Hectic Times...

Man... I know I've already whined about it more than once, but this whole moving-while-working thing blows. I spent over 20 hours this weekend driving all over tarnation to deal with apartment stuff, arriving back at my hotel on Sunday just in time for the stupid Super Bowl that I refuse to talk about (other than to mention the culinary aspect of it below). Every day this week after work I've had to drive around doing apartment-related things for a couple hours before I could come home... then it's back to work bright and early the next morning. I really miss leisurely early-evenings, where you can come home from work and relax for a while before dinner... Getting home at 8pm feeling frazzled and starving to death is no fun at all... But enough whinging. On to the positive, which starts with the fact that:

I have a totally awesome apartment!!! The more time I spend at my new place, the more I totally and completely love it. I find myself waiting for the other shoe to fall (wondering why such an amazing place is so affordable...), but it certainly seems like I just lucked into a great place. The majority of my driving around on Saturday was to buy a washer and dryer from some guy on the other side of the state:
These puppies are pretty big and barely fit through my kitchen door and into the laundry closet... (Thanks, highly skilled delivery guys!) My favorite purchase of the day (maybe tied with the washer and dryer) was definitely either my drill or my knife:
My brother always carries a sharp knife with him, and damned if it doesn't come in handy. I've been using that thing constantly around the apartment... And the drill? Let me tell you, every grown-up should have a drill. They are absolutely fantastic, and using your drill as an electric screwdriver makes the whole cheap-furniture-assembly process much less exasperating. Yay, power tools!
I also did some painting for the first time ever, converting the massive (still empty until Saturday) rabbit cage into a work table in an attempt to make it seem a little less massive (or at least more practically so). It looks pretty cool in person, and it turns out painting isn't as scary as one might think...
With all my running around over the weekend, I was only able to make progress in the kitchen and bathroom (zoomed in shot of my awesome bathroom pictured above) since I still had no furniture or floor-coverings. I drove home just in time to watch that thing I'm not going to talk about, and ordered up a pretty fantastic spread (which ended up being 3 dinners) from another sketchily-named local restaurant ("Not Your Average Joe's"). The BBQ Chicken Pizza was much more restrained than I'm used to in such things, with a nice thin crust and a fascinating accent of roasted garlic (although that accent became the dominant flavor by the time this was leftovers). The crab cakes (bottom left) are surprisingly delicious (the restaurant's name put me in a place of lowered expectations) featuring bits of roasted red pepper mixed in with the yummy crab and drizzled with a roasted pepper aioli. The chicken quesadillas were also seriously delicious and different than one might expect, filled with grilled chicken, caramelized onions, roasted pepper, and mozzarella and pepper jack cheeses and topped with a chipotle sour cream. Totally awesome.
Finally came the ahi tuna wontons with wasabi aioli (pictured larger below). The wontons were a little not-so-crispy by the time this was delivered, but the tuna was absolutely delicious. I think I probably wouldn't bother with the pizza again (I can make better), and the pineapple salsa that comes with the quesadillas doesn't seem to compliment them particularly well (though they're fantastic without it), but all in all I was pretty impressed... Definitley some things here I was thrilled to have leftovers of...
Two of my three rugs were delivered to my apartment on Tuesday, which required me working from the apartment while stalking the UPS guy. In case you've never tried it, getting an 8' x 10' rug out of its plastic sleeve (the one that says "DO NOT slice the down the length of this sleeve!!!" all over it) by yourself is no easy task. In the end, though, my rugs look fantastic, if nothing like the pictures I based my order on... The living room rug in particular looks completely different than its picture, but in a way such that it's exactly the rug I would have ordered if I had seen a picture of what it actually looked like. It is absolutely perfect. The rug-buying gods were clearly smiling down on me this time... (I'll post a picture once I get some furniture in there.)

This weekend it's off to adopt the world's cutest pair of rabbits on Saturday, then getting my sofas delivered on Sunday (at which point I will move out of the hotel and into my apartment)... Definitely looking forward to getting settled in...