Pictures!

The inside of our house is all still painted white, there's no big changes yet... I do have some pictures hung, but it's nothing great. Looks kind of like our apartment did...

But the outside! well...
This is what the front of our house looked like before we bought it: (Nice comparison picture...)
Notice the green grass? Hopefully it'll come back. And it's supposed to rain tomorrow, so that's a good start!
And this is now.
Notice the bush is missing from beside the front door... It was cute, but it was always hitting me, the screen door couldn't open all the way, and when the wind blew it would smack my window (scaring me). So now it's gone (one day in a fit of rage, I chopped it all off). And the bald patch of ground? It was purely weeds. Evil vicious stickery weeds that cling to your shoes if you should happen to walk through them and then they come inside and OUCH! So they're gone now, too!

This is the back yard after I got done mowing (the second time) and had filled the garbage can. I did about half the back yard.
It's a jungle out here!

This is our favorite tree... well, okay, so we hate it. It's dead, and on our neighbors property, leaning on the fence, over my back yard.

Look at my pretty flowers! Yes, I do know they're both weeds...
But I do love my dandelions! The sad news is I think it's too dry from them to do well! I had a handful last week, but they were all dead yesterday. I could just cry!
I did take this picture just in case this one went away, too!
That's all the pictures of my lawn!

Lots of weeds!

Okay, so this weekend we bought a lawnmower. We decided since it was almost time for "rainy season" we should mow our lawn, before it starts growing again.

Hal assembled the mower on Saturday and started it up. After he got it going, we discovered that our "grass" (it's very weedy looking) was dry enough that it literally powders as you cut it -- most unpleasant! And it's super long!
Hal went inside (so he didn't die from allergies!) and I started cutting. I filled our garbage can with the clippings. I'm shocked with how much grass there was! The most shocking thing is that I only got the front yard cut! I still have the back to do! Our front yard is probably just over a third of our grass... which means I get to fill the garbage can probably (and hopefully only) 2 more times before the grass is cut all the way... and then I'll get to start again! Luckily, our garbage man comes on Monday and Thursday, so I can fill the can twice this week.

As a side note: powdered weeds are not the best thing to be inhaling! I don't really recommend it!

Sirens!

Hi ya'll!
So this morning, I was standing in my kitchen washing dishes...
And the deafening emergency sirens went off! I'm like "What?" And then it hit me... Tornado!

I, like every calm, level-headed, smart person does when unexpected sirens go off, panicked. I'm like "Oh, no! I've got to hide! Tornado! I need to grab the ferrets and hide... where?" (Yes, even in times of crisis, I think of my boys...)

"Maybe I should find out if it is a tornado!" So, I ran into the computer room to check the weather forecast... genius, I know. The weather forecast was fine. We have a fire advisory, but that's it! So then I'm like... "well, isn't it like cloudy and stormy looking if there's a tornado? The skies are completely blue." So then I went outside to see if I could see any threatening cyclones coming closer. I saw blue skies all around and my neighbors standing outside smoking, not looking worried in the least.

I'm like "hmmm... Maybe they're testing the sirens?" Yup. The Wichita Falls website says that they test the sirens once a month. I read that when we first moved here. But I've lived here for 3 1/2 months now, and this is the first siren I've heard! At least I now know what they sound like!

Oh, and bonus! Even though, theoretically, these sirens aren't supposed to be loud enough to be heard inside houses, I'm fairly certain I'll never miss the siren going off! It's so incredibly loud! I'm on top of a hill, surrounded by sirens. Wow. Loudness!

I've calmed back down now, but... it's still terrifying! I've gotta tell ya, my biggest concern about moving to Texas was the tornadoes... And now it's tornado season (roughly)! Hurray! We'll see how I do with the siren next month.


Oh and just by the way, we've achieved a new record today! Our weather did anyway... We hit a new record high today of 86. :)

Things I should have posted forever ago...

So everything is fine here in Texas. Sorry ya'll haven't heard from me in a while... I just haven't known what to say! As far as I'm concerned, nothing really is going on in our lives... at least nothing interesting. But courtesy of my husband (who has threatened to start blogging himself if I'm not going to do it) and my wonderful sisters, I've got some new drive to blog! So here goes!

ALTUS, OK!!
To start off, I thought I'd go back a few months to somethings that Hal and I have been doing. Back in November (on the 11th to be exact) we went to Stake Conference in Lawton, OK. It's an hour drive from here. We decided, since we were going to Oklahoma anyway, we'd drive to Altus (Hal lived there for 4 years when he was a kid) and visit some of the old "haunts." We couldn't actually get to the house where they lived (on the air force base), but we did go by the stadium where Blaine and Cindy used to play soccer (It was locked up tight!)
The elementary school where Hal had GT (Will Rogers), also predictably locked -- it was Sunday, after all! (The school where he actually went was on the air force base, as well.)
And we went to see (and feed) the ducks.
We saw a couple of ducks that were our favorites (the white ones in the middle):
The one with the fluffy "hair" was just cute, and the swan with the funny beak couldn't actually honk, it was more like a wheeze... It's indescribable! but, oh, so funny!

Also, on our trip to Altus, we saw something that I'm just fascinated by: cotton!
I didn't know that they baled cotton! But look at that field of bales!
Does this look like "bales of sheep" to you? (Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, doesn't it?)


FERRETS...
So I thought that I'd already shared this picture with everyone, but apparently not.
While we were living in a hotel, I would let the ferrets out to play in our "ferret safe" hotel room. I would let them out to play, and just never put them back in their cage. The door was open so they would go in and eat and drink, and could fall asleep in their cage if they wanted, but they could also fall asleep anywhere they wanted in the room. Garret (the big, dark, fat one) has always just fallen asleep wherever he wants, but Rocket would rarely sleep anywhere but in his cage.
This is one of my favorite pictures of them ever. They're sleeping between our bed and a bedside table. This became their favorite place to sleep, and they would sleep here everyday.
Aren't they just precious? We adore our ferrets!


A STORY ABOUT A BUG.
This next one is just "hilarious". Okay, so now I enjoy telling the story, but at the time...
Backstory: My shower is kind of broken. The little plunger thing that you pull up to switch the water from the faucet to the shower head is stuck up, so the shower is always on. Hence, if I want a bath, or to soak anything, I have to turn on the shower head and let the water collect. (It's on the list of things to fix, but it's not really that big of a deal, so it'll just wait 'til we remodel the shower...)

Okay, so I'm in the shower... for some weird reason, I've decided that I'd like to soak my feet in the water after I get all done showering, so I'm catching the water (which turned out to be a good thing!).
I've got shampoo all over my head, and I hear this noise like a chain saw. I'm like what is that? Then it stopped, so I rinsed my head, and reached for the conditioner. As I did I looked down and saw a GIANT SIZE RED BUG swirling in the water that I'd been catching. I, not liking bugs in the least, especially ones that join me in the shower, panicked. I jumped up on the edge of the tub and considered making a run for it, but as I'm not done in there, not to mention soapy and wet, I didn't. So I sat there and watched the stupid red bug swirl around in the soapy water 'til he stopped struggling. Then I scooped him out (with a toilet paper tube -- I'm not touching him!), drained the water, and continued my shower.
After my shower, I looked at him again. He's only like and inch long (not quite so giant) and it looks like a red hornet. I put the dead hornet in an old paper cup I had to take him to show him to Hal when I picked him up for lunch.
When I showed Hal my dead hornet, he was dutifully impressed and very sympathetic to my terror. Then we realized the hornet was moving! Apparently, he didn't drown, he just got to soapy soggy to move anymore. I brought him home, filled his cup full of water so he couldn't fly away, and took pictures for future enjoyment:
This is him. He's "happily" swimming...
This one is one that I zoomed in on so ya'll could see his pretty color:
I've decided to name him The Hornet From Hell (Doesn't he look like that's where he hails from?)
After his photo soot, I took him outside and squished him. Dead. Never to return. He still gives me the creeps just thinking about it now!

The moral of my story is... well, there is no moral, just an amusing story to everyone I've told it to, and terror for me.
As a couple of side notes: apparently, hornets don't drown. Their shells just get soft enough, and so full of water, that they can't fly anymore. After they dry out: good to go!
And after telling some guys in our ward I learned this: These delightful hornets live here. They're natives! They're just as common place as golf ball size spiders and cockroaches. As a matter of fact, we have some that live in our chapel! They buzz around the ceiling all summer long during sacrament meeting. To this I say: "How lovely..."


CHRISTMAS TIME!!!!
So, I know Christmas was a month ago, but...
We had a wonderful Christmas! On Christmas Eve, some friends in from the ward invited us over to their house for dinner and games. We spent the entire evening over there eating, playing games, singing songs, and watching their kids open presents and be super excited for Santa! It was so much fun! And it made Christmas be so much... better.
For Christmas, we did stockings and opened presents, and all of that. We had a wonderful time. It was kind of lonely to just have us for Christmas, but kind of nice, too. We've never done that before.
All four of our stockings. It was so fun and cute to do this! Santa even cares about ferrets at our house! They get things like pencils (oh, the smell!), and old toothbrush's (yummy rubber-like handles!) and ping pong balls!

Our beautiful tree!
My wonderful little brothers made us these ornaments. (The little white peanuts -- sorry, Cindy, we've had peanuts in our house -- tied on with red string.) They're snowmen! They've got little faces painted on them and everything. They've got eyes, an orange "carrot" nose, and a red scarf (that's how I decided to attach them to the tree...tie them with their scarfs!). They were just so cute! I made Hal take a picture of them hanging on our tree!

After we got all done opening presents, we got a box, cut holes in the ends of it (at the bottom), and put all of our paper trash in it. And Voila! Instant ferret toy! They adored it all day, and for about a week until I stole all their paper and threw it away.

We also got our ferrets a neat toy that rattled, jingles, crinkled, and squeaked. We didn't know that Rocket responded quite so violently to a squeaker -- we've never tried one before. After we knew, we went right out and bought a clearance squeaky bone! Garret can hear it, and he'll take a turn at chasing it too, but he's not as high strung and energetic as Rocket (hence, not quite as funny).



This is our Christmas squeaky toy! Yes, it hurt quite a bit when he bit me... the hazards of working an animal into a frenzy and getting your fingers in the way...
The "bags" were another Christmas present. (I made 'em!) The red one is a fleece bag with a jingle bell and stuffing in it. The blue one was for Garret, but Rocket likes it more. It's got crinkly plastic in it. Rocket likes to hide his bags in a secure place: in his litter box... Yummy!

At the end of the video, Rocket is "killing" the toy... it always gets killed when he's hauled it off to the "cave", or hiding place. It sometimes gets squeaked to death, and sometimes shaken to death, but IT MUST DIE!!!!
We all had fun for Christmas!


And I think that more or less catches us almost up to present day fun! It's a long enough blog at any rate...

My house...

Hi ya'll!
OK, so sorry I haven't said anything for practically FOREVER, but well, I've been in my house...

We closed successfully on the 30th of November, as planned. We got to the house, and everything fell into place: the electricity was on, the water and natural gas were turned on that afternoon.
Hal works with a guy who volunteered to come over and help us replace our water heater Sat. afternoon (Dec 1st). After they got it in, we almost had disaster: it wasn't venting out of the house! So we went and bought a ladder, and climbed into the attic. There was nothing we could do there, so up we climbed to the roof. After I fished a bird's nest (including the dead bird) out of the water heater vent pipe, it worked just fine.

Since then, I've been working on cleaning the walls, putting things away, and Christmas.
We had an ancient (60s -- we were told by everyone who saw it to not try to turn it on, including the professional "gas man") in the wall gas oven and counter-top range. (see the pictures) We decided to rip them out and get a free standing range. Hal spent an evening ripping them out of the wall, and removing the cupboard where the range top was-- that was fun! It was built in place with hundreds of nails... Sorry I didn't get pictures of the event!

We had a window that had been broken, and was now missing a panel. We found a glass panel for it in the house and while I was cleaning it, I broke it. So, the window is covered in plastic until we get a new panel.

I think that's all the updating I have time for right now! Hopefully we'll get internet soon, and I can do this at home again...
Later! Have wonderful days!

And I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas!!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

I could just cry!!!

So "funny" story:
I woke up this morning to this:
This is icy-snow... brrrr!
(These are taken in the courtyard at our hotel.)

Hal and I have both been super excited because it's been 70 to 80 the last month! (With the exception of like 2 cold days where it got down to 60.)
Last Tuesday, it was like 80 degrees... Thursday (Thanksgiving) it suddenly became like 40. We're having a "cold snap" as I was told in church yesterday.
Hopefully it'll be over soon!

Pictures of our house!

Here's the front of the house again!







Here's the backyard from the alley behind our house. We're going to be removing the inside fence. (It was a dog run.)



I'm standing in the same place taking these next three...

This is the living room/front room







Dining room. The corner of the door you see goes into the backyard.










Kitchen.













These are my wonderful hall closets!











One of the three bedrooms.









Our bedroom closet...














The bathroom.








The half bath in the master bedroom (isn't it exciting? A half bath!)







As you can see, it has much the same color theme in every room. Now is when the real fun starts! I get to decorate... yay!

Wahoooo!!!!!!

Hurray!!!
We are getting a house, officially!!! We have to go in today when Hal gets off work to sign the papers one more time and submit it to the Title Company! We are getting the second house!!!!! Hurray!!!!
More later....

Hi all you happy people!!!

OK, so I've been neglectful. Sorry I haven't been keeping ya'll up to date on what's up!

Hal's job is fine! He seems to really like it. He's learning all sorts of fun stuff (heat exchangers and heat exchange sales). The first couple weeks were kind of annoying -- there was some conference for all Tranter's sales reps (Hal is not one) from all over the world that Hal had to go to our first week here. It was endless power point presentations, Dr. Pepper, and cookies long. Then the next week he got a new computer, which was malfunctioning. That made it hard to do his work. That got fixed though, so work is fine now! He comes home in a good mood and says he enjoys it!

House hunting is fine! We have found two that we like:

This one is cute! It's got 2 bedrooms (one of which is painted purple and yellow), 1 bathroom, a kind of funny layout (it looks like there used to be a porch on the front and back that they've enclosed and made a part of the house), it's on a corner lot with about 10 feet between the street and the fence on the side (on the left), there's a huge dying tree in the backyard that might have to be removed, and is listed with 1282 sq feet. We measured it (roughly) at 1085... there is not 200 sq ft of closets that we missed! There's maybe 60... where's the other 150 ft? And there's people living there.

This one is also cute! It's got 3 bedrooms, 1 1/2 bathrooms, big closet spaces, an adorable tree stump in the front, an attached garage, it slopes from the house to the back fence (not a good thing), will have to have new heat/AC installed sometime soon, and is listed at 1090 sq feet. We measured it (roughly, again) at 920. However, there are probably 100 (+) sq ft of closets. Oh, and it's on the outskirts of town, and like 5 minutes from Hal's work. This one is vacant.

The houses seem to be about even, we may like the second one a tad bit better. So, we're planning on making an offer on the second one. If it's not accepted, we'll offer on the other one.

Hopefully I'll be "in contract" soon! And in a house soon after that!

SMILE!!!!

Happy November!!!

Hi ya'll!

So today I'm way excited! I found some houses that I want to buy!! I mean some literally. There's like 4 that I'm super interested in.

AND we got pre-approved for a home loan! yay!!! So, now I just have to pick the house I really want and say "This one!" and sit back and see if it'll happen... (and go to lots of meetings... and negotiate... and sign papers... and more papers... and we'll see what else...)

But I'm totally getting a house!!! Hopefully soon. We'll see.

AND we found this awesome craft store in town called "Hobby Lobby". They've got the coolest stuff! I love craft stores! I spent like 1 1/2 hours in it the other morning (no, I didn't buy anything, just wandered all over the entire store and saw everything!)


OK, so funny story: In our bathtub here in the hotel, there's one of those plastic non-slip liners glued to the bottom. Rocket (the skinny white ferret, who is very curious and hates water!) has decided to peel it up (he's got an entire corner dug up! Bad ferret!!!). So, to prevent him digging at it, I've started filling the tub with like 3-6 inches of water to keep him out of it. He HATES water. Bathing him is awful!!!
Anyways, usually when there's water in it, he'll jump up on the ledge of the tub, see the water and get down. Today, I'm not sure what happened, he must have slipped or something...

I was sitting out on our bed cross-stitching, and I hear a "splash" I'm like "oh no", so I get up and run into the bathroom to the sound of scratching, and splashing, and in general panic!!! (He was trying to jump out but couldn't because of the water.) I walked in to see him fly (he got out!) out of the tub onto the floor. He was sooo wet! and mad and oh so cute and funny!!!
"I told you to stay out of the tub!!!"
To make the whole matter more tramatic, I decided since he's already wet, I'd give him a bath, right there in the scary tub. Then I dried him off and set him free.
As a little side note, he's now terrified of the bathroom! He went in to use his litterbox (sitting in the corner of the bathroom) like 30 minutes later, got in there, remembered, and came tearing out of there! He won't even go into the bathroom now... tee hee...

Oh the joys of ferrets...
and of house hunting...