Welcome to our new home

Hello family and friends! We moved! And we dearly missed all of your hands and muscles and help in the process! It was a rough two days!
We are still trying to unpack and find homes for everything so I don't have any pictures of it decorated but I thought you might like a pictorial tour of the layout at least. I promise I will post pictures with our stuff and also a picture of the building itself soon.
The building is wonderfully located about a 15 minute car ride to work for me and a 10 minute bike ride to Stanford for Brian. We love Menlo Park too. It has everything we could ever want, most of it in walking distance! We are apartment 1 of a 7 apartment complex but we have the best spot! We are over the garage with no one above us or beside us. There are 2 more apartments about our size. Each of them get a portion of the 3 car garage along with us (we have a garage now!). Then around the garage level are 4 tiny little apartments that he must rent out dirt cheap because I mean they are little! We have met many of our neighbors and they all seem friendly and quiet!
We all share a laundry room and our landlord's daughter lives in one of the bigger apartments so all the utilities are included in our rent! With the money we are saving to move into a larger and lovelier apartment (crazy how wonderful a deal this place is compared to our Belmont apt), we splurged and got digital cable with DVR. I am pretty weirded out by now being able to pause, rewind, and record TV but that is an entire blog entry in and of itself!

So read on for the tour and remember you can click on the pictures to enlarge them!
We miss you all and we have decided not to move again until Brian graduates unless it is to move into a home and since the chances of us being able to afford to even rent a home out here are slim, I think we will be here for 5 years or so...hopefully many of you will visit us in that time frame and get to see it for yourself!

The new place....the bedroom

Here is our bedroom. Through the window you can see a little bit of the view from our backyard. We put the bed in and realized that this bedroom is at least 25% bigger than our last one. It is great. We are going to find Brian a desk and set him up a little office in here it is so spacious. Love the his and hers closets! Saves us having to fight about encroaching items!

The new place....the kitchen

The kitchen is so amazing! We just had that little kitchenette that was basically the size of a closet in Belmont so this kitchen is like a miracle! The first pic is from the hallway doorway. I love the red counter tops....they are so 50's and fun! The doorway in the pic is our back door and it leads to our stairway to the backyard, which we share with everyone else who lives in the building.
For the second picture I am standing in the far corner. Behind me is a row of shelves and another counter with shelves below and above. Pictured is our stove....eat your heart out Rachel Ray. 2 different oven doors, each with their own temp setting and that sweet counter space next to the burners. I made french toast for us for dinner tonight and I can tell you that little space is very handy!

The new place....the bathroom

I love this bathroom! The tub and sinks and some of the walls are pink (Brian isn't thrilled ...but he will just have to get in touch with his metro side!) and it is so spacious! So the first pic is from the doorway. Off to the left you can see a little bit of a door frame....that is the separate room that houses the toilet. For the second and third pics I am standing in the doorway of the "potty room". Notice we have two sinks, a shower stall AND a separate tub ? There is also mondo amounts of storage. The toilet room has a full wall of cupboards and directly to the right of the door to the bathroom is a wall of cabinets and drawers!

The new place....the living room

So here is our living room. The first picture, featuring Brian, was taken from our front door, and the second picture was taken from the door leading into the hallway. Notice the fireplace and the great windows? I really like the green carpet which continues into the hallway and bedroom but Brian isn't as enthused by it.

My First WCN event!

Friday, October 5th we rented out the extremely posh Palace Hotel Ball Room to hold our Gala dinner. For $500 a plate, we gave our donors tasty food, great entertainment in the form of Talisman (a Stanford U a cappella group), and mounds of inspiration from our dedicated conservation heroes who are all actively engaged in on the ground "in the trenches" conservation work to help save the habitat and preserve the longevity of large land mammals in 23 different countries!

Me, WCN staff, and the conservationists! (Yes it is the Richard wedding dress again! Give me a break...I am poor and I HATE dress shopping!) Charlie Knowles, my boss is at the far right of the front row. Eve, my co-worker is the first woman in the second row and Stacey and Elaine, my other two co-workers are the 2nd and 4 th women in the back row. The rest of the gang is our conservationists.....all amazing and inspirational and living out adventurous, sometimes dangerous, always altruistic lives in places like Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Botswana, Argentina, Ethiopia, and Kenya!