Wednesday, April 30, 2008

I'm a home owner!!!!

Seriously!!!!!
As of Monday, April 28, 2008, I own a home!!!! Brian was working on refiancing the house and decided to add me to the title!! So here we are at the Title Agency signing the docs!!!









Friday, April 25, 2008

oh the blessings of wild animals

Friends! I know you have been waiting for this educational lesson! The picture below looks like cactus and desert debris. Actually it is a VERY large pack rat nest!! YUCKY!!! Brian and I have walked our property a bunch of times and have seen these but just thought it was tree branches, dirt, etc that the wind had blown around... not a harboring place for yucky little creatures!!!!! After the exterminator came and showed me "the largest nest I have seen in my 11 years of working in this business" I just had to take a picture and share it with you. This picture was taken after Brian was able to come over to see it as well. When we walked over to it we saw two little boogers scurrying back into their next!! GROSS!!!


After the washer incident and finding out about our pack rat issue, Brian decided that the laundry room needed a major makeover. The door hasn't shut of months now. There was no dry wall, just beams holding the structure up and brick around the outside. Brian invited Dave and Bill over to help drywall and clean out the laundry room. Then he bought a steel door that actually closes to help keep the pack rats out!! Isn't he is handsome working on the house with big power tools!! Man, I love this man!



Here is the wild hog that was caught in Uncle Morton's hog trap. This guy thought we was still tough and mighty in that cage. Andy told me that he was caught eating molded, soggy corn on the cob. Apparently, the grosser the food is, the more those little stinkers like it!


Riding around on four wheelers at The Jeffrey's ranch! We had so much fun during the pretreat for Come before Winter! I am so thankful to have these women as friends and mentors in my life!! What a blessing!


My BFF, Mariana Long, and I playing on a four-wheeler at The Jeffreys ranch in Baird! I love this lady!! I just wished she lived closer to me! :)


This is Bridgeport and Bagel the Beagle!! Philip's dog is Bridgeport! Veeves dog is Bagel bear! We love her!! She is getting old but still acts like she is a puppy!!

Thursday, April 10, 2008

and our little friends keep coming!

Wednesday morning was quite eventful. I had an exterminator out roaming our property and a guy over to the house trying to fix Brian's car that hasn't worked since Sunday.

Lisa, the lady from NW Extermination came to check on a potential(!!!!!) pack rat problem and to inspect for termites. The termites really haven't been an issue but we felt since the house hadn't been inspected since Brian purchased it, it wouldn't hurt just to check it out.
Well, it turns out we have 6, you heard me, 6 large pack rat habitations within a 75 foot radius of our house. The good thing is that they are not nesting in our storage room (PTL) but they are running back and forth for various reasons.

As I let you know in the last post, Brian placed rat poison under the washer before the gentleman put it all back together. I'm pretty sure a rat found it and is now in the rat underworld...I have decided there is no way there could possibly be a rat heaven! :) Now our storage facility smells really yucky! Brian and our friend Dave have decided to drywall the storage room and clean it all out this weekend! I am thankful I will be at Starbucks and Chick-fil-A on Saturday!!

Hours later Brian's car was finally fixed with no major diagnosis. He changed the spark plugs and the car now starts...but isn't sure why it stopped to begin with. Hummm...

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Chapter 3... sorry no pix Veevs

So, I was able to talk with our caterer today. The venue for our reception HAS fallen through so we will have to make plans to use another place. Yes, this is sort of annoying... wait! Very annoying. However, it is what it is and it always seems that in every wedding there is some sort of drama that comes with the territory.

I am thankful that I have a few more months to get everything figured out. JoAnn, the caterer, mentioned another venue that she thought might work out. It's closer to the church, on the same highway, same price. The only thing that she says it doesn't have is the winding staircase to do the grand entrance on. I didn't really care about that anyway... so we will see! Mom and Veeves are going to go check it out on April 26th!

My friend Susan was using the same venue though and her wedding is in July. I am hoping that the caterer will have a great recommendation for her too so it won't be any more stressful than it already has been for them. I would probably be a little more frazzled if I were getting married in just a few months.

This past Saturday was all fine and good when I left for Starbucks at 4:30 AM. When I returned home around 9:30 AM my roommate Amanda informed me that the washer had stopped working. Brian was out of town and with saving for a wedding, planning a trip with Come before Winter to Bosnia (Catherine) and a trip to Columbia (Brian), there aren't a lot of extra pennies lying around, you know? So, being the handy girls we are, we tried fixing it ourselves. That got us no where. I called the 1-800 number on the washer. That took me across the world to a call center in India where I was asked the same questions over and over again, was encouraged the spend more money on unnecessary things, got really frustrated and then made an appointment for the earliest time... the next Tuesday afternoon. I booked it with out a smile on this pretty face! Ughh!!!

I called my sweet friend Shannon who is just wonderful. Amanda (while leaving her wet cloths in the broken washer), Shannon and I went to La Encantada to get out of the house and enjoy the weather for a while. We talked poorly about old housing equipment and our dependency on so many things. Then we went on our separate ways.

After church on Sunday Shannon and I both had some errands to run. I was going to meet her at her condo once I went home to change. From the time I got home to the time I got to her condo she had already called 5 different washer repair people to help me find someone that could come out today (Sunday). See, I told you, wonderful friend!! :)

We found a guy that would come out and look at it for only $35! If he had to repair anything it would be $85. I was totally down with that since the Sears people were going to take three more days to come over and it was going to cost $65 just to have them come out.

This guy, David, took that sucker apart to figure out what the problem was (I had no idea was a washer looked like without its casing on). Can you guess??? Veeves..shhhh...don't tell!!

It was a massive RATS NEST!!!! Seriously. I family of rats had made their home under our washer and had chewed up all the little wiring underneath! David cleaned up all of the mess they had made, Brian bought some rat poison, David re-wired the washer, put it back together... and it works like new again!!

Brian has covered the little boogers front door and hopefully they will not be getting under there any more. We will hopefully have exterminators out some time next week to make sure we are good to go!

But isn't that exciting... God bless this desert of ours... with live animals... cute and not cute all around!

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Wedding News, Chapter 2

This past Friday my mom was doing me the wonderful help of looking for/choosing the hotel we are going to use for all of our out of town guests. In her search she decided to stop by were our dinner will be held. Here is what happened:
Front desk man (FDM): Hello. May I help you?
Mom (M): My daughter is getting married in October and she will be having her reception here. Is it okay if I just look around?
FDM: Ma'am. We don't do weddings or receptions here anymore (soundly slightly appauled). We haven't for a month or so. Are you sure this is the building?
M: I believe so. This is the AIG building.
FDM: Well ma'am. We don't do receptions here any more.
M: Well, would you mind if I still look around a bit.
FDM: Sure.

Mom called me right after that to make sure she was in the right spot. She was.
I started calling the caterer/reception person to figure out what is going on as well as my friend Susan who is using the same venue this July. She hadn't heard anything about this either.

JoAnn, the caterer, called me back later that afternoon to inform me that there were some issues and that they are in the process of working everything out. If for some reason this venue falls through she has some other recommendations so there shouldn't be any big issues...of course, this is her telling me that there shouldn't be any big issues... easy for her to say.

I'm planning on calling her tomorrow (Wednesday) to figure out what she found out from the AIG management.


Brian spent this past weekend in Las Vegas will a bunch of his college buddies. He finally asked one more groomsmen. 2 down. 2 to go...or actually...when he got back on Sunday and asked if we could add one more person to our wedding party! So now we each are going to have 5 people standing with us!!!

I've got my 5!!! 3 sisters, 1 childhood friend and 1 college friend... the perfect mixture of sweet friendships over the last 26 years!!!!!


Work is going well. I am so busy and am not sure if I will be able to stay at Starbucks much longer. I really don't want to leave but I don't feel like I am being very fair to them either. We will have to wait and see how the next month or so goes.

Chick-fil-A world is well. Just super super busy.

Congratulations to the Brooks clan on baby #3 growing so strongly!! Can't wait to see her in person sooner than we can believe!!

Love you kids!!!

And sorry that I am never on my computer any more. It's amazing the difference when you have a job where you are out on your feet talking with people all day long...you don't stay up on all your computer stuff!! I'll try harder!!