our first home.

After three months of living out of suitcases in guest rooms and hotels, Ben and I finally have a home of our own! Last Monday we looked at a brand new fully furnished two-bedroom apartment in the Docklands area of Melbourne, within walking distance of the CBD and a great deal compared to other apartments we'd checked out. Our application was accepted on Tuesday, we signed the lease on Wednesday, picked up our keys on Saturday and moved in on Sunday. Our real estate agent was very pleasant to work with and explained the entire lease in great detail, which was helpful in making sure we weren't accidentally signing our lives away to satanic forces.

Anne graciously helped us move and took us on a Costco run, and afterwards the three of us spent the beautiful afternoon walking through the vibrant South Melbourne markets, having lunch at a delicious Turkish cafe. The weather has been very nice, and everyone describes it as "upper 20's and 30's," which apparently means warm and sunny. I still need to get used to this Celsius thing.

Moving is expensive and exhausting, even when you don't have a lot of stuff to move, and even when the place comes fully furnished. The apartment has really nice furniture, cooking items and some great storage pieces. But there are still a lot of things we need, and it's been kind of irritating to get them, mostly because we have it all in storage at the family cabin in Washington. But we chose to leave those items behind, like we did our movie collection. Speaking of which, my laptop is now permanently set to only play Zone 4 DVDs, so I guess it's a good thing we didn't bring our American movies. Except for our wedding video, which apparently we won't be watching for a while...

For our first dinner, I cooked up some pasta on our new stove, and then accidentally dumped all the contents into our new kitchen sink. Ben made some joke about me "throwing everything in including the kitchen sink!" which would have been funny, except that I had also managed to fail at doing a simple load of laundry that night too. Homemaker Candice is off to a fantastic start.

Nevertheless, we finally have a home, and it's our first time actually living together. We've waited a long time for this day, but it was well worth it - our apartment is beautiful, we're in an awesome city, and things are slowly but surely coming together.

And for the first time since the wedding day, we finally feel like we're actually married.

CK