New Home!

Noel and I bought a house! We've agreed on everything, and have our inspection on Friday, let's hope it goes as well as we think it will. If it does, we will close November 20th, and be able to move in November 22.

Here is the the house from the front.



The old owners collected this brick from all over town to make this walkway.



Nevermind all the chatting, we had forgotten what things looked like, so it was like seeing it all over! This is the kitchen. Sorry the video is so fast, I forgot that you need to pan slowly... I also, apologize that it's sideways. Oops.





Laundry Room, main floor right by the three bedrooms. Probably my favorite thing about the inside of the house. Then there is a linen closet and three bedrooms. This video shows you one of the bedrooms. They are all pretty small, but the large living space is what sold us. No one really spends much time in bedrooms anyway.



Upstairs bath shared by the three bedrooms.




This is the family room, and then out to the back deck. There is the nice cement patio, and then the yard!



This is the living room, which will hold my dining room set. So it will be our dining room. It's directly behind the kitchen and the family room is just behind the fireplace wall.



The view of the house from the back yard. How bout them picture windows?




There is a wet bar in the basement.

And a 3/4 bath in the fourth bedroom.

This is sad... What a crappy English Teacher I am.

The BBC says the average person has only read 6 of these:

[x] 1 Pride and Prejudice
[x] 2 The Lord of the Rings
[x] 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
[x] 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
[x] 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
[x] 6 The Bible
[x] 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
[x] 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
[ ] 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
[x] 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

[x] 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
[ ] 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
[x] 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
[x] 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
[ ] 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
[ ] 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
[ ] 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
[x] 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
[ ] 19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
[ ] 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

[x] 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
[x] 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
[ ] 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
[ ] 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
[ ] 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
[x] 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[x] 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
[x] 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
[ ] 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

[ ] 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
[x] 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
[x] 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
[x] 34 Emma - Jane Austen
[ ] 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
[x] 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
[x] 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
[ ] 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
[ ] 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
[ ] 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

[ ] 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
[x] 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
[x] 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude
[ ] 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
[ ] 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
[ ] 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
[ ] 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
[ ] 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
[x] 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
[x] 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

[ ] 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
[ ] 52 Dune - Frank Herbert
[ ] 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
[x] 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
[ ] 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
[ ] 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
[x] 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
[ ] 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
[ ] 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
[x] 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

[x] 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
[ ] 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
[ ] 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
[ ] 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
[ ] 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
[x] 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
[ ] 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
[x] 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
[ ] 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
[x] 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (yes, its a guy's book)

[ ] 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
[ ] 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
[ ] 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
[ ] 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
[x] 75 Ulysses - James Joyce
[ ] 76 The Inferno – Dante
[ ] 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
[ ] 78 Germinal - Emile Zola
[ ] 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
[ ] 80 Possession - AS Byatt

[x] 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
[ ] 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
[ ] 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
[ ] 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
[ ] 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
[ ] 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
[x] 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
[x] 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
[ ] 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
[ ] 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

[x] 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
[x] 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
[ ] 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
[ ] 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
[ ] 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
[ ] 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
[ ] 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
[x] 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
[x] 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
[x] 100 Les Miserables — Victor Hugo

Motherless Mother's Day

So this may seem kinda heartless... I don't know, but I forget all about Mother's Day. I mean, I took care of the Mom-in-law Business before we left for Denver, but not having a real mom reason to celebrate Mother's Day for 9 years, has kinda made it seem like Valentine's Day. To me, it's like a lame Hallmark Holiday. I love my Mothers-in-law (Mother-in-laws?), but it's not at all the same. Maybe, someday, if I am ever a mom, I'll think differently. That was the long way of saying, I went to a Major League Baseball game on Mother's Day. Noel's Uncle Jim treated us to a Rockies game. We had a blast.



Noel sitting in the stands at Coors Field.

Some of the players used pink bats for Mother's Day and the Susan G. Komen Fundraiser.

Our seats were in row ten just behind the third-base dugout. So Noel enjoyed a short walk to the field.

After the game we went out for dinner, and then saw Star Trek on the big screen. Then we went back to Uncle Jim's and went to bed, ready for 12 hour drive home on Monday. It was a fast, fun-filled weekend.

Spring Skiing

Noel and I went to Denver again last weekend for a long weekend. We are fortunate enough to stay with his uncle, who truly spoils us. We saw Noel's sweet cousin Molly, who is finishing up her freshman year at the University of Denver. She showed us her dorm room and then gave us a tour of her campus. We decided then, since the weather was great- 55 and sunny, that we would go skiing for a couple of hours. We did and it was beautiful, except that it's been over 6 years since I skied and I was so sore immediately! We had fun, and I love being up in the mountains.


About halfway up, taking a break and resting my knees.

Noel just before going up to the Summit of A-basin. :)

On the chair-lift. I am much more of a wimp, um, daily. But I forgot how much I love the chair lifts and the views and the ride up. I thought I would freak out without my Dad being there but I was like an old pro. It was great.

Tears.

I googled my Grandpa, why, I don't know. I'm missing him a little. Even though this was shot shortly before he died, it's a great reminder of his voice and his demeanor. This is the most boring video in the history of the world. Unless, you like Horseshoes and a lot of silence, (which I kinda do), I wouldn't advise actually watching the whole video.




Here is a letter my Grandpa wrote to change the league's rules. Woo! Go Grandpa!

Illinois Marathon for Noel and 5k for me.

April 11th, Easter weekend, Noel ran his 2nd full marathon. This time it was in Champaign, IL. I joined him in running the 5k, my first, and we both got new "PR's"! Personal Records. Noel's time was 4 hours and 14 minutes. My time was 37 minutes. I paid dearly in soreness for about three days following but it felt good to finish, and I will probably attempt it again soon.



Friday before the race, we picked up our t-shirts and timing chips. Here are a few of the friends Noel runs with on Saturday or Sunday mornings.


Here we were at the hotel before heading to the starting line.

Near the starting line on the bus that was chartered. Here are also people from the running club in the Quad Cities. Who knew running was so popular?

Surprise!

Probably, the most exciting thing that occurred in my recent history. I was so excited, the camera was shaking a lot. Angie came home from Africa a week earlier than any of her family expected. I drove her up to Cedar Falls to surprise her family.




Angie's mom called her Grandma to come over so Ang could surprise Grandma too. I wasn't standing in the right spot, but listen close and you'll hear Grandma B's reaction.

I have...

I love surveys and just about any ridiculous quizzes you could find. This does not have the same questions as the one I did about a month ago... well, most are different. Things I have done are BOLD.

1. Started your own blog (Since 2005!)
2. Slept under the stars (in Door County and Burkina Faso)
3. Played in a band (does 5th grade count?)
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity (to missions- for sure)
7. Been to Disneyland/world
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea (does on a boat in Green Bay count? Cause YES!)
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch (most of my craftiness)
15. Adopted a child (someday, Lord willing!)
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitch hiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse (in third grade. They gave us special cards to look through)
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had your portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain (Marcus & I's first kiss was in the rain!)
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie (jess's - I even smoked for the role... I'm hardcore about my craft.)
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Gotten flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten Caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone (i think my toe cause I stub them so much)
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book (someday)
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible - not all at once. but I have read every book.
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee