Our Apartment

Our apartment in Pasadena is awesome! When we left Victoria, Matthew and I were sad, we thought we'd never have such a great apartment again... but we were wrong. While the windows are fewer than in Vic, and our views consist of the apartment next door, or, the other apartment next door, the general layout and size of this place is super!

We have two bedrooms, one for B, and two bathrooms, that's right, the baby has his own full size bathroom! The kitchen is large and new-ish, there's a dishwasher and a full size fridge. The dining room is separate from the living room and lit by a chandelier, and the living room is huge. The balcony is fair sized, certainly big enough for painting on and drying paintings on. We have a tree already - my parents bought us an orange tree and it's doing fantastically - I'm hoping for oranges within the next year.
Out back of the building is a small grassy yard with a shady tree and a sandbox and childrens playhouse. All 10 apartments in the building are filled with families wherein at least one parent is a grad student at CalTech, so everyone is pretty much in the same boat as us, and often when Bronson's crying at night, we can hear other children crying too, so we don't feel that we're disturbing anyone at all.

The apartment is located half a block North of CalTech, a 10 minute walk from the Astronomy building. 12 minutes south brings us to the CalTech gym, pools and sports fields where we play soccer every Saturday on the Astronomy intramural team.

We're about 6 blocks from Target, a mere 3 minute drive... to the west is South Lake Avenue, a famous shopping area of town which Bronson and I walk to frequently (only 3 blocks). Lake Avenue houses bookstores, childrens toy and clothing stores, adults clothing stores, food places, neat shops, movie stores and our local grocery store; Pavillions which is an offshoot of Vons, which is an offshoot of Safeway. Basically, we're still getting Safeway brand stuff. Even the cucumbers here still come from BC.

To the West is Bronson's future nursery (the CalTech nursery), once he needs one, just 1 block away, the Pasadena City College, where I may take an art course or two, and the library. These are ~4 blocks away, however half a block to the west is a corner store/deli and a great park including the whole kid play area, basketball courts, tennis courts, a baseball field and picnic area.

Anyhow, the moral of the story is - we have lots of room to entertain houseguests, we're near a lot of great places to visit and you'd even get your own bathroom complete with tub and shower, so come one, come all to visit the California Stevensons.

I should also mention that our apartment came with an air conditioner (Thank goodness, even cloudy days are pretty hot down here)!