Sunnyvale notes

We are getting pretty close to moved into our new place, and we like it a lot! Since we've been back we have put a lot of pictures, paintings, and assorted other wall decorations up, Kate found us a washer and 2 desk chairs on Craigslist, we hung a couple mobiles, and got a nice indoor plant. No dog yet, but we did go to the Silicon Valley SPCA and looked a few but nothing was perfect enough for us to take home. Don't worry, that event will warrant a few of its own dedicated blog posts.
We did, however, take some time this past weekend to explore our local Sunnyvale community! It's quite nice, and here are some highlights of what we've found so far:

• A number of cool parks within walking/biking distance, including the basketball courts across the street that we have already used a few times. Another park (Las Palmas) in S-Vale has some fancy tennis courts (but you have to pay to play on them, it's like a public country club almost) and a great dog park.
  
• The Sunnyvale public library, which is a 5 minute bike ride away, and it's a great library. It's big, but has a bunch of separated areas and is organized well to keep the loud areas and the quiet areas separate. And it has this long conveyor belt to, well, convey returned books to the circulation area in the back! Pretty fun.
  
• We tried out our local church, thinking we were going to the Unitarian Universalist one (as a sign on the property read), but it turned out there are 2 congregations - a Unitarian one that meets at 10 and a UCC one at10:30. So were ushered into the UCC one instead. It was nice, but was probably a veto candidate for two reasons: 1) the service clocked in at 1:20 with poor hymn selection (including all 5 verses of twinkle twinkle little star) and 2) there seems to be a dedicated time to call out people that don't show up. Seriously - after the time for celebrations and concerns or what have you, they basically go around looking for who might not be there that week. This lasted for a good 5 minutes and covered at least 15 people. Yikes! Maybe we'll try the Unitarians next week.