden everywhere!) and 2) it would have been an excellent setting for an action movie (weapons hidden everywhere, boxes to back flip over). Sharp pointies aside, Otto settled right in, and we utilized our AC only a few times as we got used to a standard daily temperature of over 90 degrees. The other night, taking an evening walk, Charlie and I noted that since we’ve been here, it’s been sunnier than you can even imagine—we haven’t even had a single, fully cloudy day. Two weeks of exclusively sunny days. All sun, all the time.

Readjusting to apartment life has been… amusing. As it turns out, we’ve had a rock band (real, not video game) living in the basement apartment just below us. Fortunately, they sound awesome and they shut down practices by 9:00pm. Unfortunately they like to play loud and their drums are just below our dining room/library room. It’s also taken us a while to get used to the number of smokers in our building. They can’t smoke in the building, but it certainly wafts into the windows when they smoke in the rear courtyard. Finally, there’s a screamer in the building. We’re talking Herbal Essences, full blown best-experience-of-my life type of screamer (if you know what I’m insinuating). At least we know everyone is happy, right?

Everyone has been so friendly and welcoming. We’ve met almost all our neighbors, and they’re all exceptionally nice. The people above us invited Charlie up for a barbeque on the roof (I was feeling a little under the weather so declined), and the people (non-band people) in the other basement apartment complimented how good our food always smells. Oh yeah, and, as it turns out, the band moved out this week and the apartment below us is now for rent. Overall, things are good.

Adjusting to living together has been a funny process for Charlie and I, too. We’ve found we have such a funny collection of duplicate things. Two coffee brewers (the conversation went like this: “Mine makes tasty coffee!” “Mine’s smaller than yours! It fits better!” “Mine matches our other kitchen stuff!”—of course it was all in good spirits), too many knives, and too many Norton Anthologies. We’ve also found a few things that we’re curiously lacking: glasses (as in water/drinking glasses), floor lamps, chairs. As I’m sure any couple moving in together can attest to discovering, one of us is also a little less tidy than the other as well. I bet it won’t surprise anyone to hear how than dynamic breaks down. We’re thinking about getting Charlie a dust buster so that he can follow me around and pick up the trail of debris that follows in my wake. Whoops!

We’ve found that we’re also sharing our building with an unusual set of neighbors: a swarm of honeybees! The other night we were getting ready for bed, and I noticed Otto, nose to the ground, following behind a honeybee that was walking along the floor. The next night, there were three in the house, flying around the light fixture. We stuffed the gaps around the air conditioner with towels, and then the next day went outside to see if there was anything out there. Sure enough, in a crack between stones, we spotted a nest of honeybees. We elected not to make a big deal about it, considering the state of honeybees in the world right now, and I have to say, sitting near that window, I love to watch them flying to and from their nest. The towels worked wonders, and we all can coexist happily. Yellow jackets are one thing, honeybees have a whole different benign presence to them.

I think that this is about it for now as far as apartment updates go. I have plenty more to share with you all about other things we’ve seen and done since moving here, but those will appear in future posts. Stay tuned for updates about the day hike we took, the play we attended, live (free!) music, and the perils of job hunting.

Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with this funny little Boise fact. According to Wikipedia, the climate here is officially semi-arid. Other regions of the world sharing a semi-arid climate include: the Australian outback, Northern Africa, West Texas, and Pakistan. They are doing a military training exercise south of here in which they’ve created a faux Iraqi town, have hired actors, and are going to try to give soldiers a relatively similar experience to that which they’ll encounter in Iraq and Afghanistan. The newsman said that, while the temperatures were on average 10 degrees cooler here than in Iraq, otherwise it’s a remarkably similar climate.

So, there you have it. We send our love from little Persepolis.

xoxo

Ariel and Charlie

The woes of getting wired

Well, we still don't have the internet.

This is becoming somewhat of an interesting saga. First, we ordered the internet from Qwest. Charlie was on the phone with them for nearly an hour. First came the identity verification test. His information failed the first time, then went through the second time (what, you have to have a green card to get the internet now?) for inexplicable reasons. Countdown: 20 minutes verifying information. Then, upon giving the associate our address, we apparently did not exist as an apartment building. We were listed as an "institute" of some sort. To remedy this situation, they need to contact our property manager and have her vouch as to the fact that we indeed have a bed, a stove, and a couch in our domicile, and that no, there weren't padded walls or any officy goings-on in our space. Once these two hurdles were cleared (countdown: 30 more minutes of waiting) the associate thanked Charlie profusely for his kindness and patience, and promised to send a box with the internet to our doorstep.

That was, I believe, Monday morning. With the giddy patience of kindergartners on Christmas Eve, Charlie and I checked our front porch daily to see if the internet had yet arrived. Finally, come Friday, it showed up. The irony of waiting for a snail mail box to bring us the internet was not lost on us--in fact, the chuckles we shared over it made the wait that much more tolerable (as did the free wireless at the Library!--that's how it's officially written here: always with the exclamation point). Charlie unpacked the box and we petted and ooh-ed over the sleek cords and fancy wireless modem router.

Then we set to locating the phone jack for the long-awaited consummation of our internet hopes. Funny thing is, there wasn't one. We've searched our apartment high and low, and unless the phone jack is hidden behind the refrigerator, we've discovered that there simply ISN'T one in our apartment. THE PAIN THE AGONY! It seems like a strange thing to be lacking, since these have been apartments for, oh, the last 99 YEARS or so. We have a call into our property manager (late in the day on Friday) so hopefully we can get this ironed out sometime this week. We asked another building resident whether he has a phone jack in his apartment, and apparently they do, so hopefully we're just not looking in the right drawers or storage closets for ours.

More about Boise and our experiences here once we're wired, I promise! For now, things are going well, and I hope they are well for you too.

We're both missing you all but having a great time here so far, too.

x's and o's,

Ariel and Charlie

One more thing...

I forgot to mention in my previous post, I found out a little more about the building that our new apartment is in.

Apparently, it's on the National Register of Historic Places! The building was built in 1909, and it's one of two "Wolters Double Houses" (it, and the building next to it)--essentially, old "duplexes" or row houses. It was built by the same architects who constructed the beautiful Boise High school and the Egyptian Theater downtown!

Our leasing agent also let us know that these beautiful fixtures (in the dining room area) are original:


We'll be living in turn-of-the-century STYLE my friends! I can't wait to have you all over for tea, crumpets, and a ballyhoo.

It's official!

I got a call this morning from the woman who was looking at our rental application for our #1 choice apartment--and she confirmed it, we're set to go with our favorite place! Yeehaw!

I can't say enough nice things about the apartment--nice part of town, beautiful place, full of character. I'm running out of steam as far as a long texty post goes, but I will share some of the pictures we took of the place below.

Basic stats: 2 bedroom, one bath. Ground floor apartment. Built-in's, hardwood floors, fireplace. Laundry on-site. Good enough for me!

Dining room.

Fireplace

Pocket doors.

View down the "hall" to the kitchen.

Kitchen

From the outside. Ours is the one on the ground floor.

So there you have it! Our new house! Hooray! I think it's going to be a really lovely place to live. We're both so very excited about it.