Eversmashing

On this our fourth day of adventuring in our new home (day three was spent at church for Jon's installation -- huzzah!!), today we took Jon's mom & sister with us to the Fredrik Meijer Botanical Gardensin nearby Grand Rapids.  What a treat!

For now, we want to relate the "weird Michigan thing of the day"-- the encouragement of U-turns.  Somehow it seemed that in Wisconsin,they discouraged U-turns as an evil, vile thing that could only resultin chaos.  Here they seem to have the opposite perspective.  Not only are they allowed, but they are favored over the traditional"left-hand-turn-at-an-intersection."  As in, if you are on the westside of an intersection but want to go northbound, you must turn right (southbound) and then make a U-turn at the nearest gap in the median. They even have signs pointing this out.  Very odd indeed.

Rockford review of the day: Arnie's

We went to Arnie's (downtown, near the river) for supper today.  Not onlydid we enjoy good service, but they also had very delicious meals, and-- best of all -- gourmet filled cupcakes, FREE with any sandwich purchase!  I had the raspberry white chocolate one and it was quite divine.  We got our food quickly, but didn't feel rushed, and we were all quite full by the time we left.  All in all, two thumbs up.

Today was our first day living in Michigan!  We use the term "living" loosely, since we're still technically homeless nomads.  We're hoping that situation should resolve itself within the next few days.

The drive through Michigan was fortunately quite uneventful, and the traffic was quite bearable.  Jon and I had perfected the art of caravan driving, keeping in line together for all but two sections of the entire trip.  Having driven through Michigan before, we weren't really surprised by anything or taken aback by anything new.  After driving through Grand Rapids, it seems to be quite like Milwaukee... which iseither really comforting or really scary -- we're not sure which yet.

After dropping off Jon's car in "our" new garage, we got to drive together to find our nearest post office, and -- when we weren't able to get a money order there -- we then went through Rockford to find our nearest credit union -- in a Meijers.

Our Meijers is a huge, giant, gargantuan Super Walmart... on steroids.  The entire front of the storeis lined with little shops where you can get your nails or hair done, do banking, eat lunch, or even get your daily dose of caffeine (thank you very much, Starbucks!).  I think I counted 20 or 30-some registers.  A bit excessive, if you ask me.  However, we were excited to find that they had some pretty good deals -- Amp energy drinks 10 for $10,. and the 11th is free -- woohooo! (For Jon, not me... Baby doesn't need THAT much caffeine.) ... compared with the "actual retail price" of $1.99.  We had some time to kill, so we meandered through the rest of the store, basically just window-shopping and price-comparing. It was exhausting, and in my pregnant state I had to use the bathroom twice during our journey around the store.

We stopped at church and saw Jon's "un-office."  It has his books and -- after thisafternoon -- now also has some folding tables and chairs.  Exciting! Furniture is due to arrive in a few weeks.  We did get a super-awesome welcome basket from our church, including all sorts of food goodies, gift cards to a baseball stadium and a local restraunt, and even a cutelittle Rockford t-shirt for Baby!

One oddity about our new home... while it was overcast in the afternoon, our GPS lost all signalto all of its satellites.  As soon as it cleared up and the sun cameout, the little GPS was fine.  Hmmmmm... not cool.

After supervising the movers at "our" house, we had more time to kill, so we decided to check out our local Goodwill stores -- yay thrift stores! The first one took us a bit by surprise.  Unlike most Goodwill stores, this one actually had more stuff from local department stores --perhaps things that they overstocked, or items that were slightly irregular -- as opposed to honest-to-goodness "previously owned"stuff.  It threw us for a loop for sure, particularly since we were looking for furniture and home goods stuff, and they were severely lacking in that.

However, after our Goodwill bummer, we decided to try out what I think is destined to be my newest favoritest store --a thrift store by the name ValueLand.  Not only did they have tons of awesome random stuff of all shapes and sizes and styles (including HUGE carpet pieces), but they also had an entire used book store as part of their store... it was absolutely enormous, and it's probably a good thing I'm no longer teaching in the classroom, since I'd most likely spend ALL of my salary buying new books for the kids to read.  Kids' books were 50 cents for paperbacks and $1 for hardcovers; adults' books were $1 for paperbacks and $3 for hardcovers.  I promised Jon, though, that I would at least wait until I had found places in our new home for all the books I currently had before adding more =)

The third thrift store (another Goodwill) was another bust... it was in downtown Grand Rapids which was NOT fun to drive around and had no parking. Plus, it seemed like a rather run-down part of the downtown, so we didn't even bother stopping.  Thrift store #4 was yet another Goodwill, in which we found a cute penguin for Baby's room.  Oh, THE most awesome thing about the Goodwill stores in this area, however, is that each of them that we went into included a cafe in the bookstore area!  They had all sorts of coffee drinks for reasonable prices, and even cute little coffeeshop tables and chairs to sit in.  Fabulous!

Anyways, I'm sure we've just hit the surface with our "weird observations about our new home," but that was all we got to today.  Tomorrow we're out for more exploration!  Wish us luck!