Connected!

Well, we finally are connected again. It only took a 8 days of waiting and 5 hours of installing, but we now have internet, phone and TV. HOORRRAAAYYYYY!!! Now I can get some unpacking done!

Moved

Well, we did it. We are moved to our new house. This was made possible because of a lot of help we received. Thank you Dad, Mom, Emily, Von, CJ, Vlad, Jordan, Eric, Kendra, Dwaine, Mike and Elise. 15 hours of Wednesday was spent moving our things. It took 2 trips in the 17 foot Uhaul truck and a lot of manpower. Dolly's are a really good thing to have.
A few things we learned:
Keep plenty of markers around while moving so that all the boxes get written on.
Dolly's are great!
Four boxes with 6 number ten cans full of flour is too many to carry up a set of stairs at one time.
64 year old men can have more stamina than you would expect from anyone.
Keep gatorade around while moving.
Just because a fridge's measurements fit into the opening doesn't mean the fridge will OPEN when put in the opening.
Sometimes Comcast can't install the day they say they can because there isn't a nearby cable to use and they have to get permission to go over the apartment building next door before they can install for you.
It is easier to spend a lot of time unpacking if you can call your sisters and talk to them while you unpack. (At least I'll use that for an excuse of why I haven't done more unpacking)

It will probably be a couple more days before I post again since I don't have an internet connection at home until Comcast gets permission from the apartment building owners and then gets it hooked up.
Thanks everyone for your congratulations. This has been an exciting thing for us. When the first house didn't go through back in September/October I was frustrated, but knew there was a reason. I don't know all the reasons, but I know this is the house we're supposed to be in and we have been wonderfully blessed at all the things that have helped us get into the house. I am amazed at how comfortable our house feels. It really feels like HOME. I'm glad to be where Heavenly Father wants us to be.

View

Yesterday we did the final walk-through on the house. While we were doing it I noticed the view from the front porch. I hadn't realized before that because there aren't houses across the street it meant that we would have a better view of the mountains. This is our view:


We're moving in tomorrow!

Closing

Today at 3:00 we close. I'm definitely ready for it. I'm looking forward to decorating and putting things the way I want them.
Mom commented that the house is more modern than it looks from the outside. That's actually one of the things I love about it. The house has things that give it character, but everything is brand new and nice. For example: there are transom windows above all the doors, they let in extra light and are really pretty. I also like the baseboards. Not a lot of homes have 8" of baseboards. Also the ceilings are really high. I'm not sure if it's 11 feet high or 12, but either way it is high.
Here is a picture of part of the kitchen:


I actually won't be painting the walls. I really like the beige color they are now, but I COULD if I wanted to and probably will at some point. The picture is taken from the living room, so you can't see where the fridge goes on the right. The doorway on the left that you can barely see goes to the laundry room which also has a door that leads to the carport.
If the person taking the picture had turned 90 degrees to their right you would be able to see the main bathroom and the entrances to the kids bedrooms/my sewing room (the smaller bedroom will be my sewing room and guest room until we have a little girl for it, and no this isn't an announcement, we're just planning for the future).
Another 90 degrees and you would see the living room, including the front door and the windows. You would probably also see the doorway into the master bedroom. Off the master is a bathroom and walk-in-closet.
In case you can't tell, I'm really excited about it. We won't get the keys until Tuesday and then we can start moving in.

Who knew moving a door would cause problems?

Our home has recently been remodeled. It was originally built a long time ago and the front door was on the North side of the house. When NHS was remodeling it they moved the front door to the East side of the house where it just makes a lot more sense. There was already a door on the East, it just wasn't the "main" door. I didn't think anything about it when we decided to buy the house.
This is what the North side of the house used to look like:

This is what the North side of the house looks like now:

This is what the East side of the house used to look like:

I don't have a picture of what it looks like now, but I will soon.

Yesterday the building inspector pointed out that because the carport is on the back of the house instead of the side of the house, it wasn't far enough from the neighbor's property. Luckily NHS figured out how to resolve that issue and did so.
Then I called Comcast to set up a date for our service to be installed in our new house. When the door was changed, the address changed too. So Comcast doesn't have our address in their system. They have to submit a form to create that address before they can install our service. How funny.

Things I'm looking forward to

Some of the things I'm looking forward to in my own house are:
Having a washer and dryer next to each other instead of 12 feet away from each other.
Not having to share the washer with someone else
Being able to vacumn anytime I want to without worrying about someone else
Not being kept up by people walking around upstairs
Having my own mailbox
Being able to decorate however I want (as long as Karl likes it too)
Being able to use 2 different bathrooms at the same time (not me personally, but members of my family)
Having a dishwasher I can run during the day and still be able to use the kitchen sink
Knowing that it's ours.

Karl's reasons are slightly different than mine, these are some of his (although he does agree with mine.)
Tax advantages
Building wealth
Providing a nice place for my family to live
Having an open floor plan
Having covered parking that's just for us (and hopefully a garage in the future)

Older than dirt

Here's a funny email I got and wanted to share:

OLDER THAN DIRT QUIZ
Count all the ones that you remember, (not the ones you were told about.)
Ratings at the bottom.

1. Blackjack chewing gum
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
5. Coffee shops or diners with tableside jukeboxes
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (OLive-6933)
12. Peashooters
13. Howdy Doody
14. 45 RPM records
15. S&H greenstamps
16. Hi-fi's
17. Metal ice trays with lever
18. Mimeograph paper
19. Blue flashbulb
20. Packards
21. Roller skate keys
22.Corkpopguns
23. Drive-ins
24.Studebakers
25. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered 0-5 = You're still young
If you remembered 6-10 = You are getting older
If you remembered 11-15 = Don't tell your age,
If you remembered 16-25 = You're older than dirt!
I might be older than dirt but those memories are the best part of my life.

Limbo

I'm feeling very caught in limbo. I don't know for sure if the house will go through, and part of me is scared to work on packing in case it doesn't. The other part of me is ready to pack so that as soon as the house goes through we can move. So all I can really do is keep the apartment clean so it is easier to pack when the paperwork goes through.

As far as my class goes. Part of my frustration, which I didn't really state was that there weren't any other options for classes that were at times I could take them. As in: there are NO other classes I can take at any time in the evening or on Saturday that will fill ANY requirement for my graduation. I think I'll talk to my advisor and make sure there are 2 classes that will work for me this summer.

Frustration

Although I usually try not to complain, I am really frustrated and want to get it out, so feel free to skip this entry if you don't want to hear frustration right now.
Today I started school for the semester. My first class is Research Methods for the Behavioral Sciences. I'm excited to learn about this subject and specifically how to actually do research. I was pretty pleased by my first class. The teacher was upbeat and seemed excited to be there and teaching about something she enjoys.
Then came my second class. I signed up for the class People and Cultures of the World. I have a diversity requirement and this class sounded like the best on the list I had to choose from.
In my mind I had decided that the class would probably discuss some of the different people and cultures of the world. I thought maybe I would learn things that would be useful in doing therapy with people from different cultures.
I thought the titles for the books for the class seemed rather focused on one part of the world, but didn't think much more about it. When I arrived at class the teacher was talking to some of the students about her travels to Africa.
Before long I realized that the class would be focusing ONLY on Africa. While I don't think this would bug me if I had signed up for that, I didn't know and therefore am pretty frustrated about it. I guess I will learn a lot about Africa this semester. Hopefully the class improves and I will end up being very glad that I took this class. We'll see. :)

Sore Arms

It has been snowing again. I really enjoy the snow. It makes the world beautiful, and it's great for rehydrating the ground.
There is a bad side to it though. We live in an apartment, one of the things we liked about the apartment was knowing that we weren't limited on parking spaces. There is room for at least 7 cars to park in front of the apartment. The problem with this is when it snows we are responsible for shoveling the snow. If I just shovel the walkway it wouldn't take too long, but when you add the parking spaces for us and our neighbor, it takes a long time. So this morning I went out and shoveled for 45 minutes. Now my arms hurt!!! Maybe in our new house we'll be able to get a snowblower :)

By the way, our house is still going forward. We don't have a closing date yet, but hopefully it will be in the next 2 weeks. We did get more news about the house though. Originally our interest rate was 5.95, which we were happy with. When we couldn't close by the end of 2008 the interest rate changed to 5.25. Yesterday we found out that we have a 4.9 interest rate if we close by the end of March. Whoo hooo!!!!

Happy New Year!!

It's a new year. Wow, last year went by really quickly. To send out the old year Karl and I had some friends over. Jordan and Eric brought their Wii, and Shelly and Steve came over too. We had a bunch of fun playing games, then watched a movie and talked for a couple hours. (Actually Jordan and Eric left soon after midnight because Jordan had to work today, but the other 4 of us finished the movie and then talked). Karl's mom borrowed our boys for the evening. She said they had fun, and it gave Karl and I a break for a night.
Here's the pictures of the traditional New Years Kisses




Traditionally I stay away from making New Year's Resolutions, I think it's silly to suddenly decide something is important to do for the new year when it wasn't important for the last year. And most resolutions are given up within a week or two.
This year I am going to do something a little different. I've been thinking of things I would like to be able to say I have accomplished. I don't really have a deadline for them, but I would like to do them. Here they are:

Make a quilt for each person in my immediate family
Earn a Bachelor's Degree
Earn a Master's Degree
Make a positive difference in as many people's lives as possible
Have a happy marriage for 50+ years (as a prelude to eternity)
Have happy, well-adjusted, strong, spiritual, dependable children

There are other things, but those are the things that have been on my mind.