Not an ASL post (for the most part)
The Move is almost ready to begin, I still have to pack up the study which will take most of Wednesday night and Thursday morning before I pick up the keys to the new place.
One of the reasons I went ahead with grabbing this place despite not having Broadband internet as opposed to ADSL2+, was the kitchen and the lock up garage for additional storage/woodworking. I really wanted a reasonably modern kitchen in terms of appliances as I have rediscovered my love of cooking and most importantly lost the hateful issue of losing my appetite while preparing food. Defeats the purpose of cooking if you can't eat what you cook.
The kitchen below might be small, but hey, I'm a bachelor. Very improtantly the wall oven and cooktop are brand new. So new, they still have the instruction manuals inside the wall oven in shrinkwrap. Winner, winner, Italian dinner.
The picture below is about 40% of my cooking library. A complete collection of the core Margaret Fulton cookbooks and the hardback Australian Womens' Weekly cookbooks, plus almost all of the original Graham "Galloping Gourmet" Kerr cookbooks from the '60s when taste was everything and cholesterol was not a concern (I am very blessed in that I seem to be able to eat such foods with no ill-effects at all). Plus there are a few choice selections from Jamie Oliver and Gabrièl Gaté (Taste le Tour from SBS), about the only two celebrity chefs of the modern era I bother with.
What are not visible are the Halogen/Convection Oven and Slow Cooker books that comprise a good third of my collection, to go along with the two items below, one very old school, the other a product of the As Seen on TV era:
The slow cooker or Crock Pot is one of the old school designs that allow me to turn it on first thing in the morning just before I leave for work and have the food just right by the time I get home, or have it running overnight so I wake up to the aroma of freshly cooked food on the weekends. Very important when I move to trying some traditional cajun recipes as well as when making preserves.
The Convection oven is there as an adjunct to the real ovens, but was bought initially because my old place's stove was a piece of cheap, nasty, seconds quality whiteware with no redeeming features whatsoever. Plus it had broken down to the point where it was almost unusable.
So that's the non-ASL stuff out of the way but something that will allow me to enjoy my ASL all the more by providing gaming fuel.
What you see above is the living room. Now the photo does not do the actual lighting of the room justice. When I inspected the place originally, it was on a cold mid-winter's late afternoon and yet the entire room was much much lighter than the photo shows.
The photo has been taken from the annexe, a room the size of my current study which is itelsef a large double bedroom in area. The annexe will be my gaming area, as there is enough room for the bookshelves and storage required for all my miniatures, plus a decent sized ASL gaming tablke will fit there and if I was really keen I could have a standard 6' by 4' miniatures table as well.
If anything I am going to be short on actual furniture initially, and there is enough space to have a few extra bookcases in the living area without compromising space for the Audio-visual setup I have in mind. The entire apartment is significantly larger than the current house I am in, yet requires no yard maintenance and is a miniscule increase in cost.
Oh and the place is insulated properly so goodbye to major rugging-up in winter and heat prostration in summer. I can definitely live here.
