12.09.08

Moving Yet Again…

Posted in The Story, Other Fun at 1:57 pm by Chef Matt

The new home. Yes, it’s a townhome, but it’s new!

After only a week here, it would seem kind of odd that I would be talking about a move at this point. But yes, we had to vacate our temporary housing, and head for the greener pastures of our permanent residence here in Oxford. As luck would have it, Caroline and I are being put up in a nice 4-bedroom flat (which we will be sharing with some co-workers of Caroline from time to time) that has three floors and an awesome kitchen! I will be sure to get my chef on in this granite-countered gallery kitchen wonderland!

But no move can be completed without some problems right? Last night, entering the flat for the first time, Chris (one of my future flat-mates) asked me why the door keys said “alarm”. “Oh, those are for the front door, but don’t worry, the alarm isn’t active yet.” (This was what they told me at the rental agent’s.) As the first loads of luggage were being brought into the house, Chris and I were poking around the upstairs bedrooms. He was showing me the finer details of how water heaters worked in the UK, and how they put the lights to bathrooms on the outside of the bathrooms commonly. (A strategy which makes NO sense at all. NEVER give the power of the lights to the person waiting on the other side of the door!) Anyway, as we entered the last bedroom, we saw a weird box on the wall with two red buttons on it. “I have no idea what that is,” Chris said.

In the front door, the view of the front hall back through to the living room and backyard.

Well not being one to leave anything unexplored, I pushed one of the buttons. Nothing. “Hmmm,” I said. So I pushed the other button.

Captian Foreshadowing (that would be me) might have given you the clue as to what happened next. Yes, the alarm started to go off. Quite loudly. Both inside and outside - for all our neighbors to hear. Lovely.

“I guess the alarm isn’t as off as we thought…” I yelled over the din as I came crashing down the two flights of stairs to turn it off. Opening the house book I was given, hoping it had the code I was dismayed to read the following lines: “Your alarm system is not yet online.” Sigh.

View 1 of my new kitchen. Granite and lots of room! Whoo hoo!

We called the rental agents, and they in fact confirmed that our alarm was, in fact, not online. We held up the phone to the blaring speakers to confirm that they were, in fact, jackasses. Their advice at this point: “Well, it goes off in half an hour…”

That was a long 30 minutes. But yes, it finally stopped, and we finished our move in realizing that we had now alienated ourselves from our neighbors permanently. And only in the first 10 minutes of our living there. Personally, that is a new record for me, and I’m quite proud of it.

Here are some more photos of the new digs:

View 2 of my new kitchen. The white thing is my clothes washer/dryer. Yes, I do my laundry in the kitchen now.

My new stove. 5 burner gas range. It really cooks bacon fast!

My first meal I cooked in the new house. Seared Breast of Wild Pheasant with Local Apples and Seyval Reduction. And I had to eat it off paper plates with plastic silverware…

The living room. The floor is heated!

My work station. Until I get furniture, I am writing these from the floor next to a radiator.

A typical bathroom. The bathtubs are nice and deep here - great for soaking away the worries of having done nothing all day…

My backyard. They say that in spring I will get some grass on it. We shall see…

The recycle system here is weird. One bin is for glass and newspaper. The other is for cans, plastic and cardboard/random paper. But I still haven’t memorized which is which…

And now the beauty shots. This is the view of Oxford from my balcony as the sun begins to set….

And here’s the close-up as the sky is in it’s full-on orange display.

More adventures to follow from the kitchen for sure!

Chef Matt

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