A Little of This, Some More of That

I sure do miss this guy!

Ok, I have left my embarrassing story out there long enough. Now on to our latest adventures (and by latest I mean worth posting about).

My sister and her family came to visit us for the Easter weekend (I know that was a while ago). I have really missed this family, so I was thrilled to get to spend 5 whole days with them.

The family of six was our first over night guests here at the new and improved Denson Inn. I learned a lot during their visit.

The openness of the place is not conducive to drums, piano keyboards, and kids running all over the place all at the same time. Certain measures were taken in order to mitigate the noise after the first couple of hours they were here. Hide the plug to the keyboard, and tell the kids in order to play the drums, Paul's permission was needed. I wanted Paul present to hear the lovely soothing noises of drums throughout the house.

We also learned that our security system, Tomo, loved his little friends coming out on a regular basis to play/harass him in his back yard. He liked how easily it was to lick a face, and for the constant attention. I know many hours were spent just talking to Tomo.

(please don't judge my dirty windows... we do have a dog after all).

And most of all, we learned that we miss family! It so was fun to have family come stay with us and we look forward to many more visits to come.

Uncle Bob was right, since Paul and I moved to TX, he has seen a lot more family coming to Austin then ever before!

Paul and I decided that if you are going to go big, you might as well go out with a BANG. Not 18 hours after we signed our lives away for the house, we decided to add a puppy to our home. Why not right? We have a yard, we have two weeks of vacation, and we have warmer weather to stand outside and wait for the thing to do its business. Yes, you can definitely call us CRAZY!

Meet Tomo!

When we first got him we made a run to the pet supply place to find toys. We found this one toy with a rubber weight around a rope making it a excellent chew toy and tug of war device. Tomo loved it, and would shake his head really, really hard when playing with it making the weight hit his head. We thought it was hilarious and enjoyed the antics. While at the vet, However, they found hematoma's in both of his ears. I guess it is the equivalent of a boxer with cauliflower ears... too many punches to the head. The ears swell from the bruising and it takes a long time to heal. Tomo doesn't seem to be in any pain, although I think he misses the dangerous toy we took away from him. The vet said we could choose surgery to fix the hemotomas , but she also said doing nothing won't hurt Tomo either. Either way he will have some scarring. He will still be cute enough even with cauliflower ears. So now we call him HemaTomo, not to his face of course…jk

Tomo (Japanese for Friend) has proven to be a very loyal dog. We try to take him out to the drainage field by our house every night/ morning and let him off his leash. He runs ahead of us but is always very quick to return and keep his eye on us.

Tomo is still very much a puppy so there are a lot of "no's" and "ouches" coming from our yard, but he has still managed to win us over.

Look at that face? Who couldn't love that?

Whew! What a year!
2008 proved to be the most crazy filled year ever! Never in my life have I had so many changes happen in 365 days. Is that all there were this year 365 days?

Due to two crazy months and in order for me to fully document them, I am going to write about our newest adventures one at a time.

Back in November Paul and I were driving home from church discussing the lessons and the talks of the day. We both agreed that we really loved our ward, and that it would be difficult to leave it once we found a house. We figured that we would find the house Heavenly Father wanted us in, and whatever ward boundaries that landed us in was meant to be.

We had resigned ourselves to homes in Pflugerville, TX because they were more in our price range and still close to Paul's work. We found one house that we thought would work for us. Neither one of us had that "This is it feeling" but we didn't have a bad feeling either. We started writing our realtor an e-mail late one night telling her we wanted to put an offer in on the house, but we still kept looking on the internet for other possibilities(you can tell we weren't completely sold). It was then that we found OUR house, in a neighborhood we didn't think we could afford in the ward boundaries we didn't think we could stay in with a yard we didn't think we could have. We quickly revised our e-mail and we looked at the house the next night. It only took us a couple of minutes to decide that we wanted it. For anybody who knows us, there were no pros or cons lists or taking our time on this. We just jumped in.

So one month later we were ready to close on our house. After a few false starts with the actual closing (supposed to close on the Friday before Christmas, didn't happen till late the next Monday) we were home owners! Now the more time we spend in it, the more we are convinced this is where we are supposed to be.

(don't judge us in this picture...we had a long day of painting)

I typed this yesterday, so some of it is outdated.

8 TV shows that I watch:
1. House Hunters (what can I say.. I have house hunting on the brain)
2. Office
3. Big Bang Theory
4. Simpsons
5. Destroyed in Seconds
6. Dirty jobs (I want to feel better about my current employment situation...it could
always be worse)
7. Bones
8. House

8 Things I did Yesterday:
1. Slept in (Hooray for Veteran's Day)
2. Spent 5 hours looking at houses with our Realtor
3. Took out the trash
4. Vegged on the couch
5. Went for a run
6. Ate Dinner with Paul
7. Created our ward evacuation plan
8. Did some Laundry

8 Places I love to eat:
1. Quizno's
2. Schlotzkey's
3. TGI Friday
4. Olive Garden
5. Johnny Carino's
6. Outback
7. Corona Village
8. Mother Mae's

8 Things I am looking forward to:
1. 5 o'clock
2. Thanksgiving!!
3. Being done with the house hunting thing
4. Moving into a house
5. Finding a new job
6. Pumpkin Pie!
7. Cold weather
8. Creating some TX traditions

8 Things on my wish list:
1. A house
2. A puppy
3. A yard
4. Kids
5. Cool weather
6. A vacation
7. A jeep
8. And While I'm dreaming... A self cleaning house!