Fully furnished

At last, things are slowing down a bit. It took a full week to finish painting the bedroom, living room and kitchen after we moved in last Wednesday, which meant yesterday we could start unpacking boxes. No really, the previous tenants put a lot of time and effort into painting the place three or four shades of brown. The bedroom was sponged and spackled to resemble a Du Maurier cigarette, which took three coats of tooth-bleach white to cover. When we weren't painting we were driving around the city – make that province – collecting various pieces of furniture. First was the bed, which involved a long trek up Bathurst all the way from Queens Quay to Sheppard (which is parallel to Pearson airport, for those like me who forget how huge this city is) and then all the way back down Yonge (after scoring a parking ticket in North York, one more reason never to go back there) the literal turning point being Mel Lastman Square, which I had always heard of but never seen. It was actually an interesting little tour, in our very rattly U-haul van, on some of the patchiest roads I've seen in Canada, through some phenomenal neighbourhoods. At the same time, Toronto feels more manageable now than it did when I lived here in the nineties. We've both changed.
We also made some new friends collecting kitchen stuff from a couple who are moving to South Africa – more on that below. Then on Saturday we took an east-west tour up along the lake to Kingston to collect a Danish teak dining room set from the grandparents of one of my closest friends. It's a nice drive considering it's on such a nasty freeway, and every now and then Lake Ontario peeks out from between maple covered hills, reminding you of the rest of the world outside the Big Smoke. The table is the only thing we've acquired so far in our little recycling project which has a real story attached to it that I'm aware of, and it's nice to keep things like that more or less in the family. And it's beautiful, in perfect condition. I've never had a real piece of furniture before...
Since then we've also had a chance to check out the strip of Dundas west of our place. It has the feel of the main street in a small town, with a handful of random corner markets, a mechanic, a spectacular organic vegetarian cafe, a coffee shop and a bank. It also has its fair share of junk shops and a few great furniture places, many of which rescue and refurbish old stuff. In general I think we've landed in the right place. We found a perfectly good espresso maker at a junk store, and a vacuum at a cheap electronics place, plus a large stripped and unfinished dresser from an ornery old dude called Ray, who lent us his dolly to wheel it home.
So the place is a little less hollow than it was last week. The finishing touch is Moyo, a tiny black cat we adopted from the couple moving to S. Africa. We brought her home last night and within three hours she'd caught a mouse – the primary reason we'd considered getting a cat, given our proximity to the train yards. She thought she'd found the ultimate plaything and batted it around until we took it outside (where it was immediately claimed by a bird who was less playful, I think). Since then she's been looking for it frantically, and woke us up several times last night to ask if we'd seen it. But when I came home this afternoon to find her crashed out on the bed, it really started to feel like home.