Sunday, December 28, 2008

2008


HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I know I am alittle late but, better late than never right!

Our Christmas was pretty good. The week before Christmas my sister Shannon, my brother Nate and my parents came down and we all went to the play The Forgotten Carols, by Micheal Mclean. It was awesome. He is a very talented man and I could listen the his music all day long. This year we spent Christmas with Darrell's family. It was fun. We were able to go snowmobiling. It was my first time and other then the times that I go stuck it was pretty fun. Darrell loved it though. He grew up on snowmoblies and he has not been on one since we got married so he was pretty excited about it! We hung out in Logan for a week. On new years all of my sibilings went over to my sister Rachel's house and we played games and just had fun together. We also got to meet my brother's girlfriend. It was very fun to hang out with everyone! That probably won't happen again for quite a while considering we don't all live in the same state. My brother Keith and his wife are moving to Virginia and Nate is still in Tuscon.



Highlights of 2008

2008 was a good year, for the most part. The best part about it was all of the traveling we did over the spring and summer. We made a trip down to lagoona beach for a wedding, we went to Bosie for my cousins mission homecoming, we went up to Logan and went waterskiing acouple of times. We went to Boulder Mountain where we went and hikes slot canyons, we went into capitol reaf national park, and did other fun hikes. The week before that I had a surgery and so that put a damper on some of the things that Icould do on that trip but it was still fun. In June we went to Havasupai, AZ. It was a backpacking trip. I would recommend it to anyone. The hiking 10 miles, carring all your supplies was well worth seeing the falls, they were awesome! Then came our house project. Once we started the house all of our travels came to an abrupt halt. After fighting with the mortgage company we were finially able to move right before Thanksgiving. That is about all for our 2008! We are looking forward to a new year.Here are a few picture from some of our trips.


Bottom of Mooney Falls

The first night we slept outside in the parking lot at the entrance of the hike down in. We had been told that is was suppose to be hot while we were there so we didn't bring our sleeping backs, we just brought fleece sleeping bags that are as thick as a normal blanket. That night it was so windy, rainy, and cold. There were 4 of us and we all cramed in to my dad's Honda and tried to sleep. We got about 2 hours of sleep (tops). The above picture is darrell trying to sleep alittle bit more before out 10 mile hike in.


Me jumping off a waterfall
Havasupai Az,



Lagoona Beach, CA



I believe this was in Capitol Reaf Nat. Park.

Demolition derby in Delta
Slot canyons near Escalante




Thursday, December 18, 2008

It Snowed in St George!



Actually it has been snowing for days. I just don't have anything else to write about, so snow it is. St George people are crazy. 2 days ago Darrell showed up to work and they told everyone that because of the snow that they weren't going to work that day so he came home. I guess the only work they had at the shop was rough ins and thats when you do all the under ground plumbing before the framing is put up in new construction homes. I guess his boss didn't want all of his employees to freeze.



This morning I got up with Darrell before he went to work and we were listening to the radio and sure enough all schools in Washington county are CLOSED today!! We have, maybe, 2 inches of snow on the ground. People here would never survive in Cache valley or anywhere in northern Utah for that matter. I do have to admit I have also adapted to warm weather but, I still welcome the snow one or two days a year down here. The weird thing is that Bandit hasn't wanted to be outside playing in the snow! Every time we take him outside he just sit by the door and waits for us to let him back in. You'd think for an Alaskan Malamute that he would be thrilled to pieces that it is snowing!




My poor tree. It looks pretty sad this morning. It is definately sagging from the weight of all the snow. Hopefully all my new plant survive the cold.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Christmas lights



Now that our house is done it seems like I have nothing new to say. Just the same thing everyday. Just cleaning houses. There are still alot of things that we need to get for the house for example a fence, toilet paper holder, towel rack, decorations, etc... As soon as I get all of those things I will take a picture of the finished product. That could be a while! But what I can take a picture of is my Christmas tree! So here it is... I did decorate the exterior of the house as well, kind of. I got the roof section done first and then we to put them up above the door. Well, the way the house is shaped we would have to actually get up and stand on a small portion of the roof to get everything and when we got up to the top of the ladder if appears that the roofers left up with broken tiles! We've got 4 broken tiles of our roof. Needless to say we did not finish hanging the lights on the roof because we do not want to give them the opportunity for them to blame us for the tiles beacause we would have had to stand on the roof. If they come and fix the tiles before Christmas we will finish hanging the lights if not then we have a lit up garage! I did light up some plants as well. Anyways that is about it for tonight.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

We're in!

We are finially in our house! Yesterday we got the call from our mortgage lady and for the first time throughout this whole process she had something good to say! Anyways, this has to be short because I have a ton to do. We have got to vacate, which is almost done, and clean our apartment ASAP so out landlord can move in. We are not going to have the internet for a few days so this will be the last post for alittle while.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Spoke to soon

It appears I spoke to soon. I have no idea why but funding did not happen today. I don't have a clue!! We asked them and all they had to say was they were working on it and didn't get it done.
I can't even describe how completely unsatisfied with this company that I am. I am to the point that I would love to go onto the radio and tell the entire city of St George every single thing that they have done just to make sure that everyone would be educated and know exactly what they were getting themselves into while using this company!!! Maybe we'll be in by Christmas
Sorry ya'll for the unpleasant email. I had to vent

Thursday, November 20, 2008

WAHOO!!

Hurray!! We Finially closed on our house today! Tomorrow the funding will happen and then we should be given the keys to move in tomorrow afternoon! This loan process has been an absolute pain! One thing after another after another, but thank goodness it is over with.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

QUIRKS

1. Link the person who tagged you. (uh..don't

know what that means, so Rachel - sorry if

you're not "linked".)

2. Mention rules on your blog.

3. Tell about 6 quirks of yours.

4. Tag 6 fellow bloggers to do the same.

5. Leave a comment to let them know.



I have many quirks... here are a few:



I am scared of the dark. If I get up in the middle of the night and go into the kitchen (or any other room in the house) I have to turn on every single light switch that I see, including the bedroom light. I absolutely refuse to go outside at night alone, even at my parents house where I grew up. Talk about dark, the area outside of Delta gets pretty dang dark without the street lights. My fear of the dark really drives Darrell crazy!

I am also a cover nazi! I believe that covers (blankets) were invented to cover people and it would be a shame if you threw off all the cover and slept without them. I cannont sleep unless I am completely covered, minus my nose for breathing purposes. I also make Darrell get under the covers so no cold air gets into the covers.

Most of my quirks definately come into play at night, as you can tell. Well here is another one that occurs right before bed time. If I do not take a bath I WILL NOT be able to fall asleep. Bath time has definately become theraputic to me. It is my time to unwind and stop thinking about things that are bugging me. I often get that restlessness in my legs at night and I am often to busy in the day to really think about problems and so they all seem to pop up at night and the only way to clear my head is to take a bath.

I cannot sit still. I swear I have A.D.D. or something. I just have to be playing with something at all times. When me and Darrell are watching a movie I can't just watch the movie with him. I have to be either reading a book and watching, or playing with cards, or something. If I don't have something to play with I usually have to tap my feet or find something to occupy my hands. I think that quirk probably comes from my mother and my brother Keith! Its all in the Genes!

I guess to a man this would be considered a quirk that a woman might have. I hate cooking!
I have always thought that there was much better things to do than hang out in the kitchen. My mother has always been a wonderful cook. She would try and get me to cook with her in the kitchen but I usually fought it untill I didn't have to. I always firgured, "Why have me experiment with cooking and have meals turn out not so good, when I could alway have my mom cook and have a wonderful meal." Now I am married, I realize maybe I should have payed just alittle bit more attention in the kitchen, I am working on it though. Someday...... maybe if I could cook something that actually tasted good, I would probably enjoy it better.

One more... This one has to do with my job. When I clean houses I like to clean myself out of the house. Seems logic enough. Vaccuming is the very last thing that I do in a house. I CANNOT HANDLE WALKING OVER FRESHLEY VACUUMED CARPET!! Now if the home owner walks over the carpet that is ok because it is their carpet but me, Oh NO! That is against the rules. One day the radio was asking people to call in and tell them which should be first, vaccuming or dusting. The amount of dust a vaccum would put back into the air would not be ANYWHERE NEAR as visible as a carpet with footprints on it! I also have a very precise pattern that I use when I vaccum. I once had a girl that worked for me that I could not stand the way she vaccumed and she would walk over the carpet when she was done!

I am suppose to tag 6 people but some that I would have tagged have already been tagged so I am only going to tag 4 people. I am going to tag

Rachel Anderson
Megan
Trisha
Nicole

Friday, November 7, 2008

Cooking-Not my specialty











Since we were planning on moving today I had packed up most of the food in our kitchen except for a few things so, when it came to dinner last night we really didn't have much food to choose from. I decided to make German Pancakes, which I had never made before. I pulled out my cookbook, followed it to a tee. Well, this is how it turned out. I 2 pictures of it to try and show everyone how high the edges actually were. In fact it was so high that the right edge was actually touching the burner on the inner top of the stove. Is that normal? If I would have left that it there much longer it probably would have caught on fire. It made me laugh so I thought that I'd share it with ya'll. oh and it did actually taste alright, it was alittle satlier than I would perfer, but it was ok.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Here we go again!

Last night we did the final walk through with the builders on our house. Everything looks good. We found acouple spots that needed some touch up spots but that was it. While we were there we got a call from our mortgage lady wanting to meet with us as soon as we were done with the walk through, first thought that crossed my mind was... what happened now and why can't we close. Sure enough my suspicions were correct. When we got there she informed us that we could not close today. When we first got approved for the loan we were getting the down payment assistance program that was being offered. The catch with that was the program was not going to be offered after October 31st so our loan had to be final by then. Our mortgage lady submitted our information and it appears that the underwriters (? I think ?) had the information but did not process it before the 31st. They just didn't do their job. That program is gone with absolutely no exceptions. So... needless to say they messed up and messed up bad and our mortgage lady has been working on this everyday for 1.5 weeks and is close to coming up with an agreement with the underwriters, investors, and owner of the mortgage company to still let our loan go through with no money down and a lower interest rate. The rate we have right now is 6.125% so what we have is not bad at all. She could not tell us what it will be for sure because she does not have it in writing from all of the other people involved. She did say we are getting a far better deal than we were. I was very excited to move in this weekend and am extermely tired of living in a house that is all packed up, messy, and clutered but hopefully we will get the better end of the deal in the end. I don't know when we will move in but hopefully soon before my landlord gets impatient!

Sunday, November 2, 2008

It is Finished!







So our house is finished! We are, hopefully, closing on Thursday and moving in on Friday.
The top right picture is of our entry way looking into our living room. The top left picture is from our living into dining/kitchen. And then of coures, the exterior. All the the main stuff on the house was finished on Tuesday if I remeber right. The rest of the week they did touch up things. Unfortunately we could not move in this weekend. For some reason we can't close until the 5th. We only did the landscaping in the front of the house because we are feeling kind of poor right now and it would have cost alot to get it done. Plus we have Bandit and he would probably destroy the grass anyway. We'll finish the back before we sell it, or when we get kids, whichever comes first.
I am acutally kind of glad that we did not move in yesterday and the day before because, it gave me a day to relax. Saturday was great. I have not had a Saturday that I have not been working or being really busy in a LONG time! I was so bored that I actually made bread, which was the first time ever for me. I'm not a good cook but crazily the bread turned out really good. It was a very needed relaxing day.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Carpet

Here is the color of our carpet. This is in our master bedroom. Rachel (my sister) called me last night and asked me why I haven't put any pictures of our living room and bedrooms. I haven't done it because it is just an empty room, so I did at least take a picture of the carpet. As for the living room it is all tile so there is nothing new to see in it until there is furniture. My husband just called and told me that we do now have plants in the front and today we will have the sod put on. Darrell said we have a 24ft tree and acouple 16ft trees and lots of little plants. I will go by today and put some more pictures on later.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Finished interior


Here is the picture of our finished bathroom and kitchen. To the left of the pantry door is where our fridge is going to be. We don't have a fridge yet, we have ordered it and it should be there the end of this week or the beginning of next week. We were hoping to close on our house this week and move in this weekend but the loan stuff is going to take took long. There is a slight chance we could have it all done, but I doubt it. Darrell has to go back up to Montana to do the plumbing on a big lodge cabin up there on Monday(a week from today) he will be gone around 4 days so it looks like we probably won't be able to move in until after he gets back. Its kid of a bummer deal but things have gone relatively smoothly for us and so it is alright. Everything is done inside the house except for the door knobs. Half of the landscaping is done, both things will be finished tomorrow! I'll take a picture of the exterior of the house tomorrow.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

More House Pics




Our house is coming along very smoothly. The tile in the tub/shower is still not done but I thought that I would put in a picture of what we have done so far. There will be one more row of tile above where it is right now. Me, Darrell, and his Uncle Don did the tile floors over conference weekend and we have been slowly doing the shower walls in the evenings after work. Darrell has done an awesome job with the tile. the design and layout of the tile was all his idea. Over conference weekend we had it down to a tee- Don cut the tile, Darrell layed the tile, and I grouted the tile, mixed the thin set and did whatever else Darrell told me to. It was actually pretty fun. I like doing hands on stuff. Our hands were pretty sore and cut up by the end of the weekend though. Yesterday they got the kitchen cupboards put in, hopefully the countertops will be put in soon. We also got light fixtures yesterday too. All we need left to do in the inside is; finish with the trim electical stuff, trim heating & air stuff, trim plumbing(darrell's doing), countertops, and touch up paint and then we are done. The exterior need landscaped the finishing layer of stucco. Hope you all enjoy the pictures as much as I do!

Monday, October 13, 2008

Hair

I dyed my hair last week and there has been a few people that really wanted to see what it looked like so, here ya go!

More House Stuff

We have been so busy lately that I have not have time to update my blog.

Darrell had to go up to Montana last week for acouple of days. Him and his boss flew up to Montana, in his boss's personal plane. Three other guys from the shop drove up earlier in the week. There is a huge cabin up there that they are doing the plumbing for. It was pretty much torture for me. For one, they did not have any cell phone sevices so I could even talk with him for 2 days, and second it was only the second time since we got married that I have been all alone in my apartment at night! That terrifies me. I have a really busy work week so I didn't notice he was gone until night came around. He made it home just in time. Had the job taken one more day to do, he would have been stormed in and wouldn't have been able to some home till today.
Alot has happened with our house since I did the last blog. All of the framing, sheet rock, and all of that is long done. Our house has stucco on the outside now, it is gray right now but when they finish it will be dark brown. Our tile roof is just about done. The base molding and doors and cases are in. Over conference weekend we layed the tile in the kitchen, living room, hallways, and bathroom floors. I drove by the house today and we now have a concrete driveway, and the walls are being primed today and they will be painted tomorrow. So for those of you that are thinking that the house is coming along really fast well...... it is. About a month or so ago my landlord called me and said that him and his wife are splitting up and so we had to be out of the house at the end of October so that him or his wife could move into it. Darrell went and talked with the builder and they are going to have our house done by the end of this month instead of around Thanksgiving time. We don't have to be homeless for a month!! I'm excited. I have a few pictures of our house but none of them are recent. so I will have to take some more soon.
The first picure is back in framing stage, the second is right before they put up the stucco and the third is darrell standing in the kitchen before we layed the tile.


Sunday, September 14, 2008

construction



This is my house, cute huh?
Just kiddin'. Darrell is standing in our entry room. They were suppose to do the framing on it this last week but, I guess we are down the list aliitle. Hopefully this week the framing will get done. The other picture is of our view outside of what will be our Master Bedroom. The good thing is is that there is a wash area right behind our house and so there won't ever be houses blocking our view. Wahoo!

Monday, August 18, 2008

Home Sweet Home

Me and Darrell are building a house!!
We have been renting the same 1000 sq ft apt for 2 years and 3 months now. I can definately say that we have out grown our place. We just have to much stuff. We have looked to buy a place since we moved dow to St George Almost 3 years ago! Thank goodness we didn't. We have seen the market drop alot since then. For the past 8 months-ish we have looked at alot of short sale homes and forclosures and we haven't really felt good about any of them. Darrell is a sub contractor for Ence homes here and we found out that we can get a pretty good deal on a home because of that. Darrell is going to do the plumbing and tile in the house and ence gave us a 3% discount. They are going to pay our closing cost and our down payment on the home. We are going to a pre-construction meeting on friday and the I think within the next couple of weeks we will start construction.
Wahoo!!

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Cops



We went down to Capital Reef one day and on the way back we saw this cop car parked along the side of the road so we slowed down and looked inside of it and sure enough there was a blow up cop doll inside the car. I couldn't help it, I had to take a picture of it because I had never seen it before. I hope you all get a kick out of it as well.

More vacation stuff.


This is Calf Creek Falls. There was a pool of water at the bottom that we could swim in and Nate was playing fetch with Bandit. Because of my surgery I could not get in. I just watched and put my feet in the water.

Vacation






We just got back from our family vacation. This year we went to Boulder Mountain. My favorite part of the vacation, other than being with the family, was the slot canyons near Escalante that we hiked. The pictures don't do it justice, it was a very pretty area. At the entrance of one of the slot canyons was a rattlesnake. I was real worried about taking Bandit past it becaues he tends to chase everything that move so me and Bandit stayed behind while Darrell, Nate, and my Dad went on. Alittle while later they came back because they had found a pool of water that Bandit could lay in (he was extremely hot, thirsty, and tired). Luckily the rattle snake did not move when we walked by and we saw another one the shook its rattle but didn't come after us.
By the time we went through 4 of the slot canyons a storm was getting pretty close so we decided to call it quits for the day.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Surgery

For those of you who haven't already heard, I had surgery on Wednesday. It appears that I have a Stage 3 endometriosis. (Stage 4 is the worst). I guess I had enometriosis all over inside of me. It was on my Colon and Appendix and I had some Cysts as well. The doctor got it all. I'm pretty excited because maybe some day we'll be able to have kids. Also for the last couple of years I have had some stomach problems, where I just felt real nauseated and nasty. Well the endometriosis was probably causing that as well. It will be great to feel normal again.
As for right now, I'm feeling alright. I don't really feel the pain from where I was cut open, my shoulder and throat hurt the worst. I'm still on some pain killers. My mom was here until Friday then she went back to Delta. Darrell has been very good to me. He took Wednesday off work and was by my side side just about the whole time.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Spiders

So today I was cleaning a guys house. It's only the 2nd time that I have been there and the house needed ALOT of work. There were spider webs and cob webs all over the place.
I decided to clean the blind and I noticed some spider web behind them. I pulled them up and sure enough I saw the spider's egg sack. I grabbed some paper towel and threw it away. I walk back to the blinds and there was about 30+ little baby spiders all over the place. Trying so hard to not scream in my clients home I sprayed them with my cleaner. Then I went back to work and started cleaning the blinds. I was almost done when all of a sudden a big HUGE black spider drops right in front of me!! Had I been 6 inches closer to the window, the spider would have landed on my head. I just about freaked out. I got my client to ome help me get it out of his house. He then starts explaining to me that he doesn't kill spiders. He said, "I'm to big of a softie." 2 minutes later I had to go out to my car to get something and sure enough the spider was back on his door step waiting to be let back in. The rest of the time I probably saw 20 more spiders. The next two hours I was sure that I had spiders crawling all over me. So that was my exciting day! That man has never on bug bommed his house or had an exterminater come. CRAZY OLD MAN!!

Scary Dog


Here is Rachel's(my sister) daughter Adrianne and my dog Bandit. This was taken over the 4th of July in Delta. When Adrianne was younger she was ran over by Bandit. It terrified her!! She also saw Bandit jump on her Grandpa and again it TERRIFIED her. I thought that she was going to be afraid of all dogs because that. I will admit, a 70 lb. extremely hyper dog would probably scare me too. She loves him now though. WAHOO!!

Bandito


This is my dog Bandit. He's about 2.5 years old. He's just about the cutest dog ever.
I live a fairly boring life that pretty much consist of Darrell, my hubby, and Bandit.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

My first post


Demolition Derby in Delta Ut