Reflections on a month in our new home

I realized today that we've been in our new home for just a little over a month. Exciting, right? We're still in various states of unpacking, but we haven't had a good excuse to really finish (housewarming party, anyone? I need the motivation to show our place off!)

It leaves me with a few frustrations, however, mostly having to do with the undone state of a lot of the work promised us by the seller. As a CYA, I had a rider added to our contract stating that a number of things would need to be finished prior to Oct. 15 - a lot of them aren't done, or anywhere near. And so, while I have the recourse of having these things done professionally and having their costs taken off the total value of the house, Blu and I just can't afford to have a lot of them done. However, we have made a number of small improvements inside and well...improving a house really does just take time.

Tonight we sat and enjoyed our beautiful weekend evening by cracking open one of our new games. Blu and I have a hobby of sending our used books to Amazon and using the proceeds to buy new things. We're board game aficionados - the weirder, the better - and a friend of ours back in Colorado turned us on to a little game called Pandemic. The goal of the game is simple. Discover the cures to four diseases before the world outbreak is impossible to contain. You do so by traveling around the world, researching, and discovering the cures. The game is cooperative (everyone against the board), and pretty difficult to win.

Blu demonstrating a typical setup of a game of Pandemic. The little blue and red knobblies are our player markers. The colored wooden blocks represent levels of infection in their respective cities. Once a city gets 3 blocks, it "breaks out" to all the cities surrounding it.

A night of Pandemic, a bottle of wine, and a (winning) Packers game made for a great night. Tomorrow, we'll be heading to Menards to start winterizing the house!