Over the last few months Nadia and I have slowly started to upgrade our lifestyle from 'international student' to what I would call 'student-plus' (since it'll take us a whole year to get to the 'young professional' stage).

What does a student-plus lifestyle include? Well, among other things:

• A faster Internet connection (streaming video, yaay!)
• A DVD player and a video store membership (YAAY!)
• An MP3 player (for me, since Nadia already has one)
• New furniture including a bed, mattress, sofa, and some shelves
• A vacuum cleaner and a room lamp
• Generally more time and money for entertainment and relaxation (i.e. using all the stuff we just bought)

Here's a picture of our new sofa (technically a chaise) from Fantastic Furniture:

Cool, isn't it? Did you notice the little bean-bag foot-rest in front of it? :) Oh, and that swirly-patterned thing along the back wall is our old mattress which is waiting to be gotten rid of.

And here's my MP3 player, an iriver E100, which is awesome and is exactly what I needed and wanted:

Yes, life is good.

Looking Forward

We still have a few more things to get, though: like a digital camera (more about this in another blog post), a cable TV connection, and an Audible subscription. We also have a few more things to do: like taking a short vacation somewhere near by (which we hope to do next month), watching a play or attending a concert (if something exciting comes long), and hanging out with friends more often.

Of course, what I want to get most of all is new laptops for both of us (specifically, tablet PCs) but those cost a lot of money so they'll have to wait for another few months. Such is life. Still, we're loving what we have now (e.g. we're half-way through the one and only season of Joss Whedon's awesome TV series Firefly!) and, with the exception of me complaining about my laptop all the time, we're having a really good time.