stormdog: a woman with light skin and long brown hair that cascades over one shoulder. On her other side, she is holding a large plush shark against herself. She has pink fingernails and pink cat eye glasses (Default)
I'm online only minimally because I'm using my cell phone for the data. More on that below.

Looking out the front windows of the new place, I noticed the siding of the condo across the way picking up wonderful reds and oranges from the sunset. I stepped outside to look west and saw a really gorgeous sunset across the farm field that's just across the road from us. I may end up taking a bunch of sunset photos in the future. The view is hard to beat: just flat fields and wide open sky for the sun to light up. It may be the best thing that I wasn't expecting about this move.

That said, the unadvertised central air conditioning is pretty awesome too. It totally wasn't on the listing. Surprise! I think the resale price of the condo may have just gone up a few thousand dollars?

It's rained a few times since we've started settling in and I was surprised at how loudly I was hearing drops against some kind of metallic surface. I investigated and found that the sound was traveling down the chimney of the fireplace. I like it.

We cooked a pizza for dinner tonight. The oven smelled kind of weird while it was cooking and was a little smoky when I opened it to look. It turns out that the wire rack above the one I put the pizza on had some kind of...something on it. It melted and dripped all over the pizza and the bottom of the oven too. I have no clue what it is except that it looks kind of pink? I'm going to have to clean that rack thoroughly before cooking anything else. Or just take it out as a stopgap I suppose.

As noted, we have no internet yet. I'd carefully arranged our schedule for installation and setup the day after we took possession at a time we'd be here after driving the truck up and before dropping it off. The tech came and spent some time trying to tone out the line to the exterior interface and gave up. They're going to send someone to pull a new line on the 31st. No extra charge, but we're stuck using data from our phones until then.

Seregil is enjoying his perch in front of the front windows. He sits on a weird 3-level desk that I grabbed from the dumpster and that we've really only used as a cat tree. It's been unexpectedly good for that purpose. The windows are also low enough for Ella to easily get up on her hind legs and look out of. This is great, except that she barks at everyone going by and I don't think these walls are that soundproof. We're getting curtains ASAP.

Speaking of walls that aren't very soundproof, I'm glad we're in an end-unit and our bedroom is on the outside wall.

But we also have upstairs neighbors, who we can hear walking around pretty regularly, so sound may be an issue there. It doesn't bother me, as long as they're not making a lot of noise in the wee hours, but it seems likely that that this building is just wood frame construction, not concrete or anything like that.
Which is why the our floors are squeaky and slightly uneven. But no big deal.

I have set up our bed and my vanity and cheval mirror. Eventually I'll take a picture because it looks nice. It's the only nice-looking room right now, but I'm working on that.

The layout of the living room is weird and our TV stand isn't going to work well in it. In fact, I'm not sure where the TV is going to go long term. We've repurposed the TV stand to hold that enormous microwave that I got for free and fixed: it's set up in the kitchen next to the stove. It looks a little weird, but it'll do for now.

I took another load of stuff here from the old place today. I kind of want to do more, but I'm not motivated enough to get past the soreness. Tomorrow will be fine. I moved *all* the furniture on my own yesterday, plus a carload more and I was so sore and tired for a lot of today. Still am, really.

And those are my random thoughts and observations so far.
stormdog: (Tawas dog)
This is the development we live in. It's called Molenwijk, Mill District, and the buildings are laid out to call to mind classic four-sailed windmills. The buildings are individually named things like tower mill (torenmolen) and bergmolen (mountain mill). We live in Petmolen, which I'm not sure I'm getting the correct translatin for. (Pet mill?) They are ten floor residential highrises with car parks in the middle, and we are on the third floor. Access to the front door is via a shared exterior walkway that runs the length of the building, and we have a back balcony exclusive to our unit.

This is quite atypical urban planning for Amsterdam, but it was built in the 1960s and is much (much!) newer than the old city south of the IJ. If I figured out the translated history correctly, the land we are on was water until the 1870s when it was drained and became a polder. Officially we are in Amsterdam, but it is Amsterdam Noord, across the IJ from the center of old Amsterdam.

The squarish building in the southeast is a shopping center with a grocery store (Albert Heijn), doctors offices, a post office, and other handy things. Even high-rise residential is fairly walkable here! Also, the entire interior of the Molenwijk area, other than the stub roads that to to the car parks, is restricted to pedestrian and bicycle traffic. There are frequently people with dogs visible outside our windows. This being the Netherlands, they are usually off leash. This morning, there were two cute chubby birds sitting in the tree just past our balcony. I really like the place so far.

There's a lot of cleaning left to do at the old place. I'm going to end up taking a few trips to take care of everything there, and will likely buy a bike trailer to take any remaining bits and bobs over here and because I want one anyway for grocery shopping.

The Molenwijk Neighborhood in Amsterdam-Noord

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stormdog: a woman with light skin and long brown hair that cascades over one shoulder. On her other side, she is holding a large plush shark against herself. She has pink fingernails and pink cat eye glasses (Default)
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