An Exciting Sunday at Church

We've been in our new house now for almost a 3 months now. This week we were finally read into our new ward! We just never gave them our information until recently. The awkward part about getting read into the ward was that we also gave a talk this week. So not only were we read into the ward, but we got to see everybody staring at us while it happened. Then we got to give our first talks in the ward. I gave mine on "the Ministry of Jesus Christ" and Tom gave his on the "Atonement". I think they went pretty well and through it I think we both learned some things. That's the way it's suppose to work huh?

Also that day we got new callings. Tom is the new 11-year old boy primary teacher and scout master (or something like that). He's very happy with this new calling. He was really hoping for something with scouting. My new calling I am less excited about. It is the activities chairman. I am not the most creative person, so this sounds kind of painful to me. I was on the enrichment board once and did not enjoy it. Luckily in this ward instead of doing a lot of different activities they just do a monthly pot-luck. This aught to be interesting......

Present Wrapping

First of all, you can thank my lovely sister Ashley for the beautiful scenery change on this blog! She's got the creativity gene inherited from my mother. I always look at stuff like this and would love it do it, but never get around to it. Thanks Ash!

Yesterday evening my new ward had our Christmas Enrichment activity! Tom decided while I was gone he would wrap a few of my presents! Lovely job huh
There actually were other packages he had fully wrapped under the tree, but I got a kick out of this one!

Painting

From the moment we moved into the house I wanted to repaint. Of course, I had no real world knowledge how expensive it would be. After Tom did the math on our house vs the cost of paint we decided with all the other little changes we were having to make right now, we could only afford to paint half of the house. We decided to start with the common areas of the kitchen, dining room, living room, and hallway. We also decided to paint the wood trim (because it was horrible). When the previous owners had painted (which in my opinion they decided to do to see the house) they were not very careful and got paint on the wood and cupboards along the edges. It seems to have been done in a hurry even though the pain was in pretty good condition and I liked the color. After many trip to Lowe's looking at their paint displays and many conversations about the color we wanted the trim and the dining room we finally made a decision. I had to do a little convincing for the color I wanted the dining room, but it turned out gorgeous and Tom really likes it too! We're really happy with how it turned out and I'll post some before and after pictures later. In the mean time here are some pictures while we were painting and the disaster our house became for a little under a month. Needless to say, I'm very happy to get my kitchen back and our lives kind of back to normal. All we have left to do it tack the trim back up in the hallway. Yeah!

My Review on V

Most of you probably know that I've a sci-fi freak! I like almost anything that is related to science fiction or fantasy. I do have my restrictions though. Anything with vampires, x-file type stuff, alien invasions are pretty much guaranteed to be found in my Netflix queue or as a book on my bedside table.

For those of you that read my sister A's blog, know that we were raised in a Sci-fi household. It was common to have our family bonding around the TV watching StarTrek, Star Wars, or V. I guess this is kind of an inherited obsession (from my Mom's side of the family mostly).

When I heard they were going to remake V, I wasn't sure how I felt. The old version of course was a bit corny and old fashioned, but I love it because I loved it back then. Plus, regardless of the bad special effects, I like the story and the meaning behind it. It shows what a civilization will do when threatened. It brings out both the best and the worst in people.

The difference between the old and new versions to me was very suttle. Same basic story, much better special effects, and some swapping in the sex of the characters. What used to be a girl character is now a guy character and vice versa. I'm still waiting to see whos going to play the crazy Diana chick character. There is more depth to the characters and there are some additional characters that weren't in the original.

I look forward to seeing where the show will lead and how it will either shadow the original or branch out and become it's own entity. This show has the potential of being really great or a total bust. Only time will tell!

Finally....pictures of our new house!!

This was us right after we signed our papers. We are in the picture with our mortgage lady and our real estate guy. They were both amazing!

This is the front of the house. The truck belongs to a friend of ours that came to help T do some heavy lifting because I'm a wimp! Thanks to everyone that has done that over the past month!

This is a view of the back of our house from our back yard! We love the deck and the backyard has a lot of possibilities!


Our backyard! As you can probably see, the fence needs a little work. We're trying to figure out who exactly owns the fence. Jake loves the backyard. You can see in the lower left hand corner where he's dug a little bit. We're trying to kick that habit. That's where I want to put a little garden anyways!


Our cool new BBQ. Tom loves it! We got it on sale along with a family donation! Thanks for the help, we've already used it!

Here's the dining room. We were given the table about a year ago. We're on the lookout for a bigger one!

Here's the kitchen! I actually love it, but we're planning on updating it in a few years! I was pleasantly surprised how much cupboard space and counter space there was! All my kitchen stuff actually fits now! The door leads to the garage (I didn't take a picture of that...sorry).

This is part of the living room (from the dining room).

The living room from the other direction. I love the windows in this house! Plus there are a lot of strange angles that are really cool.

Living room again!

Bedroom #1

Bedroom #2

Bedroom #3

Master Bath. There is also a walk-in closet to the left.

Entrance way. Absolutely love this!

Hallway

2nd Bathroom

Office/Gym??? The blanket on the floor is where Jake hangs out when I am working out. This is still and work in progress but people were asking for pictures. There's also a third bedroom that I didn't take pictures of. It's kind of a staging area for everything we don't know what to do with yet (mostly decorations).

Office/Gym #2

Well, I hope you all enjoyed the pictures. We're in the middle of painting right now, so I'll post more pictures later!

Coupons

For the past several years I've wanted to learn how to use coupons to save us money. This is something that completely confuses me. I just don't get it!

I've read articles, seen tv shows, & heard stories about how to use coupons. That still doesn't seem to help. We even got the newspaper for about a years while we lived in Salt Lake City thinking there would be coupons that I could learn how to use. Pretty much the only "coupon-like" things there were, were the weekly notices from the grocery stores. It wasn't coupons, it was just the weekly sales. I've heard stories about being able to double coupon things, but in order to have that work I need coupons. I'm not sure exactly what to do.

If any of you have any websites that could help me, or books, or anything like that please let me know!

My life right now.....

Our life recently has been pretty crazy! I'm starting to wish for the days when my most exciting activity was cleaning the house a looking for a job. Although, I guess I am still cleaning the house, but much more aggressively. We've been looking for a house for the past 3 or 4 months. We made an offer on two different houses and got them both (at different times of course). The first one was a short sale (that I have previously blogged about) and the one we eventually purchased. Our house was more expensive, but had several really nice features to it that I will talk about when I blog with the house pictures.

We signed on our house about 2 weeks ago and honestly the past 2 weeks have been a bit of a blur. We signed on Wednesday Sept 30th, had the carpets cleaned the next day, and moved in Sat Oct 3rd. The house was previously being rented to the previous owners daughter and family. She said she didn't find out we were signing on the house until the couple of days before and she thought she had another week to move and clean the house. Weird considering the date we signed the papers was the exact date that we had scheduled for over a month. Don't know if she was full of it or not, but the house was not clean! I'm still in the process of leaning out drawers an cupboards with cleanser and deep cleaning the bathrooms! Anybody know how to get stain out of a toilet bowl. Extreme non-cleaning is the only reason I can come up with for the state of some parts of the house. We've already started replacing some the things in the house. T's loving being Mr. Fix it!

The Monday after we moved into our house, we had our 5 year anniversary! Tom had told me previously my gift was the house he was getting me! I told him he's going to have a hard time doing better than that in the future! On Monday, we completely forgot about our anniversary. The only reason I remembered is I was making an appointment with my doctor and wrote it in my date book and it was marked! We spent that night and the next cleaning our old apartment! Very romantic I know, but we got almost all of our deposit back because of it!

I know some of you are waiting for pictures of our new house. I know we've been living here for 1 1/2 weeks, but we are still not fully unpacked yet. When that happens I will post pictures of our house with all our stuff in it. Of course it will not be decorated for a while. Still need to paint.