No Snow in March???

Minneapolis always gets snow in March - so what happened this year?!  Not that we complained about the warm weather but should we be scared of Global Warming now?


".... That's right, a snowless March. March, typically, is one of the metro's snowiest months.
Do you remember the last time we went through this particular month on the calendar year without a drop of snow. "According to the record books, you have to go back to 1878," University of Minnesota Meteorologist/Climatologist Mark Seeley said. Seeley's job is to keep track of this kind of stuff. "Pretty remarkable," he said."

For the whole article: No Snow in March?

New Updates from us and Uchi

Yeah usual excuse I have for each time I did not have time posting blogs - busy busy busy :(

I tried my best to share my time to refresh Inubaka blog and catch up with other things which are not related to work or Uchi.  So far it has been working .... Actually let me reword that: So far it might be working for all things related to work, but I am still obsessed with Uchi. Every day I try to find something to improve/decorate/clean in Uchi.  These are all the changes to Uchi so far:

1. We painted the hallway

2. We painted the kitchen

3. We painted the living room

4. I sewed & we placed several curtains

5. We made a blue backsplash around the kitchen

6. We decorated Uchi a little bit with orchids & other plants

There are still a few projects I wanted to do and learn ... sewing the curtains was fun, but you can stain them & make your own patterns as well.  We'll see if that happens. 

The pictures are coming soon.....

Pictures from Last Year

The last touch up was done to Uchi (Oct 27)

Our Halloween Party

We didn't dress one - but one of our friends was dressing as gorilla

Our Stair before renovating

Underneath our loft

Underneath our second floor hallway

Our Loft with new carpet (nicer and softer)

Laundry Room before painting

Best Buy's washer and dryer (cute blue) in a blue painted laundry room

Our messy Kitchen

Our Messy Garage

We installed our garage openers (we did not have enough lights for all the garage openers)

Our kitchen island was used as a temporary table to build new computer

Thanks to Erni's new knives - really sharp ones

 Painting our guest bathroom (same color with our laundry room)

Trandition Blue 

 

Painting our loft green

"Crocodile tears" is the name of our paint and we picked it because it is a funny name

Complete painted loft

Cleaning our driveway

Our White Christmas and white Uchi

That was me cleaning our driveway

a new exercise tool for us

Reflect Back....

Saying goodbye to 2009...  many things happened to us last year:

* We are home-owners
Finally, after years of waiting, we dared to place our footprints in MN.
We experienced our first painting (which was painful) and shoveling snow.

* Still "aliens" but with no-visa needed
Got a green card -- no longer need a corporate sponsor to stay in the US

* First Ticket
My first traffic ticket in MN, just on the day when we moved to a new home. (For not stopping "completely" at a stop sign -- what a ridiculous argument from the police officer, apparently he was so sure that I did not fully stop. What imaginary people stop completely 100% at a stop sign when there are no other cars around?!)

* Celebrated Our First Year Anniversary in Chicago
See Chicago Trip 2009

* Russian got a new Job
See New Job

* New babies -- NOT OURS!  (Don't start posting rumors on the internet!)

A couple of friends have had their babies this year: Ernita (Ethan), Elena (little Vasya), Lani (Aiden), Ely (Livia), Touby (Kyle), Zhichao (Sarah) and few others ... sorry I don't remember their baby names.

* Babushka came to visit

We got a surprise visit from Babushka, see babushka

* New Hair Cut

See the boy-cut

* First Time Biking to work

Biking is not a new thing - but biking 25 miles a day is a new thing, see biking

Hopefully we will continue experiencing new things this year!  Good things more than bad things, of course.  And same wishes to all three of you reading this blog!

Haven't Forgotten About the Blog -- Just Busy With Uchi

Wass up people - one day before the year changes. Time to complete last year's blog!

We finally moved into our Uchi.  The last 2 months have been craaaaaazyy, so I didn't have enough time to work on the blog. So here's what happened so far:

1. Our home was complete on November 2nd, and it took them several days to do touch-ups and a final walk-through and inspection.
2. We officially became home-owners on November 3rd at 2.30 PM
3. We didn't move in right away since the days after our purchase were really cold. We did several stages of moving, the first one was November 9th where just for ceremony we boiled a pot of tea in our kitchen for the first time, and then we officially moved in on the weekend of November 13th, half the stuff by ourselves, and the other half with some help from friends.
4. Our first project was replacing the basement door knob (door between first floor and basement) with a knob which we can lock. This project was done before we moved anything.
5. For the first few weeks, we were either sleeping on the bed without any linens or sleeping inside our sleeping bags. We were really slow in buying our furniture.  But we already had a sofa and dresser from a bit furniture sale earlier that month.
6. The first bigger project was replacing the carpet on the second floor. At the same time, we completed painting our laundry room prior to Best Buy's appliance delivery.
7. We didn't have a refrigerator and washer/dryer until our 3rd weeks living there (the garage was our fridge for a while). The first appliances we bought were refrigerator, washer and dryer from Best Buy which we returned a week after that - they were either too expensive or too big. At the end we got everything from Lowe's.
8. We celebrated our Thanksgiving with our nice neighbors, who invited us to eat dinner with them. The next day we spent going around buying furniture for the house and cleaning out our old apartment, a huge chore.
8.5. I lost my phone a week before Thanksgiving and finally found it on Thanksgiving when we were going to use our dryer (yup, first electronic device to be ruined inside Best Buy's washer). Finally we bought $8 cellphone from Best Buy during Thanksgiving.
9. One week after Thanksgiving, Jermaine & Russian built a new desktop computer and painted our guest bathroom.
10. We put up our first blinds in the master bathroom.
11. The kitchen was the first room we completed unpacking. The second one was our walk-in closet.
12. Early in December, we finally got our furniture (dining table and chairs, tv stand, bed frame and mattress)
13. We completed painting our loft before Christmas.
14. We spent our Christmas vacation building book cases and rearrange the loft library. We also didn't really do Christmas gifts, since we had bought so much house stuff at random sales during the holidays.  Whenever there was a good deal, we'd buy games and books and comics as well.
15. Russian experienced the joy of shoveling the driveway three days in a row!  We had lots of snow during Christmas weekend.
16. We've managed to avoid the swine flu so far, but both of us got colds during Christmas weekend.  First me, then gave it to Russian.


As you can see we have been really busy taking care Uchi, our selves and working to earn bacon and eggs. Slowly we started to decorate and clean and unpack.

So far we really like Uchi and really glad that we decided to purchase this lot.
HAPPY NEW YEAR And See you next year ....

P.S: I still could not find my usb reader, pictures from above home improvement/mess will come soon.