Busy!

We have been very busy, but we finally managed to take a bit of a break yesterday.

The weekend before Last weekend (Memorial day Wkend) Anne and I went to St. Louis looking for an apartment. We used Rent.com and the Apartment Guide. We armed ourselves with a map and many appointments. What did we find? crraap. The apartments we saw were all in giant complexes, run down, and little, and expensive. On sunday Laufersweiler and Wendy helped us look. We left equipped with only a general idea of the areas we might like. we found hundreds of phone numbers. No offices were open since it was Memorial Day weekend, but we resolved to return again, this time bearing many more appointments.

We returned to St. Louis on Friday (Anne's immediate boss being about the coolest boss ever) and saw many more apartments. They were on averege about 200 square feet bigger, much nicer, much cooler, and ~$100/mo. cheaper. Most importantly, it was the putative landlord who did the showing instead of some office flunky. That seems good.

"So, what", you ask, is the upshot? We put in an application, and a security deposit on a 1br, 5 room apartment in a four family building in the "Southwest garden" neighborhood. then we went out with Anne's brother, Mark, for celabratory Chinese buffet.

We were so pleased with our progress, that on Sunday we decided to go hiking. We really like going, but haven't really had a chance since Febuary. On sunday, we didn't really get the ideal early start that I prefer, but we left the house by about 8:30. That got us out on the trail at ~9:00, which is just fine. It was a beautiful day. It was hot, but not too hot, and we didn't step into any major nests of seed ticks. We were both really surprised at how much better we felt when we got home. It was really great, except now I want to go hiking again this weekend, but we probably won't have time.

This has been a really long entry. I have to finish cleaning the house so it can have a showing.
I've included a picture from the trail we went on yesterday. It's one from Febuary, hopefully I'll get the pictures out of the camera from yesterday soon.


Brian