the office

Watching the olympics, going on hikes, cleaning, and running errands made the weekend fly!

Typically, living on the west coast is great for watching sports...Monday night football is on at 6, the World Series starts at 7 at the latest. That's not the case with the Olympics. Everything is taped and delayed even though they have that misleading "live" icon in the corner of the screen. I was impatient last night and repeatedly checked online to see the results of the swimming. Strangely, I found myself cheering for Dara Torres and hoping that she just MIGHT win the gold even though I already knew that she had won the silver. Weird how the mind works.

Devin and I are going to be moving at the end of the September. We love the house we're currently renting and the neighborhood is great and we're really sad to move (especially b/c we've probably moved at least 8 times in the past 5 years), but we've realized that we've only fully finished/furnished 2 of the rooms and don't use our spare bedroom except to store our bikes and use our clothes drying rack. So we decided it makes more sense to get a smaller place, pay less money, and save more aggressively in the hopes that we'll be able to buy a house in the next 2-3 years. In the meantime, though, we thought we'd post some pictures of our current house.

This is the office. One of our 2 finished rooms (the other is the kitchen). I rarely use it despite working from home which is ridiculous. I usually end up sitting in the living room or in the kitchen. We're really proud of the huge plant near the window. It's a giant bird of paradise and if it were planted outdoors, it would grow to 10 feet or more. We got it from a friend who was moving and it was far from healthy. Since neither of us have the greenest thumbs, we took it to a local nursery and asked them what we should do. They gave us some tips. We gave the plant some TLC and it's gotten 4 new leaves since then. The plant's survival was a pre-req for us getting a dog. We even named it Chin-Chow after 2 guys devin used to work with in Maryland. For whatever reason, whenever Larry tried to call Wayne by his first and last name, he would call him "Chin-Chow." So it's a bit of an homage to both of them.



This is the opposite side of the office. We LOVE the big wooden file cabinet despite the drawers not being in the most perfect condition. Sometimes we have to wrestle with it to get the drawers open and sometimes some cursing accompanies the wrestling. I picked it up at the Alameda flea market (along with the desk chair) for $100. The guy just wanted to get rid of them because he'd been lugging them around forever.





This is the back of our house which we actually use as our main entrance 99.9% of the time. It's a good way for us to keep tabs on who's at the door because if someone is at the front door, we know it's somebody we don't know. There's a big brick area behind our house where klaus likes to lounge. For the most part, he's okay out there without being on a leash, but there have been a few times where we have had to go on a mad search for him.






































Devin and I had a very low-key Christmas this year. I was going to build him a planter box for some fresh herbs as his present. I ended up buying the wood and supplies, and devin built it. He even used the tool-lending library which is AWESOME. You take your library card and you can borrow tools like big motorized saws and ladders and pretty much any tool you could imagine. From left to right....some dying thyme, parsley that is half green and half brown, some beautiful hardy (hearty?) sage, and some very dead coriander. And it looks like klaus might have stored a stick in there, too.

Devin and klaus snoozing on Sunday.