oh hi, i'm alive, barely.

i work all day, overtimes, and then i can home for brief moments, only to be on to the next thing. summertime in our corner of the NW is "this event!!" and "this event!!" and "this activity!" because we try to cram in everything fun and outdoorsy or travel-worthy until the undending grey drizzles happens again and spoils all our plans. This rain and cold could come on at anytime and decide to stay, so it seems to me like a mad rush of people trying to get in their fun and happiness like it was their last day alive on this earth. A constant bucket list, if you will, is running through all our brains.

this past week has been especially bizzare, a steady heat wave in Seattle. It broke all the records and i'm sure the environmentalists were like "here it is!! this is what we told you would happen! this is all your fault for not recycling that can or hugging that tree! you used too much hairspray!!" but anyway, no one has air conditioning in this part of the world. unless you're wal mart or something. so we were all screwed. old people died, children cried themsleves into sickness, and i did not sleep for three nights in a row because my house was 100 degrees on the inside. LITERALLY. NOT JOKING. The inside thermometer said 100. degrees. People got in fights at grocery stores over fans. eastern washington was like "you guys are whiney pansies."

anyway, after tomorrow (going to a friend's wedding.... who's getting married on a battleship. yes. you heard right. a BATTLESHIP.) i am through with the frenzy of summertime. i am not a "eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die" type of individual. yes, i want to be with my friends and family and live life to the fullest, but i want a quiet life, an undivided heart, a happy home where i can actually stay home. the more overtime and stress piled on at work, the more dreams i have at night where i am a mommy with babies and making spaghetti in the kitchen and picking lettuce out of the garden. my biological clock is like "WHAT THE FRACK ARE YOU DOING STOP WORKING WITH OLD SICK PEOPLE ME WANT CUTE BABYYY" and my brain is like "shut up i'm trying to start an IV in a particular thin wiry vein!" And so it goes. And so it will always be, I suppose, even whence the said children if and when arrive, there will still be other things to do and think of, to divide the spirit and mind, to pull and tear, whether it's a job (god i hope not), a sick relative, church ministry.

i find solace and meditate on

Be still, and know that I am God;


I will be exalted among the nations,


I will be exalted in the earth.

moving

I'm gonna be sore tomorrow.

I helped a friend move today. It was fun - she did live on the second floor and moved to the third floor of a different apartment complex. Staairs. Boooks. Bed fraaames.

I like moving things one place to another, it's kind of like a fresh start. Even if it is down the road. I really enjoyed moving in to our first home. I enjoyed but at the same time felt sad leaving our first apartment - it was such a sentimental feeling. It was like, aww, we made spaghetti on that stove a hundred times over and it never got old. That's the window that overlooks the lake - that's where our pirate skull and bones shower curtain hung - that's where our futon used to be, until Heidi made me give it away because she hated it oh so much...

Our friend's apartment is super cute, it has a bunch more windows and looks bigger to me even though it's not. It had an elevator to the third floor THANK GOD. It's in a pretty nice part of town, although up here it seems like everything is really close by. That's what I like about this city.

Excuse me now but I have to go quarrel with Josh about how he is obsessed with running the dishwasher like ALL the time.

pictures

Josh has been using the laptop for work and my old PC is beyond revival right now so I haven't had as much computer time to do computer-y things. I have about a bajillion pictures (it seems) to upload to my flickr (I love you, flickr!!) that I have been taking with my new "sweet digitalness" as I like to call my new canon I got for Christmas.

I accomplished a lot today, you would all be very proud. I took all the boxes out of our spare bedroom, put everything in it's place, got rid of some stuff we don't need, and collapsed all the boxes for recycling. We have now have an EMPTY room. There is no rooms in the house that are full of boxes - instead, we are all unpacked! Yes!

When Josh got home he helped me (by this I mean I watched him) put the old TV in there (the TV from when Josh lived at Ft. Irwin, the TV that makes mysteriously whistling noises when you watch it for more than ten minutes). There is a cable in there so the TV gets channels - important channels like Home & Garden and TLC, which Comcast gave us for free on top of our basic cable for some unknown reason (i.e. it's a conspiracy to make me a TV ADDICT on Saturdays). It's like I can't stop with watching just one show, NO, I MUST SEE WHAT COLOR THEY WILL PAINT THE LIVING ROOM. CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT SEEING THEM TRANSFORM THE SPAAACE.

It's going to be an awesome workout room, if the Bowflex will put itself together. That thing is complicated. I supposed WE'LL have to do that, too. But I did my job - it's clean, it's ready to go.

Earlier today I went around with a friend helping her apartment shop, which was wildly unsuccessful as it seems there are no one-bedrooms or studios open at this time or the manager / office at each complex was closed. On the up side, I got to see parts of the city I've never been to, and understand a little better how to get around in this town. And best of all I saw... the mountain!! The volcanoest volcanic volcano-y thing around, Mt. Baker. Yay. It was... snowy.

house shopping

I can't even remember when we started looking around for houses, 'cause it seems like a long, long, long, long long long, long long, long time ago.

Prices around here are starting to come down on homes, really coming down. So are interest rates. Yay! Things are looking up.

Maybe we'll find a home soon.

cleaned

Cleaning! We cleaned the house today. CLEANED. Boo yah, it looks great. We had people over to play Wii Sports, Scrabble (Josh won both times), eat pizza.

Now I'm inspired to buy some bins and put stuff in them. Because today both closets kind of exploded, and stuff fell out on my head, and I was like, enough! This stuff has been in boxes or stuffed in here since we got married and I haven't unpacked like, anything.

I already got rid of so much stuff - like, clothes, nstuff.


Gonna be a whole new cleaned out world around here. Ahhh-yah.


***Cleaning, me being inspired to? It's 'cause Josh will be gone for the week at a conference. Wahh. I won't have anything to do except, I don't know, this stuff.

i dream of sofa

Being around nice furniture this week made me think, hm, I sit a lot at home. Someday, and I mean, like, way someday, I think I just found the sofa I want.

Microfiber with a chaise. Minus the "celery" color.

**ooo lookat this one, it's huge!!

This is the first time I've looked at furniture - now I know why people shop for new furniture - my in laws couch, man, it's like, so, comfy!

bad fan

We've been having problems at our apartment lately. The new neighbors downstairs like to party it up late at night, and while I can appreciate late night partying, during the week? Really? I mean, really. You find people to party with around here, on a weeknight? Really. But the main problem is when they are not home - which is often. Their very large dog barks and whines and rams himself into the walls non-stop until the owner comes home. I've never heard a dog that's woof carries so well through walls and ceilings. We can hear him over the television, especially the movie "Premonition" (which was so lame. I like, don't even get it but I don't care).

It's been very windy here on the West Coast - ours is rainy windy, California has the opposite problem. I like watching Arnold S. on the TV talk about it. I could listen to him talk about states of emergency all day. Anyway, the wind is slamming tree branches into our walls.

I can handle these outside threats and noises, but my own ceiling fan? (Thank you to Mrs. Grammar for correcting my spelling of ceiling!)
Yes, while me and Josh were sleeping peacefully in our little bed (not to say it's little, it's a queen size, which is pretty decent if you ask me. I mean little in a cute way. Like, "our cute little bed".) the fan just dropped part of itself onto our bed. But it was done stealthily, because neither of us awoke. Josh did wake up sometime later and thought that I had moved my foot next to mine to be nice, so he started rubbing it with his foot, but soon realized my feet are not usually cold, glassy and oblong shaped. He should've known better anyway, since I keep to my side of the bed when I'm sleeping, I'm not a cuddly sleeper. I sprawl.

I now know what those people mean about near-disaster experience in their home. Cheating injury or even death in your own home. Just think if our heads were where our feet were - lucky for us. One of us could've been bonked on the head pretty good.

I wrote my neighbors a note about their dog, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that their next-door neighbor also wrote them a note. Yay. I'm not the only one who's annoyed.

Maybe I will give them a ceiling fan as a welcome to the complex gift...

see the couch

christmas plaid goes well with off-white and purple.

voolay voo couche a way mwa; siswa

I gotta post some pictures of our new couches.
Well, okay, new old couches. Josh's dad got paid to move out here for work and so he moved their old couches with them - and gave them to us. Yay new old couches! Finally, the evil fouton that tried to kill me whenever I looked at it wrong, it has now been donated to our friend and his college roommate. It can have goodtimes over there with beer and video games and whatnot.

We had Bible study tonight with the two young couples, hurray. I had a great time. I made everyone dinner. It went really well. I don't remember the last time I got together with other people my age for dinner and Bible study. Maybe those two have never been combined. We are so doing it again next week.

So now we have really awesome plaid couches, combined with our white with purple leaves weird other couch and chair, and wood end tables with crystal-y type lamps. Heh.

Jesus hit me in the face

The persistent bicycle-riding Jehovah's Witnesses must have stuck the flyer high up in the doorjam - when I unlocked the door this fluttered down and the creepy "The Christ" picture hit me in the face. I was so startled I screeched. Then when I saw who it was supposed to be illustrated on the cover, I started laughing. I'm really glad I wasn't home when they came by.

friendsies

It's so nice to have friends over this weekend. The fun couple came this weekend. We call them the fun couple because they always have fun. They're our wakeboarding buddy couple, boating couple, camping couple, snow sport couple, travel couple, football couple, board game couple... anything fun, they're our fun couple. So of course I know there is more fun to come.

Josh and I cleaned our apartment and it is looking oh-so awesome. I don't know why it is that we only really clean it when someone comes to stay the night - when we have people over (which is most nights a week) we don't clean very much- not the deep cleaning.

Anyway, the guest bedroom looks so cute now. And the table is all set. And Josh cleaned the bathroom and it looks really awesome. He also got the drain unclogged the other day which I think he deserves an award for since we've been trying to get both drains in there unclogged since we moved in.

I love our apartment!!!