Welcome to Snow City

I've been in Snow City since Friday, and the weather has been unusually warm (highs in the 90s; readers in TX, OK, etc., can bite me) and very sunny, but today is wonderful.  Today Robert and I took our second morning walk along the Mississippi River on the hiking/biking trail (which is 2 blocks from our apartment) and the sky was overcast, the temperature in the upper 60s. 

Our move was pretty easy and straightforward (if such terms can apply to moving everything you own over 900 miles in a truck, including across a mountain range).  We're still unpacking, though I'd say that the living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, and both bathrooms are about 80% - 90% ready.  My office is still a disaster zone, and we are waiting for the maintenance people to figure out our phone line situation downstairs (where the bedroom and office are) so we can set up my computer.

It's going to take some getting used to being in an apartment that is both smaller than the previous ones (we've downgraded in size on our last two moves) and is a townhouse.  We're also on a kind of interesting climate control system - the building generates A/C or heat (depending on the season) and each apartment can turn on a fan (with 3 levels of air) to bring it in.  The nice part is that we only pay for the electricity that powers the fans, not that changes the air itself, but we also have less control over the temperature.  On the warm days this weekend, it got up to about 83 degrees in the dining room (where our thermostat lives) in the late afternoons.  The downstairs is distinctly cooler than the upstairs (as you might expect).

The apartment building is of that style I associate with urban areas - you go into the building, then down the hall to the specific apartment, like in a dorm or hotel.  We are on the fourth (top) floor but are very close to the elevator.  (The climate-controlled parking under the building is an open plan, but we have been parking in spot K-9, which is close to the elevator.)  The trash situation is pretty much awesome.  There is a trash chute next to the elevator where you stick in your trash and it gets sucked away.  Large trash and recycling you can take down to bins next to the elevator in the parking garage.  The mail box is on the first floor of our building, though for some reason the mail drop off is only in the other building (so far as we can tell).

Some specific pluses, minuses, and oddities about our apartment:

Kitchen:  The refrigerator is surprisingly small.  The top shelf is too short for a bottle of beer (i.e., Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout) to fit, so our Brita pitcher is on the bottom shelf.  We do not have a pantry, so I set up my metal shelves from my old bathroom in the dining room, and this seems to be working.  There is a lot of counter space and there is a microwave pre-installed above the stove.  The stove top has two large burners (our previous one had only a single large burner, and it was annoying).

Dining room:  This is a combined Robert office / dining room space (luckily, it's pretty big).  Its most salient feature is the overhead light, which is a big metal monstrosity that Robert and I have both hit our heads on multiple times because it hangs so low.

Living room: The living/dining areas have large windows as well as a skylight.  In keeping with our vampiric habits, we leave the blinds on the windows closed, but we can't do anything about the skylight, which being oriented to the west allows a bright shaft of light to cross over the dining area during the late afternoons.  The vaulted ceiling is really high.

Office: Hard to say until we unearth it from the 6 gazillion boxes.

Bathroom: It comes with no storage space at all, but the combined bath/shower with the molded plastic interior (much better than tile) and the sliding doors are nice.

Bedroom: The closets are on either side of a short hallway that leads to the master bathroom, and they have sliding doors, so it creates a sort of dressing area.  The bizarre thing about the closets is that in the longer closet, there are two rows for hanging things (that combined hanging rod + shelf typical in new apartments) but the top row is so low that you can't actually hang shirts, pants, etc., from that rod without it bunching up on the bottom shelf.

Master bathroom: All the storage is in this bathroom, but it has only a shower stall, which is a bit cramped.

A cool thing about the townhouse layout is that we have what Robert calls a Harry Potter room under the stairs to use for extra storage space.

Oh, we also have a "powder room" upstairs but we have used it to store our packing boxes and other stuff.  Because the door is set back from the wall, we can close the door and use the inset space for our upright, stand-alone freezer.