We're home!!

The last few days have been completely crazy and wonderful! We're feeling like our hectic period of inbetween-ness is finally coming to an end and we couldn't be happier! 

We spent the whole day Friday packing, sorting through everything in the garage, packing, going to Best Buy to get a fridge, packing, and uhh packing! We also went on another (possibly last) big Walmart trip with Mum and her childhood friend Robin who was visiting for the weekend. We were feeling some serious déjà-vu from both of our set up experiences in our old places, only coupled with insane excitement because everything was starting to feel very real. We got so many adorable, colorful, perfect apartment things and we're feeling like the luckiest girls on earth right now! It was a huge day of organizing but we were feeling more than ready for move-in day the next day!

It's crazy to think that we moved in YESTERDAY!! Ahh the place already feels like home! We got the U-Haul out to Corona fairly early and packed it (quite expertly and surprisingly not very stressfully) full of everything we hadn't already put into the cars. 

Before we knew it we were on the road towards North Hollywood babyy! The two of us left first and drove in convoy, which was actually a surprisingly fun challenge, and got to the apartment first to sign all the paperwork.

We signed on the dotted line, got our keys, and started lugging load after load of stuff up to our place! 

Oh man, it was hard work!! It didn't take terribly long though and then we were onto setting everything up! Luce and Robin worked on the kitchen, Mum and Q assembled the bed, and Han worked on the (ohmygosh) walk-in wardrobe!! Yeee! 

The professionals (Mum, Q, and Robin) left us to our own devices a little later, having already gone above and beyond to help us, and we plowed on through for hours until the end was in sight. Here's the product of all our hard work!!

We microwaved some soup (still don't have gas for the stove) and had a go of our new coffee maker, so cool! Then pushed through the last of the unpacking to get almost EVERYTHING into a place before absolutely falling into bed and crashing out. What a successful day! 

Today was more of a recovery/odds and ends day. We worked on decorating the apartment, set up the printer, organized drawers/bookshelf, vacuumed (love our cute new vacuum, so easy and borderline fun to use!) and had a huge grocery shop at Ralph's! After a whole trolley FULL of groceries, we each took a stab and guessed what the price would come out to aaaand - wish there was a way to better emphasize how incredible this moment was - HAN'S GUESS WAS 20 CENTS OFF THE ACTUAL PRICE!! It was amazing. Wow! Love little moments like those!! Anyway, we headed home (ahh, love the sound of that! HOME!) and kept going with all our bits and pieces, had a three way phone call with Sarah and Izzy, made a wonderful salad for dinner, watched A Knight's Tale (on the laptop because we're still working on getting TV and internet), Luce ran back to her old place to pick up a few things we'd left there, and now we're about to go to bed for the second time in our lovely place! We want to get a good night's sleep too because we're meeting with another agency tomorrow!! So exciting! Life is gooood! :)

We're on our way!

On Wednesday morning we woke up early, got all our stuff together and headed back to LA! aaaand then we turned around because we forgot the laptop and phone chargers, but then we really did head back to LA and went to Sam French and Staples to get everything else we needed to do our mailing!
Man, did we underestimate how long it would take or what?! We were up until 3:30 decorating the envelopes to make them stand out, editing our resumes/cover letters, running back and forth to Staples to print things, and sticking on sooo many labels. Also, on Wednesday night, we got the retouched versions of our headshots to print the next day! Here they are!!

Thursday was another full day of running around to finally get everything ready to send out. We printed the photos in the morning at this place in Van Nuys and the guy was so nice! We were thrilled with how well they turned out and it only took about 20 minutes! We were back at the apartment around 12:30 and taped, drew, wrote, stuck, stamped, and assembled soooo many envelopes! We sat and worked, without stopping except once for food, for 13 hours!! Woah. But we were done!! 

Ahh it felt so good! We got them in the post first thing on Friday morning and were more than ready to have them off our hands. 

YAY! Then it was time to pack up all Lucy's stuff because we were moving out on Saturday! We got a great handle on things and Mum and Q drove out to help us disassemble the furniture and bring more tubs for storage. It was all surprisingly easy and stress-free given our lack of sleep, and once we'd done all we could for the night we went to a Mexican restaurant right next to the apartment. We'd been smelling the most wonderful aromas for months and finally got to try it! It's lucky we didn't go there sooner because we would have had no chance of resisting that delicious food otherwise! Ahh so great and just what we needed after all our hard work!

Yesterday all we had to do was load up the U-Haul and drive it out to Corona! We were all done in no time and it felt amazing to have everything moved and be officially out of Lucy's place. Goodbyeeee K-Town! 

It was great for the semester and to get us on our feet, but we're SO excited to have our own place - now all we need is to find it! We spent a little while chilling in Corona, then we drove back to LA to look at a couple apartment complexes, hang out with some friends, and go see our acting coach's one man show. The first place we looked at we liked a lot buuut it was a little ways out of our price range. That's the only one we'd originally had lined up, but we did a little more scouting on the way and rang a bunch of places. Only one picked up so we decided to go and check it out and - we ABSOLUTELY fell in LOVE with it!! AHH! It was completely above and beyond anything else we'd seen AND it was entirely within our budget! We couldn't contain our excitement and straight away lined up an appointment for this morning to check it out with Mum and Q. 
After that we headed over to see Lucy's girlfriends from LACC, Kiah, Alicia, and Alisa. They're such sweeties and it was so nice for Luce to catch up and for Han to get to know them better. We carpooled with Alicia to see Chambers's show and all really enjoyed it! Well, once we managed to find it! Google maps failed us for the first time and took us to Del Taco, what?! We'd left about half an hour spare just in case and we needed every minute of it! We managed to find the place, park, and get in just in time! The show was really funny and had a few poignant moments thrown in too. After the show we headed over to JT's and went out for a coffee and chai lattes at a really cool little cafe nearby. We watched a movie and crashed on the couch, so excited to meet mum and Q in the morning to look at the apartment again!

Today was Australia Day! Yeee! We met in lovely North Hollywood at 10:30 and had a look through the apartment all together. It was even better today! The place has all the amenities - pool, spa, barbeques, sauna, fitness center, laundry AND the cutest little one bedroom apartment we could have hoped for! Mum and Q gave us a huge stamp of approval - like, we can't quite describe how great of a find this was. The other ones we saw for the same price a couple weeks ago were legitimately frightening. Anyway, it was too great to let someone else snap it up (in fact, there was another guy touring it just after us) so, we signed the lease! We officially have an apartment!! YAAAYYYY!! 

(In the leasing office!)

We picked up meat pies and custard tarts from Bronzed Aussie in honour of Australia Day, headed out to Corona, and are watching the Sean and Catherine's Wedding Bachelor special, so sweet! It's been such a long, busy week, and we are feeling SO accomplished and actually pretty proud of ourselves! We're making it happen baby.

Survivors

-- Han and Luce --
Saturday was incredibly surreal and exciting, one of those days that we knew was an important step on the right path. We woke up early and went to Beverly Hills for our haircuts! Leonie was awesome and spent almost 5 hours colouring and highlighting and cutting and trimming and styling our hair!

We felt like regular celebrities, getting all pampered. After that we went and got new headshots taken in Downtown LA - 25 minutes away, thank goodness! There was a heart-attack-inducing mix up with the address where we briefly thought it was two hours away, so we were extra grateful we didn't have to go far! The headshots went really well! The photographer was so sweet, really talented, and gave us a good deal because we were shooting together, nice one!

After that we went to Bronzed Aussie to get some sausage rolls, meat pies, a custard tart and an apple pie! The perfect end to a wonderful day!  

Sunday we had a lazy morning then went to the Grove to see Meme and get Sprinkles Cupcakes! It was poppin! All decked out for Christmas and getting ready to light up the tree that night. We saw a bunch of singers warming up for the celebration that night, including Gavin DeGraw who was absolutely gorgeous! The holiday cheer was infectious and we're getting very excited for Q's birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas all right around the corner!!

We drove back to Chapman because Han had a 12 page paper to write (eww) and Luce had to work on her final celebrity performance for Monday! 

-- Luce --
Monday was a complete whirlwind - probably one of the most stressful days of my life haha..! So, on Sunday I was talking to my friend Alicia and neither of us were feeling very excited about our celebrity performances the next day, so we decided (somewhat foolishly) to change our celebrities to Ingrid Michaelson and Sara Bareilles so we could sing a duet together! The main complication was that Alicia was in Washington visiting her family and wasn't going to be back in LA until 11:30pm! So we practiced by ourselves until I picked her up from the airport and then we went back to her place and rehearsed until a little after 2:30 in the morning! We woke up at 5:30 on Monday morning and got ready for the big day ahead. We were practicing at school at about 7:30 when I got an email from my teacher saying that he wanted to talk to Alicia and me about our last-minute change.. Uh oh. So we met with him and he said that he didn't think that there was enough movement in our new choice and he wanted us to change back to our original choices!! Ahh! Alicia couldn't because she didn't have her Britney costume, but when he asked me if I could do Katy Perry I (again, somewhat foolishly) was honest and said that I did have my costume and could do it even though I hadn't practiced it in the last 5 days!! So my teacher decided to make me re-do Katy Perry AND he said Alicia could perform as Sara Bareilles for her celebrity so that meant that I had to do both!!! I was freaking out. I practiced my butt off in the hour before my acting class started but I was still really nervous! To add to the stress, a bunch of the upperclassmen came in to watch my class perform..! Omg. I was 8th on the list to do Katy and by some stroke of luck, after the 6th person's performance all of the upperclassmen had to leave to go to class! So that wasa lot less pressure thank goodness! It got to my performance and I was a little flustered to begin with, but once the music started playing it all came back to me and I remembered all my movements!! Hooray! Katy Perry was done and it was a success! Next was my duet with Alicia and it went quite well too despite how rushed we'd been with getting it prepared :) after that I was in one more performance and that went down without a hitch as well! Phewww I made it through the class! Straight after acting class I hopped in the car and drove over to Chpman to pick Han up so we could go and see mum!! Yayyyyyyyy!!!

-- Han and Luce --
It was SO WONDERFUL to see Mum and the doggies!! Ahh we had a great time catching up, picnicking in the empty house, playing with the pups, and snuggling on the air mattress with mum. Just what we needed after a big day! Mum dropped Han back to Chapman and Luce went home too later that night, excited to get all the furniture delivered on Thursday!

-- Han --
When I got back to Chaptown I went straight to a meeting for my hall announcing, in honour of The Hunger Games: The COPA Games. (More commonly known as Assassin). The people participating all got assigned a target to kill by poking them with a crayon. There are rules and safe zones but they're constantly changing and oh man has this game taken over my life this week!!
I went to kickboxing with Megan in the morning on Tuesday and hatched a plan to kill my target later that day...
I had another theatre major to kill, but on the first day we were allowed 10 minutes of safety before and after class (we were also safe in the cafe, the lounge, classes, our hall, and in groups of 3 COPA people) so I had to bide my time. I went back on the shuttle with him and when the clock clicked over I pounced! He then gave me his target and I knew she was waiting to kill her target, so I raced back to the dorms and got her as well before she knew what hit her! A couple hours later, by third target asked me to stand with him so he'd be safe while he waited for his target to get back from class. I seized the opportunity and got him, making me the only person to kill 3 people and also responsible for almost half of the deaths on day 1. 
By yesterday I had been dubbed the Black Widow, so now I have a HUGE target on my back - nice going. I know who has me, though, so as long as I can avoid him I'll be fine! My target, a dance major named Hannah, was terrified of me though. I couldn't kill her yesterday, but that's not to say it wasn't a total bloodbath! The game's heating up and people are dropping like flies! Spencer got killed right after his dance performance (which I went to, he was incredible!), JT sustained an injury running from his own roommate, Tosh killed Sierra, paranoia is running rampant - it's pretty intense.
But back to my target being scared of me haha so she should have been! I knew she had class at 8:30 this morning, so I woke up early, waited outside in the cold and rain (ohh yea, I'm taking this game pretty seriously) and got her as she left Henley! 
It's been crazy but an amazing bonding experience - I'll update the blog with any major events!
The movers are over at the house unpacking and I can't wait to go over tonight for dinner and see the house with everything in it! It also might be good to get away from the COPA Games for a little while... I only have to survive for a few more hours and I'll be untouchable! Can't wait for a fun weekend this weekend, my last few classes of the semester, and more crazy times with all the COPA people out to get each other!

-- Luce --
Tuesday was an entirely uneventful day for me - pretty much just recovering from the drama and no sleep on Monday!

Wednesday was a pretty normal day as well.. I was just hanging out, when I decided to quick look at my mobile banking app on my phone too see how my bank account was going.. But when I looked, I saw that over 100 dollars was missing from my account! What?! When I looked at where it had been spent in my previous transactions it said it was at Ocean Seafoods in LA which I have never been to in my life!! There was something very "fishy" (haha) going on... But I couldn't call the bank because I had to go to class so I figured it'd be fine if I just called after class.. When I checked my app again after class I discovered that it was absolutely NOT fine! Another $400 had been taken out and whoever it was that took my debit card info had tried to take even more than that!! Ahh! I called the bank straight away and explained to them that I had been the victim of fraud! I couldn't even believe it! More than $500 gone in less than 3 hours! Luckily Bank of America completely reimburses any money lost to credit card fraud and the guy I spoke to on the phone was incredibly helpful. But what a stressful ordeal! I had to cut up my card and I'm now waiting on a new one in the mail - thank goodness I'm seeing Mum and Q this weekend otherwise I would've been completely flat broke with no way to access any of my money! To take my mind off the stress, my roomies and I all went to see a late night showing of About Time and it was such a wonderful movie! It really had the most beautiful message and the acting and story were impeccable. I absolutely loved it!

Thursday was an easy day at school, and then once my school day was over I saw LACC's production of Comedy of Errors and it was great! All of the actors did such an amazing job and it was so fun to see all three of my roommates in a show together! As soon as the show was over, I raced home, packed my stuff for this weekend and then got in the car with Qee and we were off to pick up Han and go home to the new house!!!! Woohoo!

A Perfect End to a Perfect Trip!

Wow! We've had a busy few days with a lot to catch up on! On Thursday we went to the Canberra zoo and aquarium which was so much fun and very exciting!

We were there early and almost all of the animals were being interesting - which is a first in our zoo-going experience. We saw two gay lions getting it on (also a first...), a sun bear playing and trying to scratch an itch that it couldn't quite reach, King Julien from Madagascar, a big brown bear like chewy awwwww, and a lot of Aussie wildlife: dingos, kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, wombats, and emus.

Will recently decided that chameleons, or "camouflage lizards," are his favourite animals. He spent the whole time in the aquarium pointing out the animals blending in, and told us: "I'm a pretty good camouflage spotter." 

We went to the zoo sausage sizzle and had the classic Aussie sausage sangers we've missed so much! Yum!

We had a quiet evening at home and delish salmon risotto for dinner.

Next day we had one very last surprise in store for grandpa... We'd secretly organised with grandma to come over for lunch and the surprise went perfectly! We saw uncle Matt too while we were over and it was lovely to catch up with all of them.

We had driven to their place and on the way back we got a little turned around, yikes! We went the wrong way and were trying to turn around when we found ourselves in the left lane (good) of two left lanes of oncoming traffic (eek! Not good!). Han did a quick reverse manoeuvre and got us back on track but it was slightly terrifying... 

When we got home Phe came over for one last visit. Eddie suggested that we show Phe the finished dance as a dress rehearsal before we perform for the whole fam on Saturday. Mid way through "I Would" by 1D, though, Eddie had a bit of a mishap!

It really was hilarious! Once we knew Ed wasn't hurt we all had a bit of a laugh and had another (more successful) crack at the dance. So here it is, the long awaited, umm, masterpiece...

--- eeeek! Just kidding! It won't upload right now so we'll try again later ---

The next day was Saturday, our last full day in Aus! We got up early to watch the kiddies at their swimming lessons - they did SO well and were absolutely adorable!

After that we went out for a coffee with our childhood friend Nick. It was so great to see him after about 8 years! We've all grown up but none of us have really changed all that much.

We had a lot to catch up on though, and it was awesome to hear all about Nick! He'd just come back from field training with ADFA, so he was considerably more badass than he was the last time we saw him!

Nick dropped us home in time to help get ready for a big Sunday roast with the whole fam. Lucy helped Eddie and Will ice/decorate cupcakes - this is the pose Han got when she asked for "nonchalant."

The lunch was perfect and it was great to catch up with the fam! Sue also brought a tin of our favourite shortbread over for us to take back to LA, so sweet of her! We've already started on it since getting back and it's seriously helping with the homesickness for Aus.

We got absolutely destroyed in the cricket that night, which was entirely depressing, and watched some of the Tour de France before packing our bags and going to sleep.

Yesterday - if it even counts as yesterday, so confusing - we had a yummy breakfast, watched Han's ballet recital dvd, and did early birthday prezzies before heading to the airport. We had a bittersweet goodbye, sad to leave after such a lovely visit but excited to head back to LA. Part of our b'day present was a countdown timer to our Chrissy holiday in Thailand, only 150 days until we see each other again!

The flight was entirely unpleasant :( neither of us slept and a baby a few seats away cried for all but, I don't know, about two hours, ugh. We made it, though, and knew Ollie and Wyatt would be at LAX to pick us up... They weren't. Haha we gave them a wake up call and they left soon after to come get us.

We made it back to the apartment and on the top of our to do list was catching up on The Bachelorette! Tonight is the second last episode and we're glad to be caught up! We're pretty into it...

We have a big day of unpacking, errands, grocery shopping, and laundry planned for today, so we'd best be off! It feels great to be back in sunny LA, the city of angels.