Touched in Church

Okay, get your mind out of the gutter - that is NOT what I mean. In church we sat next to a young boy, sitting alone, in the last pew. We have been attending a new church in town so we are still shying towards the back at this point. He followed the service through the hymns, readings and Lord's prayer. he even signed in cursive in the sign-in log.

When it came time for the offering he got the gold plated bowl first and then passed it to me. He proudly put an offering envelope enscribed with his name (in cursive again) and in the "other" area, he simply wrote "Food." He placed a small bag of cereal in the envelope to give to the church. At the end of the service, the reverend asks for prayers and he raised his hand meekly and said, "For my 11th birthday tomorrow." I sure hope he had a wonderful and memorable day.

Detox

I just completed one week without any sweets including ice cream, cookies, chocolate and coke. Also, one week without caffeine (headache on day 1, none since). We are doing a 5 week detox to help us slim down and get ready for running additional races this year and get back on track to eating healthier meals. Other things we are without? Alcohol, creamy salad dressing, almost all processed foods and carbs and some red meat (more fish and chicken). The other night we each had a small portion of pasta to get some carbs and I felt awful all night through the next day. needless to say, the pasta has been put away! Of course, our scale broke and is stuck on 120 pounds so now that we want to weigh in weekly on the same scale, we need to buy a new one. Certainly just a small thing to deal with.

A New Year - A New You?

Happy 2010! I was talking with a friend the other day and laughing about how ten years ago the "hot" phrase was Y2K and everyone wondered if the internet would shutdown among other things. Seems silly now, doesn't it? We spent New Years Eve with some good friends and I even won a little black dress contest so now we can go out to dinner for free :).


Right now we don't have any "big plans" for 2010, but not to say there won't be any. We'd really like to take a large trip this year since we didn't do one in 2009 and my top choices are Italy, Greece or Hawaii. We may go see a friend at med school in St. Maarten too which would be a fun long weekend. Our current plan is a diet cleanse - not as awful as it sounds. We aren't doing anything radical like eating only cookies or grapefruit or becoming organic vegetarians, but for the next five weeks we are eliminating several things from our diet including: alcohol, caffeine, soda, ice cream/cookies/cake and most processed foods. We went to Costco to stock up on bulk sizes of fruits, veggies and fish to get us started. Hopefully the updated food with help boost our energy and we will see more improvements at the gym too.

Happily Livin'

It feels WONDEFUL to be living in our home!!

Last week I took a few pictures of us outside in an effort to capture "the" Christmas card photo, which we did successfully. Also took this great picture above of us standing on our front porch. And to think such an awful looking structure was standing there less than six months ago.

We hosted Thanksgiving for nine adults (siblings and parents) recently and I think it all went quite well. My sister and I baked on Wednesday and Thursday morning Brad and I work up at 6:30 a.m. to put the turkey in the oven. Everything else fell into place thanks to the help of our moms.

First few nights!

I wanted to give everyone a quick photo update because I know I have been MIA. I am going to blame it on Verizon because we are still without internet at home and I have taken some vacation time from work so I am forced to visit the library to logon to the internet. We spent our first night drinking champagne, eating a good dinner and Brad surprised me with a pretty bouquet of flowers. Yes, we did use the blender as a vase since we only had random boxes at the house.

Our first few weeks have been a whirlwind because we went out of town and had guests over for Thanksgiving (more on that soon) but I just wanted to say hello!

MOVE IN DAY!

Yup, you read that right - today we can move in!!! Brad called me at 8:40 this morning to tell me that the inspector had already been otu to our house and everything went great. Three hours later he has already brought our new sofa, ottoman and mattresses to the house and will getting more things together throughout the day. I'll write more and FINALLY post pictures in a few days, but for now I'm just going to enjoy spending time in our new home.

Still Waiting

I haven't been posting because this house process has still been draining me emotionally. We are still living with Brad's parents and waiting for the house to be done. Last Friday I was on-site for a plumbing/septic inspection when they realized one of our pipes was broken, meaning we failed our inspection of course. The pipe was fixed in no time, but another inspection couldn't be done until Monday, Nov. 2 - luckily we passed. Also on Friday the plumber told me our sewage grinder pump wasn't operating correctly. In an effort to prevent sewage from accumulating in our pipes, I called WSSC and within three hours a new pump was installed (much easier than I thought) at their expense. Now we learned that we need to wait 10 days from chlorinating our well to have the water sample test done which carries over to next Tuesday, Nov. 10th. We are going to the house daily and running water to speed up the dissolving process of the chlorine tablets because we are several weeks behind "schedule" and patience has run out. Sigh.........