Loving Fall....

24 Hours in Montreal!

Welcome to Canada!

Dave & I have been planning a 4 day mini-vacation to Montreal since the end of September.  We were supposed to go this past weekend and instead of staying for 4 days we spent 1 night. The weather changed from the time we checked Wednesday night to when we got there on Thursday. Instead of rain for Thursday and part of Friday it was going to rain all the way through Saturday! I also woke up on Friday not feeling great so we decided to come home instead of spending a lot of money to sit in a hotel.  Montreal is probably a really great city but we weren't able to enjoy it in 40 degree rainy weather. We will try again another time--good thing we were able to drive and decide when we wanted to leave.  The hotel we stayed in was very cool and super nice--they let us cancel our other 2 nights there with no problems. So if you are ever looking for a hotel look for a W Hotel to stay at! Super nice, super friendly and fancy!

Welcome home!

October 31st, 2010:

Dylan the Pirate!

We spent Halloween in Hoboken with the MacDonald's.  Hoboken sure knows how to make families happy and welcomed! They closed down half of Washington Street so that the kids could parade in their costumes! The stores along Washington Street also had candy for the kids who were Trick 'O' Treating! It makes me excited to be moving to a new town that has a "downtown main street" so we can enjoy similar events like Halloween in the future.  

Moving on up to the East Side....

Beautiful new kitchen!

Okay so actually we are moving West not East but it's all the same!  We finally found a place to live! After house hunting since Father's Day Weekend back in June we found something! We also realized that we really can not afford to buy a house in New Jersey at this time--anything we liked we could not afford, and anything we could afford we didn't like...SO we settled on looking into buying a 2 bedroom condo.  We found one!!! We are buying a 2 bedroom, 2 bath condo with a living room, kitchen dinning room AND A LAUNDRY ROOM!!!!! I think I am most excited about the laundry room part-it costs us $5 a week to do our laundry at our current apartment complex.  I try to go to my parents house every few weeks but that doesn't always work out. 

View in October!

As for our condo, we just had our inspection and now we are waiting to hear what the lawyers say about that. If all goes well we will be closing on November 30 and moving mid December.  We are so very excited and the development is really beautiful.  It comes with a pool, playground, tennis/basketball courts and a million sidewalks to walk around on. No gym which makes me sad but I'll find something. Everyone in the complex seems to be young couples, either just having their first baby or about to have a second one. It's a great place to start a family and make new friends (and keep our old ones as well!)



So all in all we are very excited and can not wait to start the next part of our lives in New Jersey!

You know it's time to move when....

So Dave & I have been living in our wonderful apartment since the end of January and it's going so-so.  The apartment itself is not anything special, it is considered a "two bedroom" because the second room has a closet (although that has been transformed into a kitchen pantry) and it is incredibly small.  We have a living room, a kitchen, master bedroom and a bathroom- no dining area so we have a tiny bistro table in our living room that we attempt to eat on.  The complex does have a really nice pool that I took advantage of all summer and they have provided every apartment with one air conditioner. We are allowed to put another one in the bedroom(s)-- we have gone through 3 air conditioners in our bedroom this summer! Thankfully the first two came free of charge from my parents bu they only lasted a few weeks, we sucked it up and bought the third one from Target only for it to stop working on LOW after a week or so. We can run the a/c on MED or HIGH but not low! So our room is always very cold.  But the saving grace for our a/c problems is that today is the first day of Fall--though one would not know that since today's high was 85 and tomorrow it is supposed to reach 90! Yes friends we do live in New Jersey now NOT Orlando!

Okay, so our apartment isn't amazing--everyone should live a crappy place for awhile but the actual apartment is not really the problem so much as the surrounding apartments.  Let's start with the most annoying problem--faulty smoke detectors.  One of the apartments behind us has a smoke detector that is constantly beeping because it needs new batteries--come on now people! Call the office and ask them to replace the batteries. If we can hear YOUR smoke detector in our apartment you must be dying of the sound! I have tried to figure out which apartment it is coming from but have not been able to pin point it down yet--my goal is to figure out which apartment number and call as that apartment renter to ask for the batteries to be replaced. So far I've failed at this goal.

First dinner 

Second problem with our apartment complex--our awesome neighbors across the way from us.  Our sliding doors from our living room open up to another apartments sliding doors to their living room. Not close enough to see all but close enough to hear their TV when its loud-- OR when they are screaming at each other for over an hour.  They are a young, newly married couple who scream daily for at an hour and 1/2 about how they should not have gotten married, who they text on the iPhone's, who they chat with on Facebook and how much of an a$$hole he is to her.  When I say loud, I mean we can each and every word perfectly! We can hear it so well that we had to turn on our a/c AND the TV on the weekend and we could still hear them yelling! If you are yelling now and have just gotten married, it's going to be a long rough ahead.


And, lastly this morning we woke up to no hot water. Do you know how wonderful it feels to wash your face at 6:15 in the morning with ICE COLD water? Yeah not so much. Dave did brave it and attempted to take a shower--me I decided it was not worth the icicles that were going to form to shower and went to work dirty. Don't worry I brought my deodorant along with me and used it frequently throughout the day.



So all in all, the house hunting is back and we are ready to move NOW!

...because everyone else is doing it...

I'd like to thank everyone else on Facebook who has started a blog and has posted it! I seem to fall prey to peer pressure--it started first with Friendster, then Jewster, then MySpace, Facebook, Twitter (yes I have a twitter account but NO I not ever tweet!) and finally a blog!

So with that being said, lets get started on this blogging thing! 

Dave and I have been living in New Jersey for just over a year, and you know what that means? HOUSE HUNTING! Come on! We did it in Orlando after living there for a year, we must continue with the tradition! Too bad it's much harder to find a nice house in New Jersey that we like.  We have been house hunting for two months now and still haven't found THE HOUSE! I have gone out a half a dozen times since June and still haven't found anything. But I will continue on! THE PERFECT HOUSE is out there-even if takes me forever to find it! Thankfully though we have been approved for a loan by our dear friend Brian over at Red Oak Mortgage  ( www.redoakmtg.com )

This is the type of house we would like: 

But this seems to be what we can actually afford:

Not really, but you get the point of how expensive North Jersey is these days!

 Okay, I think that is all for my first blog. We'll see how often I update this thing-probably a lot until I go back to work in September!