Apartment!

As I alluded to earlier, in mid-June we moved into a new apartment. We had been living just out of town (near Elijah's parents, which was nice), but our new place is in town, close to Safeway, PetSmart, our vet, and lots of other places that are handy to have nearby. It also cuts Elijah's drive to work in half, at least.

Besides the location, we love the new place! It's bigger, and in a nice little area. It is an apartment, but townhome-style, so we have two floors (I love having two floors- stairs are nice to have for exercise that you don't even notice, and the cats love them), and the apartment complex has four buildings with four apartments each. We're lucky enough to have a unit on the end of a building, so we have only one direct neighbor. (After living in an apartment last summer with neighbors on all sides and sharing a hallway with everyone else on the floor, it's so much nicer to almost have our own building, with our own front and back doors.) The four buildings are in a square, with a nice little courtyard in the middle, easily accessible through our back door (while we have two dedicated parking spots in front of our front door).



It's a pet-friendly place, so there are always people taking their dogs outside, which the cats love to watch from the wide windowsill of the big window in the living room overlooking the courtyard. The boys, although they are getting better in many ways, still don't like to leave their comfort zone, so they don't like going outside (although sometimes I make them go outside on a leash and in a mesh cat tent, mean mommy that I am).



Leia, on the other hand, loooooves going outside, and will often dash out when I open the door to leave or return home. I take her outside often, and she's good about not straying too far and listening to me when I call her, so I usually don't bother to make her wear her harness and leash. And it turns out that she loves dogs! She's made friends with many of the neighbor dogs (at least, the ones that are good with cats). Our next-door-across-the-walk neighbor has three dogs, and their American Pitbull and Leia are best friends. They get excited when they see each other, and run right up for a greeting sniff. She's also friends with another neighbor's two dachshunds, one of which is bigger than she is, but the other is smaller. They're energetic and jump a little sometimes, but they're very sweet.



When I drag Leia back inside, one of her favorite places is on the couch. Our living room is so large that we have room for two loveseats and the tall cat tower. The small cat tower is upstairs in the computer room, where the cats like to hang out with us. The boys often curl up under my desk, while Leia prefers sitting in the window over the desks.



No pictures of the apartment itself, but I will leave you with these pictures of what can happen when you leave toilet paper on the roll in the bathroom:


"I didn't do it!"


"Am I in trouble?"