An ode to Ruthie

At the risk of this being the blog version of a public display of affection, I'm going to warn you: I'm being nice to Ruthie in public.  Since it does, in fact, happen occasionally, I figure it's about time for another one of those moments.

Without Ruthie, I seriously don't know how I would've made the transition to life in Australia.  Sure, I managed to finagle a 5-day paid trip from Sydney to Melbourne that took less, giving us a couple days/nights fully covered at gov't expense once we arrived here.  But after that, I really did very little.  It was Ruthie who found me a bicycle.  It was Ruthie who found us an apartment.  It was Ruthie who found us a car.

Seriously, without Ruthie, I either would've had to spend a couple nights up really late, or taken a couple days' worth of leave in order to find a place to live.  The way they do things around here in terms of real estate, make it rather inconvenient for someone with a full time job to do it on their own.  Sure, we managed to see about four houses in one Saturday morning.  But none of them were really worth anything.  And even before all that, it was Ruthie who culled all the available properties on the internet down to a short-and-sweet list for us to shop.  Then, it was Ruthie, who on a Monday afternoon [while I was at work], met with a realtor, visited an apartment, and charmed him into making us a top priority, so we could move in [and out of our hotel] as soon as possible. 


Once we'd made a decision to get a car, it was Ruthie who fought the irritatingly slow and random internet at McDonald's to search the used car listings to find us something in our price range.  She then contacted dozens of people, and finally worked out some meeting times with the ones we liked best.  Sure, I might've been the deciding factor in the car, but it was Ruthie's hard work that made it possible.


So it was only fitting that after we moved into our apartment, that even with the rain, we were presented with quite the visual reward:

And even though we haven't had that many rainy afternoons since our first week in the apartment, I keep hoping we'll have plenty more of these, Ruthie's Rainbows.

-EP