Home At Last

I'm back! After lots of wonderful vacationing, time with family and friends, and far too many plane rides for even my taste, Matt and I are back in Portland, for good this time! And after a few weeks off from writing, I am excited to be back, and although we are still a couple weeks away from moving into our new rental house (we are currently staying with my cousin, just a few blocks from my old apartment!), I am going to launch myself back into writing about our plans for our little homestead in the city, changing our shopping routines, and getting ourselves some chickens! (Yes, chickens!)

As you can see, I'm still messing around with the layout here, trying to find a template I really like, and I'm almost there! I just need some fresh photos, but those will have to wait until I actually have plants and chickens to take photos of. Do note that I've updated the links in the sidebar, lots of cool and useful stuff there. The Get Rich Slowly site is one of my new favorites. It has loads of helpful hints for saving money, shopping efficiently, and also a lot of good information around bigger financial things like mortgages, credit cards, loans, etc.

Although we're home, we're mostly still living off of the things we took to New Zealand with us. I am SO tired of these clothes. I've gotten a few things at Goodwill and I found an awesome free skirt hanging on a power pole yesterday (I love Portland), but mostly we're trying to hold out until we unpack our storage unit. We attempted to retrieve fresh clothes from the unit before we went to Hawaii, only to discover that in our slightly haphazard packing of the unit, all of our clothes ended up at the very back, underneath all of our furniture. Whoops.

We're still waiting for a move-in date for our house. It will be July 1 at the latest, but the current tenants thought they would be out around the 20th, in which case we will probably be able to move in a few days after that. Matt has already done some research on chicks, and the Urban Farm Store is getting a shipment in on June 24th, with all the breeds we want. With any luck, we'll have our own place by then. I've been doing some garden planning, as we'll be starting our garden so late in the season that there's not a moment to spare- for me, getting some plants in the ground takes priority over unpacking! We'll be able to buy pretty advanced starts for most of the things we want to grow, so I've been doing some comparison shopping to see what the best buys are.

I also decided that my free time right now (Matt already landed a job, but I'm still searching) is best put to use putting together a price book, so that when we move in and supply our kitchen, we'll know where to get the most bang for our buck. It's actually kind of fun, going to grocery stores without buying anything. I got a little looseleaf notebook and spent an hour at Fred Meyer today, writing down the best prices they had for all of the main staples that we buy. I felt like I was sleuthing out some kind of big corporate mystery, seeing the trends in pricing between brands and noting that at particular places you can only buy small bags of whole wheat flour, nothing over 5 pounds! Wow.

That's probably enough of my musing for now. I'm short on new photos at the moment, so sorry about all the text, but thanks for reading, and boy, is it good to be back!