hum de dum...

A random assortment of thoughts and happenings as of late:

-- Today is Dave's last week day before school starts. So I thought today might be a nice day for him to accompany the kids and I to the zoo. How fun it would be. It seemed as though it wouldn't be as scorching hot today as some days are in Aug. And the forecast was calling for rain mostly in the afternoon. So off we plod. At first it seemed so nice and shady with a little breeze. Within an hour, we were so miserably hot I just wanted to get out of there. There was little shade and it was unbearably humid. Oh my. The sweat that was produced. Then it sprinkled a little. Then as we were wrapping it up and heading back to the entrance, the skies opened up and water gushed forth. Not only that but it was thundering like I have heard few times in my life. It was so loud it was insane! There was no where we could go to get out of it so we just had to walk. I was pushing a stroller with one kid and Dave was carrying another who was understandably crying. We finally made it to cover, and were so soaking it was as if we had just gone swimming with our clothes on. Now what to do? Eventually it let up and we ate in the back of the vehicle (well, the small people did) and headed for home. totally soaked and exhausted. When we arrived at their place, the power had gone out and the elevator wasn't working. The 2 year old was sound asleep (in a stroller) and it's a lengthy walk to get to their place on the FOURTH FLOOR. ARG! So Dave and I ended up carrying the stroller up all 900 flights of stairs to avoid disrupting her precious little sleep. I spose it doesn't sound as grand after the fact, but I came home and slept a long time. What a crazy day.

-- Tonight Dave and I went out and about (after the lengthy sleep) and were cruising down the multi-lane road, (in the dark) when all of a sudden out of NOWHERE, there's this big, orange cone right in the middle of our lane. He slams on the breaks, stops very close to the thing, and here's the best part, has his hand on the horn and is about a nanosecond away from HONKING AT THE CONE. I just stared at him, and was like, yeah, honk at it, that'll help. poor Dave. Then it all struck me so funny that I laughed my brains out for the next very long time. I think he's starting to see the humor in the situation. The cone out of nowhere, slamming on the breaks, HONK... the cone yields and shuffles off the road.

-- We think the ceilings here are lower than our last place. I fear our heads may someday end up in a ceiling fan. shiver. Speaking of which, I have this phobia of ceiling fans. I'm just sure that as we lie asleep some night, our fan is going to fall off the ceiling, while still madly oscillating, and chop us to bits as we sleep. But we'll surely wake up and who wants to wake up to such terror? Gives me shivers.

-- Unpacking our place is sort of at a stand still. Things are pretty much unpacked, but we don't have all the needed things to make everything look like it eventually will. So it doesn't look the prettiest, but it's functional.

-- I went to sleep around 9:00 2 nights this week. I don't think I've done that since I was 7. Not that that is even remotely interesting news. 2 other nights this week, I slept after getting home from work and it felt more like a coma than sleep. I would have to lay there around a half hour in order to wake up enough to feel vaguely human. Is this normal? so odd. It's like the effects of anesthesia with no anesthetic.

-- Last Saturday I went shopping with a friend to a town close by that has one (at least) street of antique shops. Oh the money I could spend. It was so neat. I haven't just browsed antiques like that for, um, maybe ever, not sure. I love old stuff like that. The furniture actually has character and what not.

-- I guess that's all. We don't have a lot going on this weekend and that's fine with me. I'm pretty sure we won't be going to the zoo.

One Year Ago...

... I wanted to say today, but I didn't get around to posting on the actual day, sooooo, on Sunday Dave and I celebrated our first anniversary. Doesn't really seem possible, but then I look at these pictures and in some ways they seem like a long long time ago. Time is so funny that way. It's been fun looking back and remembering the big day. It inspired me to post a bunch of pictures - some of the behind the scenes fun stuff that you might not have seen. Or maybe you have. Or maybe you haven't but you find them entirely boring, in which case you should stop reading immediately. This feels sort of self-centered for a happy anniversary post because Dave's not in most of the pictures. It's all about what I was doing the day before and the morning of the wedding. I also hope that's okay and the marriage gods don't unleash their fury. Anyway, what a crazy time. I would never want to do over the stress and craziness, but once we got down to about the day before, then it was just fun, because there were so many people around to visit and everything was coming together. (credit goes to Jenni for I think all of these pics)
I think this was Thursday - Jenni and I getting our nails done. Incidentally, they did a terrible job on my fingernails and they were pretty chipped for the wedding. ah well. (I don't know why some of these pics turned out sorta grainy)
What a total blast - seeing people I hadn't seen in ages! We had breakfast on Friday morning - mostly Red Lake people, but a few other great friends as well. (side note - I think Robyn and LaRonda were so overcome by joy at seeing all these wonderful people that they reverted back to the 12 year old practice of calling each other up and saying " hey, what are you wearing to the brunch? Brown? Cool! We can MAAATTTCHH!" They were also really cute and coordinating in black shirts at the wedding... hmmmmm....sorta makes ya wonder. Actually, they probably just have similar good taste, but I couldn't resist. I remember calling up these girls before Sunday night church (about 400 years ago) - hey, what are you wearing? such silliness)
Rhonda praying that the cake will turn out alright?


Rhonda singing a song over the wedding cake. A traditional Israeli blessing maybe?
Twila and the tater salad.

The morning of - doing make up in my empty Indiana bedroom.
At the hairdresser - my sweetie had flowers sent there for me! (yikes - I think the theory behind all the make up was that some of it is bound to come off by picture time, so better pile it on good and proper.)
Alabama - didn't look like she was suffering too badly.
wowzers
So pretty! - Jenni and Alabama

Getting ready at the church



Fast forward several hours -

It's sort of weird for the first year to be over. Now we're just old married fogies. = ( haha. No excuse to do something fun on the 9th of every month anymore - one year and two months - whoo hoo. = ( But it is fun to look ahead and wonder where in the world we'll be in 2 or 3 years from now. As for our weekend, let's see. On Saturday, we went to see the Julia/Julie movie. It was pretty good and quite humorous at parts, but by the end, I was ready for it to be over. Then we had a really nice dinner a place called the Grill Room. It was the best blueberry iced tea I've ever had. Sunday afternoon we were going to go on this safari thing. It sounds really neat - you take a covered wagon ride and there's all these animals that'll come up to the wagon - zebras, giraffes, etc, (but no elephants = ( ). It sounded like it would be a lot of fun, but Sunday rolled around and it was so hot that the thought of sitting in a covered wagon, just wasn't the happiest. We still want to do it, but maybe in November or something like that. So we ended up going to the Houmas House plantation about an hour from here. It was SO neat and I kept thinking of all my friends and family that I'd love to take there. = ) The tour was led by a jolly black lady and she was phenomenal - so very funny, she had some amazing pipes and sang a couple times, and played a piano that was there. I don't remember the name of it, but there are only I think she said 60 in the States. She had a lot of interesting history to share as well. For instance, she was talking about how you don't hear this, but there were actually free African Americans who owned slaves. She said her father's side of the family came from slavery, but her mother's side of the family owned slaves. All very interesting. And the place was beautiful and here's the really really terrible thing - I remembered the camera but forgot the memory card! We were so bummed. We might have to go back sometime just to take pictures - probably won't pay for the tour again though. Anyway, it was all really fun.

In other news, we are finally making some serious progress in unpacking. The living room isn't the best and is covered in empty boxes, but the empty is a good sign, right? We got a lot done in the spare room - Dave got more done than I did. I unpacked a bunch of our books, then sat and stared at the mess and wondered what to do next. I've been doing that a lot lately. I can't believe how fast my vacation time has flown by. I'd like to get a bunch more done before I go back to work, but I also want to swim in our pool and have some fun too. hmmmm... Well, I'm sure I've bored you long enough, so I should let you go now. Have a happy day.

Lost and Found

One of he worst things about moving is it seems that things inevitably get lost. BUT once in awhile, things get found as well and that is a much happier tale! The casualties of the current move are - I can't for the life of me find my set of cake decorating tips. That's is terribly annoying because to go buy all of those would cost a heap of money and it's something I was hoping to use a lot in the future. arg. And I think there's a couple other things I've been looking for, but that's the main one. Although I couldn't find it when I was packing at the other place, so I don't know that I can blame the move on that. On to brighter sunnier topics - a year ago I moved down here from Warsaw and set to unpacking our first apartment. One thing I could not find for the life of me - the class ring I got from Grace College (it was a nice, not to mention the real deal [not cheap] ring that they gave everyone when they graduated and I really liked it). I was so sad. I searched and searched and could not find it anywhere. I remembered sitting in my room in Warsaw, taking the ring, I think a week before the wedding, and putting it one of my bags. I think it was in the load that Dave took down a week before, since I didn't want to worry about keeping track of it during the wedding and all. So when I was unpacking I ripped apart all those bags and suitcases that it might be in - nothing. So I tried to let it go. Lived without it for a year and survived so I was thinking I just might pull through when... suddenly... totally out of the blue.... I was cleaning up in the kitchen, Dave had been working back in the guest room. He came out to the kitchen and said "close your eyes, give me your hand..." I was thinking, he found my cake decorating tips. But nope - MY RING!! I could not believe it! That thing wasn't even on my radar anymore. He had been putting the luggage away in the closet, and then was fiddling with these storage drawers and moved them, and there was my ring, laying on the floor. I truly thought I'd never see it again.

New place and such

Hello all - I've been wanting to post some pics for awhile so now I'm just doing it even though I should be doing 9000 other things. I had part of this week and all next week off so I'm hoping we can get a lot done around here. This little picture tour only shows the few rooms of the place that look decent. I was going to add some others but didn't resize them and now I don't' feel like going back and doing it.
Trying to get the ginormous bookcase to the spare room. Dave and Rachel: 0, Bookcase: 1. = ( In the top picture, the bathroom is straight ahead, spare room to the right and our room to the left.
The sink in the bathroom (Dave's). Then there's another door and the shower and toilet is in the inner sanctuary.
This is my sink in our room. Then the door to the inner sanctuary, then the picture above. You could run around in circles all day here if please. Oh, notice the awesome mini florescent lights above the sink - love this little feature.

Rather self-explanatory. We got our room looking all nice but threw everything in the guest room. Oh my - you should see that room.
Drum roll please ... this is the view out of our bedroom window. Yeah, we don't complain about it too often.
One more drum roll please... I don't know how I forgot to capture this in the first round of pics. Our spacious walk in closet! So very lovely!
annndddd... Our own washer and dryer and dryer in there. This came with the apartment free of charge and we had no idea it was going to be here. It was left from the last person so we got it free. (not to keep, but to use)

Kitchen - love the counter tops. Love the sink, HOT water, and water pressure, not crazy about the dishwasher.
This picture doesn't show it, but the fridge is SMALL, way smaller than our last one. The stove and microwave, on the other hand, are amazing. Very new - I'm guessing installed a year ago and it was a guy who lived here before who hardly ever used the oven, because it looks brand new inside. The microwave also looks new except a place where it looks like someone fried a small hole on the inside - furthering my suspicion that a guy lived here before us. Anyway, I find it funny that the microwave is about 2/3 the size of the fridge, not that you can tell from this angle. Okay, I guess that's all for now. I'll post more as the rest of the place takes shape, should that actually happen. Have a great weekend everyone!

FRUSTRATED!

ARG! I'm having an annoying day. I was so excited about having a Saturday to spend unpacking. Dave and I have been talking and talking and talking about how we should arrange this smaller living room. It seems there's a problem with every single thing we come up with. GRRRR!! I just have to deal with the fact that it's not going to look as nice as it did at our last place because we just don't have the space. (we also don't have cockroaches, which is nice) So we were moving the honkin huge bookcase into the spare room and would you believe we cannot get it back there? not enough space. And I was getting highly annoyed because I don't want nasty marks and dents in our otherwise nice looking walls. So we stopped that and it's lying on it's side on our floor. next idea. We're trying to find a way to fit all our electronic junk in the living room without looking like it's overloaded with stuff. We have an old nasty TV but a nice new computer monitor. So I said something to Dave about running the TV through our monitor and getting rid of the TV. I've heard of people doing that. It seems like a win win cause we could use one screen for multiple uses and then get rid of stuff we don't need. I started looking online and there are things you can buy for a relatively cheap one time fee and you get tons of channels on your computer. We are thinking about doing that. We don't watch TV that much and don't have that many channels now, but like to at least have the option of watching the news. And game shows. haha. Anyway, this is more channels than we possibly need, but we also don't want to have a lot of channels sitting there that would be of questionable content. So anyway... bla bla bla. Do you or anyone you know have something like this? Any info on that? Well anyway, our living room is ripped apart and most of the stuff has no where to go. Maybe we should just go to the water park and ride roller coasters for the rest of the day. That might put things in perspective, no? Esp. since I hate roller coasters so much that coming home to a frustrating living room might even seem like fun after that.