I think this is the first time possibly ever that we have thoroughly cleaned and organized our house/stuff that wasn’t motivated by someone coming to visit. And frankly, those times were always last minute, so there were always those random assortments of things that didn’t fit anywhere at the moment that got thrown together into a bag or box or corner or whatever. This time we are actually doing something about all that random stuff. So far. We still have a decent sized pile that is waiting for organization, so it remains to be seen if there will be any random bags or boxes. Truth be told, there have been numerous instances that I wasn’t aware of this phenomenon happening until later when I couldn’t find something… and it was still later when I found said object together with many other random things in one of those boxes or bags that the pieces came together… but I can’t really complain too much because he did come through for me many times when it was down to the wire. Anyway, after Maeve went to bed last night we kicked butt and took numbers. The kitchen and bathroom are done and our room and the storage/Maeve’s room are close. In the living room by the new desk is the largest pile yet to be assigned a location. So there is a light at the end of the tunnel and it might actually happen on time! Do you think this means we’re officially adults?
In other news, I’ve been trying to compile the words and phrases that Maeve is now using at 15 months. My current favorites are “buh be” (belly button, LOL) and “happy”, which she doesn’t know the meaning of, but loves to say for some reason. Other words that she’s added to her English vocabulary are: up, more, all done, yish (fish), bread, poppy (popcorn), mel (milk), eyes, nose, teeth, ear, elbeh (elbow), I don’t know, toes, shoosh (shoes), baby, trutch (truck), hot, hat, light, grandma, Tita (Titus), oh man!, oh no, oh dear, woah!, home, puppy, ow/owie! (which is a funny one because sometimes she’ll pinch you and say ow! for you, little punk), cheerios, amen, bed, bah (bath), appee (apple), duct (duck), hop hop hop (for a bunny). I’ll probably try to come back and edit the list as I think of more, cause it’s a good record to have. Most kids start out learning the same basic daily words, but it’s always funny to me what random ones they latch onto. That, they have as uniquely their own. I’m going to try to stick a few pictures in here, since who knows how long it will be till we have the gallery back up. I don’t really like putting pictures directly into the blog, but oh well, I guess.
when we procrastinate. UGH. we are determined to start the second half of 2008 more organized and streamlined than ever before in our previous life. well, ok, I guess that could be considered a less than lofty goal. what I mean to say is, Lord willing, every aspect of our physical life will be well-ordered. personal and business finances and systems, living quarters, etc. it has taken an unbelievably scary amount of time to reorder our home. one van load has been disposed of, and one is still riding around waiting for the store to open again from the flooding. suffice it to say, we are so glad that we are able to say we are continually moving forward and improving. oh, I guess we won’t be getting our pictures and videos in order before the beginning of the second half of this year. and I’m certainly unsure what our vehicle status will be, though it would be a very nice surprise and blessing if that was resolved before then… sorry that this is an incredibly boring post, but I just wanted to add some accountability onto our goal. oh, two other things: buy a laptop cooling fan thingy – I wish we’d bought this one a long time ago. and avoid at all cost heavy laptops falling on your foot. tres ouch. good-bye top layer of skin.
I was checking for updates about the flood to see if we can go buy groceries and stuff like that again, and I noticed that our area has a bunch of good ratings, so I thought you might be interested to know them (Podunk it is not):
Among Best Places to Expand Business (Expansion Management Magazine)
Top 10 Up and Coming Tech Cities (Forbes 3/2008)
Best Midwestern Town (Outdoor Magazine 2007)
#2 – Best Small Metro Area for Business (Forbes 2008)
3rd Best Place in Nation to Retire (Money Magazine 11/2005)
#4 in Nation – public schools (Expansion Management Magazine)
#5 Best Places to Live (Sperling’s 3/2007)
#10 in Nation – Smart Places to Live (Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine 2006)
#10 America’s Smartest Cities (Forbes 2008)
#21 100 Best Places to Live and Launch (Fortune 3/2008)
No idea what that last one really means, but I’m going to go ahead and assume it’s the #21 best place on the planet =) Anyway, you might want to consider moving if you’re not already here… Spring and Fall are the best seasons. Winter is not recommended (which I guess would kind of nullify the school rating, if you’re into that kind of thing), and Summer is pretty hot for pansies without air conditioning. (I’d definitely fall into that category of pansy when not using air conditioning in this heat – stick a fork in me, I’m done) Speaking of which, I often worry about becoming an old pansy. Well, not worry, so much as ponder about the possibility. There are a lot of things I would really be loathe to do now. I say now because there are many things I would have been more up for before David and I were married. Nay, even after, but before Maeve. Take camping, for instance. Camping sounds like a nightmare with a baby. Bugs. Stickiness. Heat. Dirt. No internet. Dealing with food sources. Keeping track of said baby. Sleeping arrangements?!Ugh. Double, Triple, Quadruple UGH. See??? I don’t like to be a pansy, per se, but then I was pretty fond of being an independent, DIYer before David. While I still retain a great deal of resourcefulness, I find that I can make a pretty good princess when the right situation avails itself. Some might actually call it being a lady, or not wishing to do a man’s job. I’m fully unPC in that regard (as well as most other), though truthfully, David takes care of me a thousand times better than he should in the traditional “good ol’ times” manner. I’m thoroughly glad that we aren’t very good at conforming to stereotypical social norms.
In other news, it turns out that duties were rearranged in a satisfactory manner and David is actually enjoying his day job!!!!!!!!! This is, in fact, not a minor miracle. We are thankful.
Still no new vehicle. Not sure what we’re going to do about that at this point. In normal pansy-like manner, I’m a little tired of driving with no AC. David’s tired of all the shimmying from the need of alignment/new axle. Neither of us wants to spend much on it, though, cause that would mean not having as much for more fun, bigger things.
it has definitely been harder to focus on the blessings this week… how surprising, since we had such a great Sunday, huh? (sarcasm, for the slow) My mom has been gone all week, and I knew that it would be a lot harder to get anything done, but it’s also been pretty cloudy, so that always makes me more prone to feeling depressed. In general, though, it’s the worst when I start feeling overwhelmed. Not really being able to get anything done has escalated that because it feels like my list just keeps piling up and will never get caught up… ever. It wouldn’t matter so much except for all the things that involve other people. Church stuff. Business stuff. We have a number of really big projects that have had to be put on hold for the last two weeks as we were getting ready for the garage sale, and as we’ve been trying to get some order back in the aftermath of that =) I think we have all the new stuff put together now, so it’s “just” a matter of reorganizing. It is kind of exciting, cause I think our living room will look like new. We’re going to feel like we live in a real place! I think… I’m just envisioning. I don’t know. I think a couch does a lot to legitimize a room =) And I think we might have worked it out so that Maeve’s toys aren’t totally taking over… we’ll see. But meantime, all these other things keep winding around in the back of my head, tightening, tightening, ever tightening and tensing me up till I am ready to explode. In all reality, I just have to let it be ok. It’s almost the weekend, and I think we’ll be able to start next week all freshly organized and MOM WILL BE HOME!!! Maybe I rely on her too much, but Maeve is really a people person, and she gets awfully tired of seeing only me for the majority of the day. In relation to my lists, though, I am going to try something new: I have a small list in front of me of stuff I want to try to do today. And it renews everyday. Looking at it in bite-sized pieces might help. Feeling like I actually accomplished something at the end of the day might help… I’ve done this before, but my methods have changed many times over the years, and little scraps of paper get lost too easily =) a little list on my iGoogle might be just the ticket.
David kind of got a promotion. I say kind of, because we have yet to see how it’s actually going to work out. It has the potential to be a lot more work and responsibility with virtually no change in compensation – certainly not commensurate, anyway. However, we are remembering that it is God who takes care of us, not any current job… and there is the possibility that David will not get too much dumped on him, and actually feel ok about the compensation in relation to responsibility. Like I said, we’ll see. In any case, he will continue to do his best as usual. And we are thankful for all this experience he is able to get in working with people. I feel certain it will be put to good use in the future, no matter what we are doing. So far it is going well and I think he feels good about changes being made.
I know, I know… pictures! See first paragraph for explanation.
Thanks for any prayers you might have sent our way for good weather, cause those were answered wonderfully. We just forgot to ask for people to actually COME. Whoops. Location, location, location. Argh. If we had been somewhere more populated, we all feel certain, we would have sold a lot more stuff. As it was, we personally made just over $100, which wasn’t that bad for how much stuff we actually have left. Oh my. I think our apartment is heaving a sigh of relief to see it all go. Unfortunately our van is now bearing the weight of it all. It’s about bursting at the seams, and it doesn’t need any help in that department as it is. We’ll be taking a good majority of it to a household consignment store, so we’ll still get some good money out of a lot of it, but this just happens to be the time of year where stuff keeps flooding, so that store is currently trying to figure out how much damage it has. Hopefully they will start accepting stuff again soon. Or maybe we can just buy another car quick.
Fast forward to today: we could not really have imagined a better outcome! We ended up being able to take our stuff to a different consignment place right by the other one that wasn’t accepting stuff. And they took all of it!!! Anything they don’t think they can use there they will just take to the Crowded Closet for us. Woohoo!!! Then we found a great file cabinet there and a half-price couch at the other place. We are so happy for the way we started out. We’ve been ghettoing it for so long that getting a couch is moving up for us =) We had a futon for a while, but then we started using that to sleep on (with a conglomeration of mattresses, which I think I might have detailed in the post about our new bed) but for the last while, kind of by default because we just need to return the futon mattress that we borrowed from my brother, we’ve been sitting on just it in our living room. We’re very unassuming =) So we are really feeling special getting such a decent couch for only $68. I can’t really find the words to explain how cool it feels to be able to appreciate these things. For example, we spent a few summers going to some drastic measures to keep from turning on our air conditioning so that we could save money. Our main method of cooling off was to get ice in our bellies =) That really does work quite well. Also, sleeping under a wet towel, which you have to get up to rewet in the night. Learned that lovely trick in China. (combined with a fan blowing on you, it’s actually quite effective) Once or twice we even hung out in our bathtub filled with cold water. We knew we would rather do those kind of fun, memory making things before having kids. Though come to think of it, Maeve did hang out in a baking sheet of water when she was a wee bit last summer. I think that was more for something fun for her to splash in than for her to keep cool, though. We turned our air on a number of times last year. This year we are, too. It’s super nice and luxurious. I don’t ever want us to take these things for granted or forget that we don’t really need them. We very much believe in living simply, and it’s really a fun challenge. We will continue to upgrade our “stuff”, so to speak, but we won’t ever be excessive. Today we bought a few upgrades – a new desk, a new table thing for our living room, some toy bins for Maeve, and a new shelf thing for our kitchen. Everything doesn’t match really wonderfully, but it’s not bad, and it is certainly a step or two up. We truly feel unbelievably blessed. Today was one of my favorite days in a while, cause God really overwhelmed me. I realized on the way home that the bed we were able to buy was actually covered by our Christmas gift money. We had talked in Costa Rica about using it for that, but I didn’t think we’d actually find something good for that price. Then the couch and file cabinet from today were covered by what we made in the garage sale, and the rest of the stuff will likely come close to being covered from what we make from the consignment place. So all the tax money that we got back this year should be able to go toward a car. Wow.
Maeve was so precious in worship this morning. She was clapping and raising her hands. Priceless.
