…::: NJ Brideau :::…

Our new apartment

After only 6 months of living here in Oxford, Chelsea and I have already moved to a new apartment.  This was partly due to our original lease only being for 9 months, and partly because we hated our old flat.  Check out this previous post for a reminder, but just know that I made it sound better in the video than it actually was.

We searched for new flats for about 2  months straight.  Scouring the letting agent sites, dailyinfo (craiglist), walking around looking for signs, etc.  The process of finding an affordable place with the specifications we wanted, within walking distance, and that allowed us to have a cat, was very difficult.  We even toyed with the idea of buying a place here because our search was so hard, and rent prices are so high.

In the end though, we managed to find a place that fit our needs perfectly:

And to think, that this new place is only 30 pounds more per month than our old flat is being advertised at!  I don’t need to sell you on any of the positive points our new flat has, the video should speak for itself.  We now live very close to city centre, within 5 minutes walk of both the bus and train stations, yet have plenty of peace and quiet.  Hopefully we’ll be here for a few years now that we have taken the time to find and furnish the place.  Please let us know if you need an updated address.

A different 4th

The fourth of July might be one of my favorite holidays.  It usually involves friends, grilling of some sort, copious amounts of beer, and celebrating how awesome the United States of America is.

This year though, our 4th of July was a little different.  We are now living in the country that the USA fought for its independence from, so it was a little difficult to find people interested in our celebration.  We also noticed a lack of the FOURTH OF JULY sales and promotions.  We did meet up with some American friends though, and have a little get together.

Chelsea posing with Seriph.  She really misses having dogs, so she’s glad to have made a new friend for life.  Unfortunately I didn’t manage to take any good pictures of the rest of the group, but our friends Josh and Jenna played hosts, and two of their friends from home were also in town.

Here is Josh showing off the fireworks he managed to find.  I think he’s a little excited because he didn’t anticipate finding rockets of this caliber here.  He did tell a story of being called out for being American by the clerk at the store he got them at, but not much flak after that.

Toward the end of the night, we were getting excited to light our fireworks so we headed up the hill from Josh and Jenna’s place to a park.  They live in Botley, which is supposed to have some of the best views in Oxford.  Its no mountain, but I think I managed to capture a good picture on our way up.

As with all my new panoramas, click the image above to get a higher resolution version.

I also managed to piece together a video showing some of the highlights of our fireworks show:

We grilled some food, had some beers, listened to baseball on the (internet) radio, and launched some fireworks.  Actually, I guess that our 4th of July wasn’t that different after all.

Moving house

Chelsea and I have relocated to a new apartment – or as they call it here – moved house.  We are still on contract at our old flat, but the housing search was difficult with location, price, and allowance of Gato, so we took one of the few places we found.  I’ll update more in the next few weeks.  We still have to get settled in, and our internet connection will take approximately 3 weeks to transfer over from our old flat.  Yeah I have no idea why either.

Unlike the flat we first lived in, our new place came completely unfurnished.  We were initially concerned about the price of buying everything we need to live with, but everything worked out for us for less than one months rent.  I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that it is way easier to furnish an apartment in a foreign country than it was probably not all that  long ago.  We found that the craigslist equivalents and internet searches were essential, and scored some really nice stuff at bargain prices.

Plus, we had to go to IKEA.  The picture above is the aftermath of our trip to beacon of Swedish efficiency.  Actually, our trip to IKEA wasn’t nearly as painful on the wallet as I had estimated, and we got to eat some Swedish meatballs as a bonus.

More to come later, hopefully a video tour.  I’ll leave you with Gato enjoying his new backyard.

Dyson airblade

Have you used one of these?

This is hands down (sorry) my favorite restroom hand dryer.  Apparently, they were announced back in 2006, but I didn’t see any in the USA.  Well, they are everywhere here, and they are amazing.  A jet of air shoots out of a 0.3mm gap at 400mph to create a “blade” of air, that really effectively dries your hands.

If I ever When I get laughable amounts of money, there are a few items that I would really like to buy.  The first is my own meat slicer and deli fridge, but the second might just have to be a Dyson airblade.  Hypothetically speaking, if you come visit me in my man-cave, wouldn’t you rather dry your hands in this thing than a measly hand towel?  I sure would.

Spotify Me

Let start this one off with a quick poll, I don’t actually expect that anyone would fall into only one category, but please select the one that you think mostly describes your habits:

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The methods to my music are a mix of all of the above, but I most often listen through my iPod.  Loyal readers of this site may remember that topics such as music delivery and my dependence on music are not new subjects.  I did however want to bring it up again because I may have found yet another new way to enjoy music – Spotify.

So what is Spotify?  Well, it is a new way to listen to music.  Click here to go to their website and read more about it. I first ready about Spotify on one of the many tech blogs that I frequent, and was thoroughly intrigued.  In short – it is a combination of many of the ways you may listen to music now.  The software looks eerily similar to Apple’s iTunes software in layout, but tries to do more than iTunes does.

First, this software is a way to play the music you already have on your computer.  The cool part is that it is also a streaming service of sorts, and plugged into social networks.  So instead of the 2,000 songs on your hard drive, you can listen to some 8 million songs they have on their servers.  The only catch is that you need an internet connection.  Its amazing.  I can search for (almost) any song that I can think of and then drag it to a playlist and play it.  The whole song.  Free.  I can then make all kinds of playlists of individual songs, or listen to full albums.

I can also share playlists, songs etc with other people and likewise, browse their interests.  AND if you have a strong interest in a song, there are options to purchase it.

Right now the only drawback is the price.  I happen to use the free service, but similar to services such as Pandora, I am limited to 20 hours per month.  There is an option to purchase a full featured version, complete with streaming to mobile devices like your Android phone, and some offline functions as well.  The price of the full featured version is a little too steep for me right now (~$22 per month), but if when it goes down, I might reconsider based on my usage.

This post may sound like a bit of a plug for this new service, but I am generally excited about the new opportunity – and you should be too.  The major problem for most of the readers of this site is that right now Spotify is limited to Europe.  Hopefully it makes its way over to the States, maybe around the time we make our way back there.  Until then, I’ll keep you posted.