Cleveland Rocks! (Though we haven't lived through winter yet)

It's been a couple of months since our last update. Chalk it up to us being busy settling in here in Cleveland. Here's an update on what we've been up to:

At the end of October, we moved into our new house in the Coventry Village area of Cleveland Heights, an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland. We love both the house and the area.

Moving from a one-bedroom apartment to a two-story house means that we had a LOT of furniture to get to fill up the house, and it is still half empty. We've managed to furnish most of the downstairs, including our living room, dining room and eat-in kitchen (though the living room furniture will be upgraded), but our upstairs still consists of a half-furnished bedroom (our TV is resting on two German beer crates -- very classy) and two empty bedrooms. We hope to get our guest bedroom furnished early in the new year, at which point we can comfortably host visitors.

Even though it's still unfinished, our house already feels very much like "home". It's our first house together, and we are really enjoying the experience of making it our own.

The Coventry Village area is great. It's one of the few areas in Cleveland that is walkable; there are a large number of shops, restaurants, pubs and cafés within a 5 minute walk of our house. With Christmas approaching, the trees lining the street are all lit up with lights and it is quite beautiful. We've been to a few of the restaurants and pubs, but still have a number to try. We've heard that the area is especially nice in the summer, and we're looking forward to that very much.

Other than settling in, we haven't done anything too too exciting, except for a short trip to New York and New Jersey over American Thanksgiving with our friends Jodie and Adam. We'll have a separate update on that shortly, but it was a great trip. Tomorrow morning we head to Prince George for Christmas, with a short stay in Vancouver for New Year's before we head back to Cleveland.