HALALUJAH!!!!!! (or however you spell it)

Ahhh, it's getting late. Dave is working on Math stuff. I was going to be off the computer long ago, but we just got our wedding pictures tonight!! Ohhhhh such fun. It took ages to look at them all. Poor Dave had stuff he needed to do for school so he couldn't even look at all of them with me. I would say overall I'm very happy with them. There are a few things I wish we had, or would have been more specific about, but they look very professional and he got some great shots. (if anyone wants to see them, send me an e-mail and I can send you the link)

Anyway, that's not really what I was halalujahing about though. And now, a short story. Dave has off school on Mondays. Or I should say, he doesn't have to teach or take classes, but he does have a lot of work to do to prepare for the week, generally speaking. So anyway, we were frittering about the homestead today, exchanging pleasantries and in general enjoying the day. This afternoon we were going to haul some junk to Goodwill and deposit some cheques (or checks for you Americans) that have arrived in the mail in the last couple days. One of those checks, the most valuable I might mention, was a 200 dollar check for Dave's rent deposit from his summer apartment. I thought I knew exactly where it was (on the floor on a very specific pile) and went to grab it and head on our merry way. Well, it wasn't there. Not to panic, I'll check another pile. Not there either. So I continued to check pile after pile (we're not quite as slobby as this is making us sound...) and NOTHING. It was as though the check had just vanished into thin air. And at this stage in our lives, loosing checks is not something we are aspiring to, let me just tell ya! So for the next almost 2 hours, both of us tore the place apart, searching high and low everywhere we could think of and looking in our cars and then starting all over, again and again. Nothing. How come junk mail doesn't get lost, but a 200 dollar check... anyway... By this time, we were neither frittering, nor exchanging pleasantries. We were downright annoyed and cranky. I could remember seeing the check in it's envelope either Saturday or Sunday. Dave remembered seeing it as well, but neither one of us could remember doing anything at all with it. So anyway, we decided to just go to Goodwill, deposit the checks we do have, and then come home and look some more and hope it would should up eventually. So we got home and I told Dave I'm scared it's in the garbage somewhere, meaning it's just gone, like it fell out of a pocket somewhere and will never been seen again. He asked if we should check the garbage here. Now there were 2 big bags of garbage in the kitchen that had been waiting to be taken out for a little while (again, we're really clean people). I said, oh, I can't imagine it would be in our garbage here, but we might as well check. I graciously offered to go through the tiny trash can in the spare room if he would go through the 2 big bags in the kitchen, because I'm nice like that (how is this short story getting so crazy long? I have no idea)... and I was half joking. ANYWAY, he went to dig through the trash and came skipping into the spare room moments later... WITH THE CHECK (or CHEQUE for the Canadians) IN HAND!! That's right, it was in the trash, tied up, waiting to be taken out. I had wanted him to take it out yesterday but HOORAY for procrastination!! It was with a bunch of junk mail that I threw out. Yes, I take full responsibility for throwing the check in the trash because I'm fairly confident of the 2 of us, I'm the one who would generally perform tasks such as sorting and throwing out mail. Anyway, thank the Lord the check/cheque is found and that the trash wasn't taken out yesterday before we knew it was missing. Otherwise it really would have been gone forever. Ummmm... that just might be it.

Annoying blogger!!

the site not the person, although I'm sure lots of bloggers are annoying at times as well. So I so carefully saved all the picture posts and then posted them backwards so they would be come out in the right order, and it didn't work!! So for some reason, the post below is in the right order, but all the pictures are backward from when they happened. arg! So if you want to see them in order, you can go to the bottom and start with Gatlinburg. But I'm sure you don't care nearly as much as I do.

This may take awhile...

Hello all - If all goes according to plan, this post will appear first followed by a pile of posts with pictures on them. I've spent hours today and last night getting all these pics downsized and such so I hope you appreciate them. = ) I've been meaning to post for awhile and life has just been crazy. I don't know with what exactly, but it's just been nuts. I take that back, I do know a little why it's been crazy - for one thing, I never ceased to be amazed at how LONG it takes to do ANYTHING. It seems like every time we leave the house, we're gone for at least 3 usually more like 5 or 6 hours. Just for a few stops here and there. Which reminds me, last Thursday I had some errands I needed to do. I really needed to get to a chiropractor and then I wanted to go to the social security off, the license branch, etc. Well, that morning after oversleeping by an hour, I remembered that Lucy was in Dave's car. Oh my stinkin cow!! How am I ever going to get where I needed to go. Well, I'm happy to report that without the aid of Lucy, little miss airhead successfully navigated the city all day long. I was frantically writing directions before I left to get to various places, then I decided that since I was out, I was just going to try to do everything I needed to do. So I went to a gas station and bought a (gasp!) map! And it worked! I mean, I would still a million times rather have Lucy by my side. One of the most frustrating things is that many of the intersections aren't marked and so you have to guess if it's the right turn or not. The other frustrating thing is that you can't read the signs in time to know what lane you need to be in. At one point I was wavering in my decision (aka driving down the middle of 2 lanes) and the jerk behind me started honking. So I picked really fast. And then just a bit later, the car in front of me is weaving all over the road, in one lane, out of another and I could just tell she (or he) was having the same problem I was. And did I honk and violently shake my fist and said driver? No, of course not! I felt such a connection, such a bond, such affinity with that person. I wanted to get out and invite them over for lunch. I smiled to myself, feeling like I wasn't the only struggling motorist on the road.



What else - we had let our laundry situation get way out of hand. Can I just say that doing laundry here is not on my list of things that make me jump with joy? The room is boiling hot, FILTHY, and smells strongly of urine. So anyway, we finally did a bunch of laundry on Saturday and were up until 2 waiting for things to dry. I was SOOOOO frustrated. There was at least one load that we dried twice and it still wasn't dry. Another load that had dried once and wasn't. And we are paying for every load! So after paying, we still have to bring wet clothes in and hang them all over the house. It made me sorta cranky.



Yesterday we came close to getting in a car wreck which would have fallen on the FIRST day of our new policy and the FIRST day in about 5 years that I haven't had comprehensive coverage n my car. How ironic. But as my gramps used to say, a miss is as good as a mile. (he didn't really say that)



I really should be doing many many things right now other than blogging but this has been on my list for ages. So I decided if I don't just do it it will never happen. One of the things I need to be doing is clearing a path for the COUCH we are getting tomorrow! We are greatly excited about that. We have been looking around and there was one that was new that we liked but it was too expensive. Then I looked at it online and it was way cheaper. So we went into the store and it's on sale ending today. And it's cheaper than a lot of the used ones we looked at. So that's a happy little occurrence. I'll try to post a picture once it's more shoveled out.



I'll leave you with one final thought before pictures (if you're still reading and haven't just skipped to the good stuff). Are all guys like this? Maybe just mine. But sometimes it's like he acts like there's a global word shortage so he really needs to conserve them. So the other day we were sitting at the table and these were the words that came flying out of his mouth: "Birthdays! 25, 26, 27! Group of friends! Parents house! PAPA MURPHY'S!! (pizza chain) CARDS!!!!" I just stared at him. Then started laughing. Then asked if complete sentences were out dated. And he said, "Okay, for my 25th, 25th and 27th birthdays, I did the same thing. I had a group of friends over to my parents house and we played cards and ate Papa Murphy's. It was a lot of fun." And I said, ahhhhh, now we have a paragraph. It was very funny, but I'm sure you had to be there. And it reminded me of one of my favorite brother Derek stories. I have laughed about this for the last nearly 20 years. We were at my brother Sheldon's house and Derek was probably 13, 14, just a guess. And some of us were sitting around and he was all excited and says (and it's not nearly as funny if you can't hear the excitement in all the nonsense ... "MOM, downstairs, playing, basement, hockey stick, all of a sudden, BRRRRUMP (can't spell the sound) on my shoulder!!" Oh my, I have bugged him about that for years. I guess he was down there playing hockey and something from somewhere landed on his shoulder. Ahhh good times. Okay, I now leave you with a small gallery of pictures from the last 5 weeks. Wow, it seems more like a year.

random odds and ends...

Jenni wanted a picture of the dishes I posted about awhile ago so there they are.

Here's our table. I like the criss-crossyness of it.

Okay, as for the following picture, I need to do some explaining. Our room is by far the most put together in the place so far. But I've been going squirlly with all the white (I guess technically off-white) walls. Look out matilda when we have a house because there will not be a speck of white in that thing!! Anyhoo... to make matters worse, we found a bed spread awhile ago that we both liked (that's not the worse part) but I didn't really think about the fact that the main color is off white, and what this room is crying out for is color. So what I WANTED to do was find a way to put a whole bunch of color on one wall - esp. to break up the bedspread and white walls. So I was picturing this really cool thing in my head. A big piece of fabric, tied in a pazazzy fasion and flowing downward, to brighten things up. Well I was in Walmart awhile ago and saw this (whispered sheepishly) tablecloth and though hey, that would be perfect, no need to hem anything, bla bla bla. So it all looked so nice in my head and I got it home and put it up and we just laughed. Because it doesn't look cool or nice or pizzazy. It just looks like there's a table cloth hanging on our wall. Truth be told, I only pounded in the top nail, so the sides are being held up by stick tack which doesn't stay at all, I just restabbed it to the wall for the picture. So, any ideas? pleeze?

And for some more explaning... One of my main jobs (now) in life is to see that Dave is presentable. It's sorta fun actually. But, um, let's see, where do I begin. No offence to anyone out there who may do this, it's not TERRIBLE, it's just not wonderful in my opinion either. But he insists on wearing shorts with long socks and tennis shoes. This is one battle that I cannot win. I admit I've won most of them when it comes to wardrobe selections. So as a consession, I just constantly remind him to pull his socks down and not to have them hicked up to china, while wearing shorts. So we were going through piles of his clothes while moving in and he has this shirt. shudder. It came from a friend of his whose (very wise) mom made him get rid of it. So he gave it to Dave. Why God, why?? I don't know if you can see on the picture or not, but it has real little people in red swim gear surfing all over the place. Dave will not get rid of it. Of course he will never wear it out of the house, but he won't get rid of it either. Then we came across of pair of very "mature" looking slinky feeling dress shorts. I have no clue how in style they are but I told him there's no way he can wear socks hiked up to china and tennis shoes with those shorts. (so we got rid of them) So there's the complete picture.

Gustav

Preparing sustenance for the impending doom.





Our window boarded up. Funny thing - it's still boarded up and who knows when it will get fixed. But the other day I said to Dave - can't we just hang the nice curtains over the boards. Because I'm getting really tired of looking at the sheet we had up for a couple weeks. So that's what we did.



We had so many frozen water bottles. We used the freezer as a cooler and put some of the food in there with ice and frozen water bottles, but it didn't really work so well. Everything was getting very warm.



We have power!! We were so lucky to get power back so quick - we were only without power for a day and a half. On Sunday in church we were talking with people who had just gotten their power back in the last couple days. Most of them had generators though. But still a huge pain in the neck. Like our "couch?"





These pictures were taken right around our building. The above tree was in beween us and the laundry facilities.



The following picture is a building on our street. That was the most damage that we saw in our neighborhood. They thought a small twister might have touched down there or something because the damage was so much worse right there.





Back to our building.



The following tree pictures were taken as we were driving a little ways from our house. I just saw this exact tree in this exact position today.

Moving in to the new place...

This is opening wedding gifts at Dave's aunt and uncle's place close to Atlanta. We had such a fun evening with them. And it was a great idea to open the gifts there because I still don't think we have a space big enough in the apartment. (that is cleared of junk)


Eating breakfast the first morning at an end table sitting on camp chairs and eating out of tupperware.

I think Dave has some pictures that capture the grime a little better than these. But this is an idea. And I didn't get a picture of the floor that he was attacking with an ice scraper in this picture. Here's a before and after of the side of the counter (with the stove removed). And hey, I got the order thing right for a change.


And here we have a before and after shot of the stove. ugh.


We scrubbed literally every inch of this kitchen.


Starting to look a bit better... finally moving stuff in.

Ack!! This is so depressing. Okay, so it doesn't look this bad anymore. But we're a long ways from done.

Asheville, NC

Okay, so we were only on Ashville one day but I think I have more pictures of there than Gatlinburg. And the ones on here are out of order because of course, I can never get it through my head that pictures will post backwards. I mean, I know they do and I try to get it right, but I never can. So these are all pictures of the Biltmore House than we went to the second day we were there. The last pictures are of us driving around taking pictures of the mountains the first evening we were there. Also, Biltmore was amazing, and I don't hae a picture of the whole house because it's too huge. That first one is on one of the patios or whatever you call it when they are huge.



Some of the shops around the house.



Part of the house.



The gardens - which were amazing and I couldn't stop taking pictures or posting them on here.



Sort of out of order - I think Dave took this picture as we were leaving the house and walking down to the gardens. Yeah, we were hot and tired so thought we should take something other than a happy sappy picture. (not cranky, just hot and tired)



The evening we got to Asheville we drove on this highway with all these lookouts of the mountains and it was gorgeous. It was a lot harder to find places like that in Gatlinburg. So we had fun taking tons of pictures. So here's mountains, us, mountains, us, mountains... you get the picture