Stolen Wi-Fi

Here I am, laying on the floor in our furniture-less living room, stealing wireless internet from a neighbor.  I just thought to check if any networks were available because we're dying with boredom in an empty house with no TV or internet to entertain us.  Tate is putting together our new barstools right now.  Jace is asleep in the pack'n'play in our bedroom.  We should have been more prepared and packed board games or something, but we realized once we got here that we didn't really pack much of anything worth while for the next few days before our moving truck arrives.  We had to run out to Target last night and pick up some clearance bedding and pillows (for our air mattress... that has a hole, sigh.).  We also picked up some towels and dish rags on clearance there.  All in all we spent less than $20 on 2 towels, 4 hand towels, 6 dish rags, sheets, 2 pillows and pillow covers and a microplush blanket... so some real quality stuff, haha!

We spent all day today furniture shopping.  What a headache!  We found a few things we liked, but we couldn't agree on whether to get a chair and a half with an ottoman (my choice) or a loveseat (Tate's choice) to compliment the couch we picked out.  After thinking it through we think we can go ahead and order our living room couch and the office desk, chair and cabinets all from the same place.  As for additional living room furniture, we're going to wait it out and see if we find something we can both agree on.  I'm secretly hoping Tate caves and agrees with me, but I'm sure he's hoping the opposite.

The thing we're most missing is our fridge.  We've been living out of a small cooler all week, which is barely big enough to fit anything other than Jace's milk.  Without a fridge we've been going out to eat for pretty much every meal.  It's definitely been fun to try out some new restaurants that are popular down here, but I miss having home-cooked meals.  My favorite place we went to so far was Fatz Cafe, but Tate really liked Sticky Fingers BBQ.  Jace has been loving going out to eat because kid's menu's really only consist of two choices: chicken fingers or cheeseburgers.  Hopefully he hasn't gotten too used to junk food this week!

We've really been enjoying our surroundings here.  The weather has been great (about 60 yesterday and 55 today... really sunny too!) and the people are all really friendly.  We also really like our house so far, I think it's better than either of us remembered... or maybe it's just that now that we have added a couple personal touches (3 barstools at the breakfast bar, curtains for the sliding glass patio door, plants from home, etc.) it's started to look nicer.  It's pretty small (about 1300 sq ft on one floor) but the floor plan is perfect and it feels alot more spacious.

The current paint colors are actually growing on us, we've decided we're definitely not painting any of the main living area since the ceilings are vaulted and it would be way too much work for a rental.  The colors are actually not that bad, they're just not what I would ever pick.  (The entry is a deep wine colored red and the living room, dining room and kitchen are a muted sage green color.  The wall that the fireplace is on is also painted wine and so is beneath the breakfast bar.)  I've realized this color scheme must have been popular with quite a few people recently because there are several home decor items to match these two colors perfectly in stores.  The other place we had planned on painting was the master bedroom that is painted a dark turquoise color and is striped with glossy or matte paint in the same shade.  One of the walls was never completed and three more stripes need to be painted on.  I'm not sure if the previous renters ran out of paint or tape or what, it's confusing.  Either way, the color would be a huge pain to cover since it's dark and different texture so I think we'll just complete the stripes and make it work.  Since all of our bedroom stuff is white it won't clash or anything.  So basically the only room we need to paint right away is Jace's pink bedroom.  Oh, and they also painted the ceilings pink in his room, lovely, can't wait to paint those back to white!

Our neighborhood seems to be filled with normal people, lots of people appear to have kid's although we haven't met anyone yet.  Lots of the yards have palm trees out front, including ours.  Most people put a light under their tree to illuminate it at night, so we really want to get one to make ours pop, since our front yard is a little dark.  We have a little patio outside the sliding glass door.  I'm excited to use our patio furniture again!  We have a wooden table and chairs for outside... I'm planning on re-staining them soon to bring back some of their luster.  The most exciting thing is that we can grill all year round here, we love to grill!  Oh, and I forgot to mention we have a pond out back that we see from our living room and master bedroom windows, as well as from our back patio.  It's not close enough that I worry about Jace-the-escape-artist running to it and diving in, but it's close enough to get a nice view of something other than other houses.

The culture in South Carolina is super different than Minnesota.  I've come to realize that I'm going to have to start saying "y'all" or I'm going to offend people.  Y'all is the south's way of saying "you guys" like we do in MN.  People down here look at you like you're crazy if you say "Do you guys deliver to Summerville?"... (What do you mean "us guys" we're women!) then you have to correct yourself and say "Do y'all deliver to Summerville?"  Ugh.  I'm totally going to get made fun of when I'm caught saying it by someone back home.  Another thing we've noticed is that everyone wants to be your friend and tell you a random story.  Everywhere we go people are chatting away and getting long-winded, no wonder everything moves slower than it does in Minnesota.  The check out lanes at Target take 10 minutes to get through,  food takes 25-30 minutes to arrive at your table after ordering at some restaurants... it will just take some getting used to!  It will probably end up being good for us to take a breathe and chill instead of zooming through everything like we're used to.

The weather has been awesome.  It's been sunny everyday, which I guess is the norm in SC.  They call it "Carolina Blue" because the sky is always blue, so far it's been true from our experiences here.  The weather yesterday was low 60s while I was out running errands and it was so sunny that I turned on the AC in the car, I was sweating!  That's only because I had my coat on though, and I couldn't wiggle it off while driving on the freeway.  Speaking of driving, thank god we have a GPS now because I don't know what I would do without it.  It's one of those things you don't realize how nice they are until you have them, sort of like cell phones.  I wonder why I held out so long on the GPS trend.  It's helped out so much with finding our way around and I already feel like I'm getting used to the roads.  The roads here are pretty confusing because the street lights are all on wires and there are no street names posted on them usually.  Also, it's hard to tell if you're in a turn lane because instead of having a red arrow they just have a standard red light. 

Ok this is getting boring, I'm rambling... but I just thought I'd jot down a few thoughts.  I promise to post pictures (of the house and of Jace-kins) as soon as our camera cords and stuff are all unpacked.  Hopefully our stuff arrives Monday morning, but we'll see...

PS- Jace is LOVING running around in all the open space here in the house.  His favorite game is to hide behind the curtains and pull out the stick that keeps the sliding glass door secured shut.  He also really likes to jump on our air mattress, maybe that's why it has a hole now!