Our new home

(This is an old post which I created the day before I went into labour, and so never finished and posted. Thus it is a bit of a time warp, but a good place to get y'all started on the big catch up of our eventful spring/summer.)

As some of you may know, we moved to a new flat in March. Nearly two months ago. The time has flown, as the fact that I am only writing about this now will attest to, but even from the first week here we felt very at home.

We managed to still stay in the same neighborhood as we were before, but a little further east, which puts us right on the cusp between an older, more upscale area of flats (that Aaron would refer to as a "leafy-profy area" - prof=short for professor), and a more working-class area, that feels like its struggling a bit. There is a discount grocery store in that area, where you can get decent produce and cheap but good cheese and oatcakes, or you can buy flats of pop, giant bags of crisps, and frozen chips. Not to mention cheap beer, wine and spirits. Still getting used to that. Booze in the grocery stores. Actually as my due date approaches, I getting more excited about that prospect...

A glass of wine.....ahhhhhh.....

Our flat is in an old tenement building, with high ceilings (11 feet, I think). We have a spare bedroom and a spare living room. Well, I guess we have a living room, and then a dining room which adjoins the kitchen and where we tend to spend much of our time. Its a very friendly room. We feel a bit spoiled for space here, especially as the flat we just moved from was rather small. When we sit in the dining room sometimes we imagine how 65 years ago there was probably a family of 8 living here, a younger couple with a baby, like us (almost), a set of grandparents, a newly wed brother and sister-in-law, who sleep on the fold out couch in the living room and a lodger who sleeps on the couch or a roll-away cot in the dining room at night.

Our cats are our only lodgers here at the moment, and very happy here. They were rolling on their backs purring, within hours of moving in. Expressing our sentiments exactly.