Doing better.....

Now that Jason has completed his first week on the job and I start my new job in just a week, I have breathed a sigh of relief. On Saturday, Jason and I were cuddling and being snuggly and I something hit me: so much tension between us has been released. Although we love each other with all of our heart, financial troubles are still tough on a couple. For the past year, there was an unspoken tension between us. We were always on edge. This played out in our marriage as shortened tempers and continual stress. Neither of us could relax knowing that we were going through yet another month of no income and no job prospects. There were a few events that we argued about something insignificant, only to apologize later realizing that the argument was pointless and caused by stress. Even though our worries are far from gone, we both feel so much better. We can see an end in sight to our immediate financial issues. Later this month, as we figure out exactly how much each of us will bring home, we will work on a budget to save more money, pay off student loans quicker and give each of us a little fun money. After that point, I think we will both feel much, much better.

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Soooo.......

Jason got a job! He's been working on this company for weeks and finally got an offer. Words cannot express how relieved and excited we were upon receiving the offer letter. He starts August 2, giving him a few weeks to get some things done around the house. We are SO ready to get our life back!

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:)

I bet all of you thought this was going to be a Father's Day update. Well, it's not. Yes, I called my Daddy and wished him a happy Daddy's Day. I promise I'm a good daughter. Most of the time.

Sorry for not updating this blog thingie I have here, but my life is just SO DARN EXCITING. It's tough trying to manage sleeping and working you know. Plus, I manage to get in a little gym time which takes up more time. Sometimes I even get to see friends! Hooray!

I actually have no excuse other than sheer laziness. There hasn't been a whole lot going on lately. My brother is here in town working on his Jeep with Jason. I think they are on Day 6 of putting in a lift. This doesn't include the entire night they spend working on it as well. They came home at 6 in the morning that time. Hopefully, they will be able to get the new Mud Terrain tires on tomorrow. Don't worry, I'll post all the pictures and accompanying story with it soon. I know ya'll are sitting on the edge of your seats waiting for this story!

Other than that, work has improved somewhat. It's still a struggle, but I guess all jobs are at times. The only thing that has really suffered is my cooking. Since I get home so late most of the time, I don't cook as much as I did before. I have to really plan to cook a meal in order to make it happen. And since Jason and Houston have been working on the Jeep all week, I haven't cooked a thing since they haven't been home at all. I'll try to find some new recipes to make and I'll post them if they are successful. I mean, it's not like I'd ever post something that didn't go perfectly.

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Passion?

I've read so many articles about jobs and how to find your "dream job", that job that embraces your true passion. But how do you find that passion? I've read things about this, but I can never come up with anything for myself. I'm afraid that I won't like something in 6 months and will have to start over. I truly have no idea what makes me tick....what makes me want to get up in the morning and go, go, go! Part of this could be that I feel very dejected as far as the job market goes. It seems that I qualify for nearly nothing and am over-qualified for nearly everything. I've done so many different types of jobs and yet none of them were great. I never woke up and really wanted to go in to the office. Currently I work in retail to get some income to keep Jason and I half-way afloat, but it's something that I don't love. It's stressful, since I'm in a commission-only position. It's also hard working around others that are 10 years younger than me making more money than I am with a degree and a master's degree. Does that make me sound full of myself? I hope it doesn't, but that's how I feel. Some days, work is pretty good. Others, it's tough when I know I'm not coming home with much money. It's even tougher knowing that there aren't any more job prospects for Jason and that I am the sole source of income for the time being. It's not a good feeling. But back to the original question at hand....what is my passion? How could I spend so much time in school and still not know where I fit in? It makes no sense at all! How do you figure this out? And how do you find a job that embraces it? I know that the job market is terrible, but I am so freaking tired of hearing about it. What do you do when you were out of a job for 22 months and then took a retail position? Where do you head next? What can I possibly do to change our current situation? I'm seriously out of ideas.

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Update, anyone?

It's been awhile since I've done an update, so here's what's been going on (in bullet points, of course!):

• Work has been going pretty good. I'm doing well according to my 45-day review and am improving daily. I'm no longer the newbie since they have hired someone else in my department. Hooray! The constant changing of my schedule is harder than I remember and I frequently get tired. When I close and then open the following day, I don't get 8 hours of sleep. My poor body needs 8 hours (no less!) to function well. I've taken two 2-hour naps so far in my quest to catch up on much-needed sleep.
• Somehow, even though I have a crazy schedule, I have managed to stay in the gym. I'm still attending Body Attack, Body Pump, Body Combat and Step. It's been hard to fit them in, but I'm able to go several times a week. I'm getting better at each class and I'm able to follow the motions with much more ease. I did fall in Step class this week, but I didn't hurt myself. It was toward the end of class and I was exhausted. I was jumping over the step quickly when one foot touched the other. It was just enough to set me off balance. Then, it was like I fell in slow motion. I landed on my butt fairly softly and laughed. The best part? No one noticed because I was in the back!
• Still no job prospects for Jason. He's been looking, but there's not much out there. His mood has been very up and down and some days it's hard to deal with. As long as he keeps himself busy, he's okay. I've been trying to keep him motivated to get things done to make himself feel productive. So far, so good.
• Luckily, with my paycheck we can live the exact way we are living currently (the horror!) for another 18 months. My paycheck doesn't cover all the bills currently, but's fairly close. At least that means we can stay in our house for now. Thank goodness.
• Our garden isn't looking good. The soil that we brought in last year has mixed too much with our original soil. It's now a compacted, thick soil that is making it hard for the plants to establish roots. Also, something is eating a few of the plants. I have no idea what they are, but it's not the pill bugs that we had last year. This time, it's eating the leaves, not the stem. The squash is the only plant that actually looks pretty good. I think we'll have a good harvest from it.

I think that's all there is to talk about. If you made it through my jumbled train of thought, I applaud you! And now my friends, I must get dressed to go to work. On a Saturday. :(

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Bad, bad blogger!

Well, we knew this would happen. I got a job and left the blog in the dust. Where to begin?

In my last post, I left off on the day I got really sick. Damn you Oak Pollen! So the allergy problems made for a crappy first few days at work. I was constantly excusing myself to go blow my nose behind the scenes and stuffing peppermints in my mouth so I could quit coughing for a few minutes. It was not fun at all. Despite that, I did pretty well. My feet believe otherwise as they have major blisters on them. I don't own any really comfortable shoes that are cute and will allow me to be on my feet all day. Where do I find such things? Oh, did I mention I have a narrow foot and I walk out of any shoe that doesn't have a strap? Yeah, this will be fun.

After those first few days at work, Jason & I got a sad phone call. Our friend's father passed away and the funeral was in a few days. Luckily for me, I was off of work. I didn't know how I was going to get off work for a non-family member. Especially since I had just gotten off work for a funeral two weeks beforehand. Unlike the last person to pass away, this person got to live a long, full life. He was known as "Grandpa" to everyone. Jason served as a pallbearer in the funeral because he was pretty close. I'm going to tell a funny story about Grandpa that Jason once told me. But first, a little background. Grandpa lost most of his hearing years and years ago. He can hear low voices sometimes, but in places where there is a lot of background noise, like restaurants, he can't hear a thing. Keeping that in mind, Grandpa and several other people (including J) decided to go to dinner at a steakhouse. Everyone knows that when a waiter/waitress comes to your table, he/she pretty much asks the same thing in the same order. So here's how that conversation went down:

Waitress: What will you be having?
Grandpa: Steak.
Waitress: And how would you like that cooked?
Grandpa: Baked potato. Cole slaw. Iced tea.

And that was it. The waitress had a confused look on her face and Grandpa never knew that he missed anything. Isn't that hilarious?

Aside from that, it's been work, work, work. I'll try and get better at this. I'll have a book and movie review up tomorrow, too!

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Reality just b*tch-slapped me in the face

On Saturday, my sister and her friend Sarah were in town. We visited my cousin and then spent the afternoon at my grandma's house. I hadn't seen her in quite a while and neither had my sister. After I dropped my sister off, I came home to an empty house and decided to take it easy and watch some shows on the DVR. It had been a pretty good day.

Until Jason came home.

Remember when I said that we had roughly 8 or 9 months left of savings to live off of? Well, reality suddenly hit Jason. He has a company that wants to hire him, but is trying to find an open position. He should hear something about that this week. He has also applied to a few other places which we should also know about shortly. So J told me that if nothing pans out in the next two weeks, then we had some really important decisions to make. Here's what he told me:

1. Find some type of job that would pay enough to keep us afloat. (Easier said than done, obviously)
2. Find a renter so we can rent the house out and live with his parents in town.
3. Sell the house so we don't ruin our credit in case we lose the house in 9 months.
4. Turn off everything, move in with Jason's parents and hold onto the house for a little longer provided we both find minimum wage jobs.

Now you may thing that the last thre choices are drastic. So did I. Believe me, I didn't want to think that this could possibly happen to us. But Jason's right. In this economy, it would take us nearly 9 months to sell our home and hope that we got what we paid for it. Renting would be hard because of the price we would have to charge in order to make the mortgage payment, taxes and insurance and not lose money. Finding a minimum wage job would help us hold onto the house longer as long as we could get our absolute minimum bills paid (mortgage, student loans, insurance, etc.) but it would still mean moving. This is such a harsh reality that has hit me in the face full-force.

How could this happen to us? We don't have any debt but our mortgage and student loans. We've always paid off our credit cards. We're both educated with degrees. The sad reality is that our economy stinks. And it's something that we can't change no matter how hard we wish it to be different. I know that many other families have been in our situation, but I don't know any personally. That part makes it hard because we feel very alone.

My plan is to call up some friends and see if they can get me hired at least as part-time help.  I don't want option 1 or 2 to happen. I've waited to do this because I keep hoping that I will get hired somewhere. It's hard for me to do this because I worked so hard to finish my Master's degree. I thought I would be doing something more. But things are what they are and only Jason and I can change. I am hoping that by the time this post is up that I will have something to report. Please keep Jason and I in your prayers. We are going to need them.

P.S. For those of you who just started reading this blog, the bathroom renovations had been completed for quite a while. The materials had been bought way in advance with money we had put aside for that project.

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Half-bath renovation

This has been done for a few weeks, but I keep forgetting to share! The half-bath in our home is tiny and sits behind the stairs in our hallway leading to the laundry room and garage. This was the plan for this tiny space:

1. Re-grout the existing tile (even though the tile is a tiny bit crooked)
2. Smooth the ugly over-caulked walls (the previous owners had slathered the stuff on the wall for some unknown reason)
3. Paint
4. Replace all door trim, baseboards and add in crown moulding
5. Replace sink fixture, toilet paper fixture, add in a new towel bar and replace lighting
6. Remove the existing mirror and replace with an oval one

I'm going to go through this step-by-step. This is going to be a bit long, so grab a snack and take a potty break before continuing! Here's a picture before:

1. Re-grout existing tile.
This seemed like a fairly easy task. Jason & I took a trip to the hardware store and bought new grout in a darker color. The existing color matched the tile and it always looked dirty. The store employee showed us a little metal tool that we could use to scrape out the grout. After it was scraped, we then just had to mix the grout correctly, and apply it with a float. (I think that's what it was called.) Sounds easy, huh? Yeah, not so much. After removing the toilet and the sink, it took Jason 2 hours to scrape around one tile with that tool before the tool was deemed useless. We went back to Home Depot and bought this Dremel plus this grout removing attachment. Nope, we didn't pay that much. There was a promotion that day, plus we had some leftover gift cards. I think we paid $40 out of pocket. So the Dremel was a little better. The only problem was that it kicked up dust like a bunch of wild horses stampeding through the desert and made your hand shake for 30 minutes after using it. It drove Jason crazy. Literally. (And why wasn't I doing it? Because the half-bath wouldn't fit both of us!) It still took Jason several hours to get this done. Finally, he was able to put in the grout and we later sealed it with three coats of sealant. Here's the grout before:

 

And after:

2. Smooth the ugly over-caulked walls (the previous owners had slathered the stuff on the wall for some unknown reason)
Apparently, I forgot to take pictures of the ugly mess of a wall. There were two stripes (yes stripes!) of rough-looking caulk or plaster that ran down the sides of the wall next to the toilet. Jason sanded them down and after painting, you could hardly tell where they were. 

 3. Paint

We used Behr paint from Home Depot for the project. "Harbor" went on the walls to coordinate with some towels I had found at Marshall's a long time ago. We used "White Fur" for the trim. Painting trim was a PITA even though we used pre-primed wood. The white we used didn't saturate the wood as well as we would have liked, so it took more coats than expected. Oh, we also painted the ceiling since it was small. We figured the blue ceiling would make white crown moulding really pop!
Here's the towels with the painted wall:

 4. Replace all door trim, baseboards and add in crown moulding
 Neither Jason nor I was happy with our door trim or baseboards. We had talked about putting in taller, more decorative baseboards in the entire house since we have high ceilings. We selected the baseboards, door mouldings and crown moulding that we liked and painted them. Then the nightmare began. We bought these little corner pieces that we thought looked cute. They fit in the corner of each wall eliminating the need to make 45-degree angle cuts on the baseboards. I took out all the existing door moulding and baseboards myself (see...I did something!). Jason then began nailing in baseboards. This is where we figured out that the walls of our half-bath are not straight. At all. The wall behind the sink actually makes an S-curve. That was was bad enough. Then, we found out that rather than nice 2X4's behind the wall, there were some type of metal plates behind the plaster instead. It became a b*tch to nail the boards to the wall. I could hear Jason cursing down the road! Worse yet, the wall next to the toilet has no supporting beam in the corner. The walls are supporting walls, so it's not required, but it meant that one side of our sheetrock was kind of floating. Jason had to very carefully nail it in the wall. Because of this missing beam, we had to leave our dreams of crown moulding in the garage. There's nothing to nail it in that corner and I really didn't want anything crashing down on our guests' heads when they use our bathroom. We thought about Liquid Nails, but we would still need something to hold those pieces up there. It just wasn't happening. The baseboards and wall trim do look nice, though. However, after finding this out about our baseboards, we may abandon the idea of replacing all of them if it's going to be this rough. Here's the before with everything taken out:

 

Here's a picture of the corner pieces and new baseboards:

 5. Replace sink fixture, toilet paper fixture, add in a new towel bar and replace lighting

 This was one of the "easier" tasks. Jason made it a bit harder by replacing the water shut-off valves. He wanted better ones installed, so that was a small project added on. I couldn't find the exact fixture we used, but this is the closest to the lighting: Here. We also bought this sink fixture at Home Depot which I think was on sale at the time. The towel bar and toilet paper fixture we got from this collection at Bed, Bath and Beyond using 20% off coupons!
Here's Jason painting around the newly-replaced water shut-off valves:

 

And here's a couple pictures of the new fixtures and hardware:

 

6. Remove the existing mirror and replace with an oval one
This was way harder than it looked. The original rectangular mirror had been stuck to the wall with a gallon of Liquid Nails. Jason tried to pry it off the wall, but he ended up having to break it before he could take it off. This left three holes in the sheetrock, but the replacement mirror (that I found for $40 at Ross!) was large enough to cover them all up! Here's the finished (for now) view. Lights on!

Lights off!

 

  

I haven't put anything on the wall yet, but I'll get to that eventually. It took Jason so many hours to do this because of all the unexpected obstacles, but I am so proud of him! We are happy with how things turned out and aren't embarrassed to send people to the bathroom anymore! :)

 

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New Year's Eve Celebration

Jason & I were invited to a "Classy New Year's Eve" party at a friend's house. Now if you know some of my friends, then you know that classy could either be:

1. Classy
or
2. Klassy

On New Year's eve, Jason & I both weren't feeling well. The mountain cedar pollen had made itself known in San Antonio and my sinuses were (and still are) well aware. They couldn't stop crying and I was tired of mopping up their tears. Jason just had a headache, but I think it was out of sympathy. Somehow we unstuck ourselves from the chairs and turned off the tv long enough to get dressed. At this point, it's cold and I'm not about to put on a dress and freeze my arse off all night. Plus, I already explained the dilemma above.

So we donned our best jeans, trying to make ourselves look somewhat dressed up and presentable. We arrived at the party a typical hour late because we're cool like that and no one ever expects the M family to be on time. Much to my surprise, it was indeed a CLASSY New Year's party and my lovely husband and I were far outclassed. We became the klassy folks of the party. Well, someone had to take that role. We made klassy look good!

Soon after arriving, Jason downed a few beers. He was a man with a mission and that mission was to kiss the toilet seat later. I am happy to report that his lips stayed toilet seat free, but we did have a good scare. In case you were wondering, no I did not drink with such fortitude. Instead, I had two small 29 degree beers early on and some champagne at midnight. This picture was taken after Jason had about 3 beers:

I have no idea what in the heck he was doing. Because he has a pumpkin head, the New Year's hat didn't fit him at all. He found a great way to supplement it. Poor Mendy just didn't even know what happened here.

 

Here's a picture of our host, Haby. See, I told you it was CLASSY. He brought out the tux for the occasion. I'm pretty sure he remembers nothing of this moment.

 Here's a few more party goers: Deseere, Mendy & Paul.

Somehow through my husband's rip-roaring debacle we managed to take a decent picture together.

Here's Mendy (again with the hat! Ha!), Jason, myself and Kristi:

The real story was of the second Jason. We shall call him Buzz for several reasons, none of which shall be listed here. At midnight, he busted open his bottle of champagne and proceeded to drink from it the klassy way. (If you'll notice, he wore jeans, too. I told you some of us were klassy people.)

Shortly after this, he decided that the champagne was only good for picture-taking and would be way more fun to spray on the lawn!

But the story's not over yet. So that a perfectly good bottle wouldn't be wasted, he filled that bottle up with margaritas! The King of Klassiness!

A little later in the night, this picture was taken. If you look closely, you'll see the Ginger trying to hide like a ninja. This is me, Paul, Nik, the ninja Jenn & another Stephanie. People, there were three freaking Stephanies at the party. Seriously, WTH?

The ninja felt the need to prove her worth so she challenged her fellow Ginger to a headbutting contest!

The night went on until I worried that Jason might keel over at any moment spurring someone to yell "Timber!" in the distance. I may exaggerate how much he drank, but I kid you not about the tree part. At 6'8", you do not want to see him fall. I would've had to have left him there because there's no dragging any man around of that size. We took the backroads home and finally got in bed for the night.

The next morning, after sleeping very late, I made my dear husband make me pancakes. I figured that was a good enough payment for driving him home. However, my dreams of morning mimosas were turned down. I kept telling Jason, "hair of the dog! Hair of the dog!" but it didn't work. Oh well. I guess I can save that champagne bottle for this weekend a special occasion. Hope everyone else's celebration was just as fun!

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Catching up, part 4

Jason & I finally made it to the hometown and we spent the evening doing what else?

Eating and drinking.

What can I say? We're a little predictable at times. :)

Anyway, the next morning was my friend Katlyn's baby shower. It was held just one town over from me......I had to trek all of 10 miles from my parent's house. Here's Katlyn with her mum that I helped Stacy put together. I had never heard of making mums for baby showers, but I think it turned out cute.


Her cake was made by Lucy's in San Antonio.


Stacy, myself and our friend Misty got together to make a diaper cake. None of us had made one before and I think it turned out cute as well.


While Kat opened her presents,


This little cutie, Cymber, stole the show:


Cymber decided that she needed to help unwrap gifts. She was so cute walking around with leftover tissue paper and bows!

After the shower, I headed home to celebrate Thanksgiving early with my brother. I forgot to get the camera out for it, but we had turkey, cranberry sauce (my fave!), yummy stuffing, veggies, pecan pie and pumpkin pie. Let's put it this way........we were stuffed!

Later that night, my brother started a fire and we all brought out lawn chairs.


Jason decided he needed to add his special touch to the fire as well. Notice the beer in hand? Anyone catching a theme here?


We sat out for a long time talking, petting the family dogs and just watching the flames.


It was a perfect end to a great night.

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The Curse Is Over!!!

After going on two fishing trips with Jason and my father-in-law and catching nothing, I was labeled "The Jinx." This year I was out there to prove them all wrong!

Friday night, Jason & I stayed at his parent's house so we could leave from there first thing in the morning (they live 30 minutes from us....we enjoyed the extra sleep). I put on my trusty seasickness patch before going to bed in preparation for the waves to come. Saturday morning, our friend Greg meets us at the house. We load everything up and get on the road.

What we didn't know was that it was cold that morning. Saturday and Sunday were projected to be clear and sunny. Sunday was supposed to have scattered thunderstorms in the afternoon. We didn't care about that since we were only going to fish in the morning before heading home. The weathermen were so freaking wrong. It was cloudy and cool.

Saturday, after a 4 hour drive, we arrived in Port O'Conner and got ready to head out with our guide, Steve. Since it stayed cool, we all had on jeans and sweatshirts with short-sleeve shirts on underneath in case it got hot. It didn't, but the weather was perfect. Not hot at all, and a nice cool breeze to keep me from chumming for fish (see definition number 10) again. We anchored the boat and dropped our lines with cut bait. The Redfish were hitting us hard! We hit our limit within one hour! We were having to throw back keepers because we had already limited out. I got the second largest Red and it was 42 inches! Check out that bad boy!

I didn't keep him with my oversize tag because Reds above 30 inches aren't good for eating. We let him go after I made him pose for a picture. It was hard to wrangle that sucker in...it took a lot of muscle and fight. I loved it! Here's my 41 incher with our guide Steve.


I ended up catching another 41 inch Red later on. Our friend Greg caught a 43 inch Red, beating me by an inch! Doh!

Jason had a great catch too, but the picture is on Greg's camera. I still beat him though. Ha! Overall, on Saturday we caught around 50 Reds and a couple Black Drums. Oh, and a lot of Hardheads and Gafftops.

After such a successful Saturday, we were ready to go for Sunday morning. We went to bed fairly early to get some shut-eye, but none of us slept well. We wake up around 6:15 AM and can hear the wind. I look outside and see the trees blowing pretty hard. What happened to the sunny weather? We decided to go and try out the waters anyway.

Everyone put on rain slickers to keep from getting soaked. We find one other boat in the entire are and we park near them, just inside the jetties. The swells were huge! The water current was extremely strong and it kept pulling our weights up. We pressed on and when we didn't catch anything but a single Black Drum, we moved to the other side of the bay. The water seemed to calm a bit, but we couldn't catch anything at all. I spent a lot of time watching the porpoises play while I waited for a bite. They're hard to see in this picture, because they move so fast! This was a family that came to check us out several times.


After a while, we moved back close to the original spot, but the anchor wouldn't hold. We moved a little farther in the jetties, and found a spot where the current was slower. Then, it rained.

Ever been outside on purpose in 60-degree, rainy weather for fun? No? It's just us crazy people? Probably.

The rain let up after about 10 minutes and we started catching more Hardheads and Gafftops and I believe there was also a Dogfish mixed in. In other words, trash fish. Finally, Jason caught two more Black Drums, I caught an undersized Redfish and my father-in-law, Don, caught a slot-sized Redfish. We pressed on for a little longer, but it was getting miserable out there. We called it a day soon after. I thought I was already plenty wet until we road the boat back in. Holy smokes we got wet! I was sitting in a puddle of water. There weren't many dry places left on me! You know it's bad when the water is warmer than the air. We got back to the house and literally peeled off our clothes to take a shower. Uh, I mean, we took turns in the shower. You known what I mean.

We loaded all our stuff up and headed back home. Even though Sunday wasn't that great, I had so much fun! I actually caught a ton of fish proving the curse false! I can't wait to go next year! :)

P.S. Don't forget about my blogiversary request! I would love to hear from each of you!

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Updates

Because I love lists, I'm numbering my updates. No need to thank me. :P

1. First and foremost, I've been feeling under the weather. I keep stalking the "In The Air" portion of the WOAI website to see what the heck is making me sneeze. Unfortunately - or fortunately - it's nothing that I'm officially allergic to. What the heck?

2. In other news, we've gotten the garden planted. With our abundance of 100+ degree weather this summer, our garden suffered a major heat stroke. Even though some of the plants looked okay, they just couldn't produce any fruit. We ended up turning things under and starting anew a few days ago. This year, we put in one cherry and one regular tomato plant, broccoli, cucumbers, 4 different types of squash and carrots. I know that carrots are not typically a South Texas crop, but I thought it would be fun. The four types of squash we planted were acorn, butternut, spaghetti and something I've never heard of. The seeds came in a mixed packet and we are hoping that we planted at least one of each. I guess we won't know until harvest! We also left one of our red bell pepper plants in the ground because it seemed to do well and had several peppers on it. We hadn't gotten a single usable pepper off either plant so we are hoping that it likes the cooler weather better.

3. I tried a new recipe last night for stuffed cabbage rolls that I will not be posting any time soon unless I am begged. Let's just say that although I followed the directions and it came out picture perfect, the flavor combination left a little to be desired. In other words, not too tasteful. It wasn't bad, but it was a lot of work for something that I didn't love.

4. I should have some pictures of our newly remodeled half bath soon! We're waiting on this humidity to go away before we attempt to paint and cut trim. This is exciting news people!

5. Jason took a part-time job in the beverage industry as well. Please wish us luck as he starts this new endeavor.....it's a brand new company with a brand new product. We are VERY excited about it!!!

And that's it, folks. I've got nothing left to say unless you want to hear about my grocery shopping excursions. :)

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Happy Anniversary to Us!

One year ago today, Jason & I exchanged vows......


And rings......


We kissed......


We danced......


We had cake......


And we left to begin our life as husband and wife.......


I love you so much my love. You mean more to me than you know. I look forward to spending the rest of our lives together!

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Cutest thing ever!

Jason came home one day last week exhausted. He said he was going to go change and then come upstairs with me. I went to check on him and this is what I found:

Cassius was asleep too, but he heard me turn on the camera. Jason ended up taking a two hour nap that night!

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Jason's project truck

Those of you who know me in person have probably heard me mention something about Jason working on his project truck. His project truck is a '55 Chevy truck that he is painstakingly putting together. When we started dating almost 3 years ago, all he had was the cab (no bed), the engine on the floor of the garage and a newer model frame that he needed to custom fit to the truck. To someone inexperienced like me, it looked like a pile of rusted stuff. It was very hard to see how things were going to come together. But, Jason saw potential. He is incredibly happy when he's in the shop with his Dad just trying to figure out where to put things. You will never see a bigger grin on his face. Currently, he's working on patching some side panels so that he can send the truck off to get media blasted. The truck has come a long way in the 3 years since we've been together. It's now sitting on the finished frame with the engine temporarily sitting inside. And there's a bed that is now attached. It's starting to look like a truck!

Today we went to a classic car show in Live Oak. As soon as we walk in the doors Jason said, "There's my truck!" I'm wondering where it is as I can't see a thing. (The height difference allows him to see clear across buildings) We walk over and sure enough, there's a '55 Chevy right there in front of us in finished condition. I thought I would post a couple pictures of the truck so that some of you can get a mental image of what the finished product will look like. It sure helped me out a lot!

Sorry some of the photos are blurry; I didn't realize they were blurry until I downloaded them at home. It was hard to squeeze in-between vehicles to get pictures!

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So you think you know your husband!

Yesterday I was cleaning in the kitchen and I flipped on the radio. Normally, in my car, I listen to XM (now Sirius XM....ugh.....that's another story) Radio, so I'm not really in the know on the local stations. I found out that Jack FM (102.7) is the best station to listen to while doing the kitchenly and other householdish duties.

Now for anyone who's never heard of this station - or for my out-of-state bloggy buddies who, bless their heart, don't realize that you can't live until you live in Texas - it's a mix of everything. And not in a cheesy soft rock kind of way. I mean, it's like I'm playing a mix from my own collection. I admit, Jack does like the 80s a lot, but so do I!

So, while cleaning, I hear the illustrious voice of Elton John. And then Billy Joel. And then Elton. And then Billy. And I'm loving it to the core. Childhood memories all come back and waves of happiness wash upon me. In honor of their upcoming concert, Jack was playing Elton & Billy for one solid hour.

I call Jason to tell him to make sure to set his radio for Jack FM on the way home because they are playing Elton & Billy! He says okay, we hang up, and I go back to being giddy.

About half an hour later, Jason comes home. And me, in my girly silliness, asked him if he listened to Jack. I wanted him to tell me how awesome he thought it was, too.

Instead, he tells me that he only listened to it for a little bit. When I asked him how this could be, he replied: "I hate Elton John. I don't like any of his music. Except maybe Candle in the Wind. That one was pretty good."

I had to take a step back on this one. Candle in the Wind?!? Really? That's it? While I happen to think it's an okay song, that song would definitely require me to push the Skip button should it come up on my playlist.

So there you go folks. We've known each other for over 5 years, dated for almost 2 and a half, and have been married for 5 months. You'd think I'd know who I married. But for a brief moment, I had to wonder who this 6'8" man was standing in my kitchen denying Elton John his dues.

At least he likes Billy.

We'll always have Billy.

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