Settling In

Wow, what a week! It's taken us this long to get settled in and more or less back to normal life. The first night in the new house was spent listening to our cats having a lively dialogue and trying to get used to the new noises of the house. Eventually the cats settled onto my stomach and legs but that did little in the way of putting me to sleep. I kept waking up thinking I had left the back door open, or worrying that I had forgot to set the central heating on a timer. Restless, to say the least.

We're slowly getting there, though. Finding places for all our stuff (that's not to say we still haven't got a spare room filled with boxes and bags), getting used to the bigger space and enjoying the shorter drive to work - both of us, that is.

We're particularly loving the open fire. By Finnish standards it's not really more than a glorified camp fire seeing as I'm used to a huge fireplace with, once lit, will keep slowly releasing heat into the whole house for even a day after the fire has gone out. But I'm not complaining, it's lovely to have a fireplace. I'll give it a couple more weeks until the novelty wears out and I get sick of taking the ashes out when it's so windy the ashes blow straight back into my face. But for the time being, we're loving how we're able to sit down and relax in front of a roaring fire with a glass of wine.