Home, sweet...is this really home?

It's been a month since we moved in here, and I'm still not used to it.

Moving from a one-bedroom apartment to a three-bedroom, three-level house has its advantages. There's finally room for everything. Excepting, of course, our kitchen paraphernalia: you'd need a whole 'nother house to store all of that properly. Okay, I'm exaggerating, a bit...our cupboards are nearly overflowing, but there's still ten or so boxes marked "Kitchen".

This place is fully furnished save the two extra bedrooms. Realistically, our library has room for one or perhaps two more bookshelves--both of which we could fill easily--and that's it. The rec room downstairs is positively stuffed with furniture. I look at it all and wonder how the hell it came out of our old place. It's like seventeen clowns in the back of a VW bug, you know?

What I'm finding is that I just can't get used to the expanded space. Before we moved in here, we visualized a downstairs "living room" in which we would spend a good chunk of time. A month later, the TV works down there, but the VCR and DVD have yet to be connected, let alone turned on, and there doesn't seem to be any urge to get this done. The rec room has become a place to drag laundry through on the way to and from the laundry room.

Oh, we spend some time "down cellar". Like last evening, during the worst thunderstorm I've seen in a couple of years...I looked out the front window and up at the sky and noticed swirls of grey rotating away up there. Not a funnel cloud, but something that looked like it wanted to be a funnel cloud when it grew up. Ken promptly descended below ground level.

But primarily, we live our life on the main floor. That's something I would never have predicted.

This is arguably the squeakiest house I have ever lived in. You can stand in the basement and listen to people moving around in the living room...a very disturbing thing to hear when you're alone in the house, believe me. If you come up to investigate, you'll find a cat pacing. And not even the big cat.

I was a little apprehensive to learn that our home is abutted on both sides by houses rented to university students. Eva has reassured me that anyone choosing to live this far off campus is probably serious about their education, and my 'Animal House' musings are most likely nonsense. I believe her...mostly. I spent a semester living half a block down the street, and it was pretty quiet then. But I saw things during my time as a university student that firmly convinced me many students arrive in Waterloo direct from the other side of the galaxy, having heard that Earth girls are easy and the party never ends.Luckily, the dividing wall between our house and the other half of the semi is solid concrete, attic to basement. Armageddon could commence over there and we'd never know it.

I figure another month and I'll feel fully at home here...