Moving

After much debate over the pains of moving, we decided to find a new apartment in the city. We were having trouble with the neighbors below us smoking pot and it seeping into our apartment. We were miserable and had to get out of there. Luckily, management let us out of our lease and refunded our deposit. We found an apartment that is SO much better (only about 4 blocks away from our old one) and moved in Friday May 9. Though our new place is a little bit smaller, it is very worth it. We are located at the top of a hill and from the front have a great view of the golden gate bridge, ocean, and city from our apartment. From the back of the apartment, we look into a nice wooded area. Our parking here is much better as well and we are even saving quite a bit of money each month by living here. Overall, we LOVE it at our new place! We have enjoyed watching the sunrise and sunset each day as well as the fog roll in over the bay at times. We are so grateful we had the opportunity to move to such a great place and are so happy that we made the choice to do it.

Our building is the one way at the top of the hill.

The steep curvey hill leading to our apt.

One of many sets of steep stairs leading to the apts... 42 in this section alone!

Living Room

Living Room

Dining room... notice the trees out the window!

Who wouldn't want to do dishes with this view?!

The smallest bathroom I have ever seen with "beautiful blue tile" as the landlady said.

The Bedroom

The apartment may be small and not very fancy, but it is all about the views!

The woods behind our apt.

View of the ocean from our apt.

View of the Golden Gate Bridge from our apt.

Sunset over the ocean... seen from our apt!

Sunset

Sunset

After Sunset

In other news, Adam accepted an offer for a new job at St. Francis Hospital in downtown SF. He will be working in their registration and billing department and will start this coming week. He will be making about double what he was making at Southwest and will not have to commute. We are very happy about this new opportunity as work at the airlines has been miserable lateley.

And, no post woul be complet without a picture of our plump 14 1/2 pound kitty.

Our baby girl is 1!

How could I have forgotten to post the pictures of our baby girl's first birthday?! She turned 1 on April 1st and we celebrated with a little party for her (if you can call it that). We made a birthday hat for her and made her stand in front of a can of Fancy Feast with a match in it (I'm sure she would have preferred a cake with real candles). I'm not sure she liked it very much; but I know she enjoyed her birthday treat!

Ginger in her party hat

At first, she was not very interested...

Then, she discovered it was food!

Mmmm...

April '08

April has been a very busy and exciting month for us. We are still enjoying life here in San Francisco and have loved exploring this wonderful city. We celebrated our 1 year wedding anniversary on the 14th with dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. We are SO happy together and can't believe it has already been a year! It has been a crazy one, but it has been good and we look forward to many many more.

Beautiful Roses from Adam

Rachel's friends from college, Kamberly and Ethel, came for a visit the 16th-20th. They stayed in a hotel downtown and we had a great time showing them around San Francisco. We took them to the Marin Headlands, Muir Woods (our favorite place), Fisherman's Wharf, and Golden Gate Park. Here are some pictures from their visit.

Marin Headlands

Muir Woods

Twin Peaks

Ghirardelli Square

Japanese Tea Gardens

Adam's mom and grandmother came to visit the 20th-24th. They stayed with us in our small 1 bedroom apartment and again we had a great time showing them the sights. We took them to Golden Gate Park (Japanese Tea Gardens, Tulip Gardens, Botanical Gardens, de Young Museum, Ocean Beach), Fisherman's Wharf (Cable Cars, Musee Mechanique, Boudin Sourdough bread bakery, a bay cruise, the aquarium, etc.), Muir Woods, the Marin Headlands, and the Palace of the Legion of Honor. They had a wonderful time and enjoyed seeing all the sights.

Japanese Tea Gardens

Japanese Tea Gardens

Tulip Gardens

Flowers at the Park

Cable Cars

Boudin Sourdough Bread

The Aquarium

Palace of the Legion of Honor

Marin Headlands

Muir Woods

A short and EXPENSIVE trip to MN...

In March, we decided to take advantage of our free airline tickets through Adam's job with Southwest Airlines and go home to MN to visit our families. Southwest does not fly to MN, but has agreements with certain other airlines that do. Since we had to fly standby, we were a little nervous about making it (for some reason, everything seemed to be extremely full those days). We managed to get on a Sun Country Airlines flight to Minneapolis and arrived late in the evening. That night we drove down to Rochester, where we spent the following day visiting old co-workers, Adam's mom and Grandma, and met up with friends. The next day, we drove to the Twin Cities where we spent all day visiting with Rachel's family.


Rachel and Melanie

The next morning, we headed to the airport in hopes of getting on the morning flight back to SFO (we both had to work the following day). What were we thinking to go on this trip??? We sat around waiting to be called up to the podium for our boarding passes, but the plane left without us. We began to panic as all of our backup plans appeared full as well. Finally we resorted to the last possible action that would get us home in time: we purchased first class tickets on NWA (coach only $50 less). Not a cheap flight! The final price was (per person)...


Our expensive boarding passes