New Neighborhood!

We are out of Bioggio and living in Lugano!


With much thanks to Anna and LeeLee for bringing cleaning supplies and much needed elbow grease last Wednesday, we busted out for about 5 hours and SCRUBBED down the entire old apartment until we were satisfied.  Kris had contacted the family we were subleasing from and I think they expected, when they came to meet us, that we would still be packing boxes and moving things out since we're contractually tied til the end of October.  They definitely looked surprised when they came to the apartment and saw it totally empty and CLEAN!  We chatted for a few minutes, promised to make a date to have dinner with them sometime soon, handed over the keys, stuffed the rest of the little odds and ends (my veggies, stepladder, etc, etc) into the car and drove off into what was no longer sunset but full on evening to unload the car and marvel at how much more sore after moving cleaning could render us (well, me, anyway.)  No more super-construction sounds day in, day out from Mon-Fri, 7:30 am to 6:00 pm.  No more airplanes flying overhead on their way to the Agno airport.  No more evil eye from the lady who doesn't actually own the strip of grass outside her apartment backyard wall but still insists that you don't let your dog do business there.  We are downtown and settling in!  The first morning we woke up here in the new place, Kris took the moving van back to Ikea and I attacked the kitchen, finding places for everything and working around the bed.  Yup.  The kitchen floor was the last space to put something really huge like a rolled up mattress so we spent a few nights in there on the floor before Tuesday, I decided I couldn't take it anymore and moved clothing and furniture out of the way in the bedroom and put the bedframe back together almost all by myself!  I'm so proud. ; )  Kris had put together the frames for his closets and we got the backing, doors and shelves put in securely (I had attempted on Monday and the shelves kept slipping and falling, of course, on my arm in the same spot about three times before I gave up and let him finish the job.)  We got my closets put together this past weekend and most of my clothing is put away!  I'm somehow re-arranging shelves (all my drawers are in the same order but shelf-category seems to have moved a bit.)  We still have to decide where we want these all to go and make the room totally functional but for now, having clothing away and seeing piles of empty suitcases in the storage room (future guest room) is awesome.  Still lots and lots to do but I succeeded in getting the one little patio off the living room doggie friendly-we don't think she'd actually try to stick her head in between the bars but we don't want that chance.  I found a roll of garden mesh (the kind you put over plants to keep birds off of, etc) and cut and tied it to the patio border.


I'm working on getting the lay of the neighborhood-exploring with Chloe and finding all the grocery stores nearby, so have done a bit of price comparing.  Since our car is having issues again, Kris takes the bus to work and so doesn't come home for lunch at the moment so my schedule is totally free during the day to wander, unpack more, eat when I get around to it, and take car of Chloe's outside needs.  We totally love living down here!  Most of our friends live downtown so that's a plus, and there's a kebab shop 5 minutes from our apartment door.  A delicious kebab shop.  If you know what a kebab is, then you know what a good thing that is.  If not...you should learn what a kebab is.  It's in the gyro family-same concept, different spices, different sauce, and if I haven't eaten breakfast and we wander downtown for a few hours, it's the perfect midday meal.  We've tried the Chinese restaurant in the area-decent food but not typical huge amounts of it, which was a little bit of a bummer.  But it's a ten minute walk to the main plaza in Lugano, ten minutes to the big park for Chloe, ten minutes to groceries-easy exercise now consists of an egg or bread run and walking up and down the stairs (third floor, no elevator) several times a day for Chloe to go to the little park right across the street from us.  She's getting settled in and has decided that with all her stuff here, and the same blankets to curl up on on the same couches, that we're home.  She's still mixed up about Kris not coming home in the middle of the day so she's super-excited to see him after work but once CSCS moves in April, and he's again a ten-minute walk to the office, she'll be back to normal.  This week has been all about computer repairs, so far-Kris's laptop died last week, mine tanked it on Monday, only going to far as to start up to the boot screen and the give me nothing, so Kris attacked it last night and it's now a dual-loaded operating system-my old windows which he kept so I could access all of my files, and so he could figure out what was wrong by running it as a virtual machine, and Ubunto/Linux, which he's been trying to talk me into for quite some time since he doesn't do Windows and I had decided sometime last week after getting a blue-screen of death and it recovering, that he could indeed convert it to Linux for me.  I think my laptop understood and decided to kick up one last fight, but we won.  It's going to take me some getting used to, but according to Kris, since he's used it, it's a much better, cleaner, smoother operating system and doesn't fall susceptible to the annoying quirks that Windows decides to fail with.  So he's proud that I decided to take the plunge.


Have to decide on a menu for tomorrow....while headed up to our new regular bar to meet some friends (Peter Pan closed while we were on vacation and wasn't able to be opened again with the same owner) we passed a couple of missionaries who were on the other side of the street waiting for a ride.  Kris said hi and they said hi back and we kept walking, had a thought and turned around to invite them to come have dinner with us tomorrow night.  They were shocked!  They don't normally get invites, I guess, which is weird for me to hear because I'm used to Kris's stories of being invited to eat at someone's place maybe even twice a day while he was on his mission.  We chatted with them for a few minutes, one of them from Utah, one of them from France, which we thought was odd, but I guess the group up North has decided to re-locate to Lyon, France, so there are less around than there used to be.  So we gave them our address and they'll be here at 7 to eat, chat, and go home with possibly a couple of packets of Ramen each...I just have to settle on food.  I'm thinking shredded rotisserie chicken into a casserole with veggies and mashed potatoes and salad, maybe a little cake for desert.  Or shredded chicken tacos...my lettuce seems to be about ready to start using.  Whatever I decide on I'm going to try to make it as painless and low-fuss as possible.  Should be an interesting experience.  


Onto more internet wandering for a bit and then hopefully laundry, if I can figure out the washing machine which has instructions written in German and French, while I'm mistakenly learning Italian.  Think I can find one of the ladies who lives in the building to show me what to do...since our laundry's piling up!  Though if I can't figure it out, there's quite literally at least three cleaners in the neighborhood square right below our street.  Talk about convenient!
Happy blogging, all!


Enjoy,


Allie H.