Apartment composting - Part I

Today is the big day - we've officially put our composter into use!  We obtained our composter from the North Shore Recycling Program earlier this week after giving up on getting a NatureMill Composter, which I had learned tend to break down easily.  So Tim stopped by the depot and picked it up and set it up earlier this week.  Upon reading the instructions, we discovered that we needed to start the composter off with a bed of twigs, so we didn't start putting our scraps into the composter until today (although we were keeping the scraps in the fridge - gross!).  So today we went on a little adventure to the park just down at the end of our street and looked around by the creek and filled a box with twigs and brought them back.  We filled the bottom of the composter with the twigs:

So, since we live in an apartment, we set the composter up on the balcony.  We're really lucky to have a fairly big balcony, so it just hangs out in the corner. Here's a shot of Tim prepping it:

Now that we've christened it with our first load of "green" (over which Tim immediately put some "brown" because he thought it already stunk), in a few months, we'll be able to use some beautiful nutritious compost for our plants!  If any of you compost and have some helpful tips, feel free to leave some comments.  Also, we plan to use mainly shredded paper for our brown material, have any of you done that or do most of you manage to find dry leaves?

Follow up: it's been a couple hours since I posted this and I have done some research on using paper as brown and apparently unless we get some worms (which we're considering), we should avoid the paper. Sigh.