What's New

First of all, I want to say thank you for visiting the blog and for all of the love on the new site! It feels good to be back to blogging and even gave me something to talk about at Thanksgiving😉. Since my first post was mostly just to introduce the blog I wanted to dedicate a post to what I've been up to the last four months. I stopped blogging in August when Mark had very recently moved to join me in Minnesota and we were still staying with my mom. Here's what we've been up to since then:

The house. Ooooh sounds so ominous and it kind of is! I lived with my mom for three months and Mark was there with me for about two months. We are so grateful to her for letting us live rent free but it was less than ideal, mostly for me. My commute to work was bout 50 minutes in pretty bad traffic, so I was not a happy camper. The silver lining was that I was always caught up on my podcasts. It was really nice to see my mom so much and to be in a familiar setting but we didn't feel settled because we knew we'd only be living with her temporarily. We apartment and house hunted for a few months but weren't in a rush at first because we wanted to save a little money after all of the moving expenses. We knew we'd be renting but weren't 100% sure where we wanted to live and whether to opt for a house or an apartment. Eventually we realized we were being too picky after we weren't finding anything that was ~perfect~. The house we ended up with was one I'd looked at before Mark moved to MN and had ruled out because the location wasn't great and it was quite small. We decided to go take another look at it together and reconsidered our little house in south Minneapolis. Needless to say, we pulled the trigger on renting and moved in in September. Problems arose on day 1. 

We had moved and stored all of our stuff in a PODS container and the way it was delivered was on an angle in our driveway with the door facing down. So all of our stuff had shifted and was pressing on the door, making it quite difficult to open. After about an hour with six people pushing on the door we could finally access our stuff! Unpacking is never fun but that went relatively smoothly but on day one we noticed that the kitchen sink drained verrrry slowly but didn't think much of it. Then on day two or three the kitchen sink randomly flooded with what was very clearly sewage (TMI? it was nasty) and the basement flooded. Our landlords were pretty much unresponsive even when we were telling them it was an emergency which was pretty disheartening when you move into a new place. After we were finally able to get a plumber to come out and "fix" the problem we were smooth sailing for about a day or two. Then the flooding happened again and around we went. They sent a different plumber and it's now been about two months with no plumbing issues so hopefully it's actually fixed this time!

I won't go into all of the details but this little episode was kind of an omen for how the first month and a half of living here went. We had a gas leak, our neighbors got robbed, our internet wasn't installed properly, a package got stolen, our brand new washing machine was broken. You get the picture. We seriously considered breaking our lease because we were both so unhappy here. Thankfully, things are looking up and now it's been about four weeks (not even joking) since we had any major issues so hopefully now we can finally relax and start to feel at home here.

I don't want to only talk about the bad so I'll tell you about how cute the house is. It's almost 100 years old but was remodeled right before we moved in so it's designed in a modern way. I've had so much fun decorating and Mark has been great indulging my desire to paint and install new light fixtures, so I'm really happy with how it's coming together! We have all of the major furniture now so it's starting to really feel like home. Here's a sneak peek of how the living room is coming together for the holidays:

Social life. I have one! I'm only half joking. Friends were hard to come by in California so it has been an adjustment (in the best way) to have so many friends and family members to do things with now. I'd say we usually have plans two or three nights a week which is up by about 100% from CA. I've tried so many good restaurants that I'll have to do a whole post on my new favorites in Minneapolis. All in all it's been so wonderful to be back with all of our people. 

Jobs. I can't remember if I previously mentioned this but my new job is at an advertising agency. I work as an Account Executive (AKA client services) and am basically the go-between for my client and our creative team. It's very different than my job at Google and has really challenged me. I've already learned a lot in the five months I've been there. For about two months the job was absolutely insane because we were in the thick of planning our holiday campaigns so I was working ten hour days pretty much without breaks. Thankfully that has passed and I'm back and a normal workload, so overall it's good!

Mark works as a Product Owner at a data security company downtown and overall really likes his job and exploring Minneapolis since he hasn't spent much time here as an adult. 

Louie. Yes, he deserves his own headline. A surprising amount of people have asked me how he's adjusting and I'm happy to say he's been great. It's snowed a few times and he's been okay with it so far. He loves going on walks around our neighborhood and going to my mom's house because her basement has so much space for him to run around. I'm glad we have our house for him to have more space and a yard so ultimately I think the house was the right call. He did have a rough last few weeks though between breaking a tooth and having to have it removed and having the groomer shave him without asking us right before winter he's had some issues haha. I cried over the shaving incident but he's still our happy little pup so it is what it is. The photo about is pre-grooming debacle. 

Minnesota. You guys, I just love it here so much. Minneapolis is such a fun city and the people are the best. This summer was so much fun exploring new restaurants and patios, we barely had a fall but the changing leaves were very welcome and we've already gotten snow! I cannot wait fore more snow and to be here for all of the Christmas season. Mark isn't nearly as enchanted with Minnesota as I am but he's happy to be back near his family so he's tolerated the weather for that tradeoff. 

I think we're all caught up now! We have a busy few weeks ahead of us but I hope to post some holiday content between in the coming weeks. I'm hosting a holiday party this weekend and we're going to be in New York next weekend so I'm sure I'll have some #content.