One of the first things on our to do list was to find somewhere to live for the next three years.  After two weeks and looking at over 15 different places, we settled on a town-house in Alexandria.  It has four levels but is fairly narrow.  The garage is on the ground level along with a den and then the second level is the living / kitchen / dining area.  The third floor is my favorite as it is the master bedroom and bathroom.  The only problem with such a huge room is we don't have enough furniture (even with a king sized bed) for it and the room echoes a bit at the moment, we will fix this in time.  The top level contains the guest room, a bathroom and the office / craft / sewing room.  Most American houses don't have ceiling lights in their bedrooms or living rooms and therefore they light the rooms with lamps.  We temporarily forgot about this and when choosing our furniture we didn't get enough lamps, hence we had to go back and choose a few extra things.  The furniture that we have rented is amazing.  Way better than we could afford back home.  It was fun picking it all out, just like shopping with someone else's money!

Much of present-day Alexandria was included in a 6,000-acre land grant from Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia, which was awarded to Robert Howson, an English ship captain, on October 21, 1669. This land overlapped a 700-acre patent that had previously been issued to Dame Margaret Brent in 1654. The Howson tract extended along the Potomac River from Hunting Creek on the south to the Little Falls on the north. The grant was made by authority of King Charles II in recognition of Captain Howson's bringing 120 people to live in Virginia. Less than a month later, Howson sold the land for 6,000 pounds of tobacco to John Alexander.

http://www.ci.alexandria.va.us

The house is pretty much settled now (Apr 07) but there is always a few things that we'd like to get and do to it. We really are living in a very beautiful neighborhood and we have become good friends with our neighbors. One of the first things we did was put the Australian flag up out the front. The Americans are extremely patriotic and love flying their flag so we decided to do the same. One day we found a note from another Australian living close by under our door and we have since caught up with them.

Welcome to the Spinks residence	Town-houses all in a row	Every good house needs a BBQ	View from the top floor out the back	Main bedroom
Main bathroom	Living area		Small back balconey
	Our street	One white and cold day	Thankfully our car is safely in the garage	Clearing the snow from the sidewalk
	Snow drops are falling on our head

Australia Day was a fitting time to have a unofficial house warming. It certainly was cozy with over a dozen people in our living room. We made the most of the opportunity to educate Americans about Australia and ran another quiz similar to the one we had at our farewell party in the Adelaide. I think some of the Australians were a little embarrassed about what they did (or didn't know).

Now that's warming up we're planning our first picnic in the park and this will be an ideal opportunity to teach Americans about real football and cricket.