PARTY!!!!!! but not really

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

since I haven't really had much to say recently and been completely neglecting my blog i thought i would wish everyone a happy new year from Steven and I. I liked the saying on the picture but for irony's sake we will pretend that it is just carbonated grape juice chilling in the bucket! Have fun everyone and be safe! there are alot of crazy people out tonight. 

BEACH!

Thursday - Nov 11th

           On Veterans day, Steven got the day off so we decided to make something of it and go to the beach with Charlie, it was alot of fun, and we are pretty sure it was his first time lol. he didn't know what to make of the water, I really wish i had gotten a video of his reaction it was priceless. The water is a little cold now so we spent most of the time just walking to the pier and back, (with my shoes off of course) . Steven and i also took turns running with Charlie, we found out he really likes to run! alot. by the time we got back in the car he was dead tired and asleep within about 5 min, and not to break tradition we went to Dairy Queen and got blizzards, we usually get ice cream every time we go to the beach. It was an awesome way to top off a day off with awesome weather, I didn't get any good pics of this but when we got back the dog also got a bath, it was pretty funny. 

Birthday Party!

Nov 9th 2010


Tuesday night we went to the USMC Birthday Ball. This year commemorates the 235th birthday since the corps was founded in 1775 in Tun Tavern (a bar of all places). Its a pretty big thing each year, well for us ladies anyway, it gives us all a chance to dress up and get pretty, and the guys to wear their dress blues. They have a nice ceremony with a guest of honor and a speech, with cake and dinner, and of course dancing :) here are a couple pics, they had the lights dimmed so it was a little hard to get to many good ones. 

CHARLIE!

All right, I guess some of you have been wanting to know about our new dog, His name is Charlie and he is a beagle, we got him from the Buddy Center in Castle Rock, where he was transfered from the Dumb Friends League in Denver. For some reason he was on the list of dogs that had been there the longest.. which I don't understand he is a pretty great dog, we haven't had any real problems with him at all! well except he thinks he is allowed to lay on my new black couch and use our little throw pillows like they were meant for him, but you can't blame him there, I just put a blanket on the spot he likes to lay, And I am convinced that he likes Steven more than me :P .

Pretty much before we got married I have been bugging Steven about getting a puppy, Now that we finally have a house where we are allowed dogs, they tell us no puppies, grrr. but it makes it a little easier, no potty training needed whew! Charlie is around 8 years old, ya he is kinda an old dog, but sometimes he seems old and sometimes he has more energy than he knows what to do with. He is perfect for us, he doesn't bark or whine, he likes to play, and will go on walks with me :)

He even made the whole drive back from NC just fine, although he found some pretty interesting ways to sleep... and he did manage to get in to our snack food and eat a whole bag of beef jerky that mad him smell great let me tell ya. haha.
I am working on training him better now, all he knows at the moment is how to beg, which is pretty darn cute, but he needs to learn to not beg, and maybe sit, stay, lay down,... you know the basics. which might take a while, he is lacking in the smarts area...

Road Trip

OCT 25th - ...... 

Now that we have covered vacation its time to go home! well as much as North Carolina can be considered home anyway. now that we have gotten settled in it feels a little more like home. As for now wherever Steven takes me will be my home. 

Day 1 - 

     The plan was to start our drive back to NC on Monday morning whenever we woke up, and packed the car, because Steven decided to buy a new truck on our trip we ended up renting a trailer from U-Haul to tow my Jeep back behind the Truck, so we had plenty of space to just pack the Jeep full of stuff and not worry about room in the truck, that made me happy :). Any way for some reason i felt the need to pack on Sunday night after we got back to my parents house which was pretty late. And being the nice husband that Steven is he packed up all my stuff (i have alot of stuff) instead of going to bed early. I think that was a good feeling on my part because Monday morning was COLD!!! and frosty, no complaints though :) its a nice change from the warm sunny winters they have out here in NC. 

Day 2 - 

        Surprisingly we woke up pretty early and were on the road by about 8 am. We had a great start and the drive was pretty nice too. (at least for me, Steven drove the whole way) He didn't complain either. Well until we got closer to the   Missouri line.. when Steven decided to tell me that he was still on vacation and he was going to do what he wanted.. and he wanted to go to Nauvoo.. First of all i had no idea what Nauvoo was and it was about 3 hours out of the way and it was already getting dark outside. So after my constant grumpiness for about an hour, we... (he) decided to stop for the night a little ways out of Kansas City and finish the drive to Nauvoo in the morning :) 

So we drove the next 2 hours to Nauvoo Tuesday morning and i actually ended up enjoying it quite a bit. Most of you already know what it is and what not, but for the very few of you who don't, its an old historical town just across the Missouri State line where the LDS settled after fleeing from the mob people who wanted to kill them. The town was pretty neat, they show you how they made bricks, food, bread, how they lived, how they made the wagons and the blacksmith shop, and we even got to see the home of the man who started brownings firearms. and where he made his first guns. 

It would have been nice to stay a little longer than just a couple hours but it was really cold and windy that day and we needed to get back on the road. So we got back on the road and crossed a few more state lines, and i of course had to insist Steven try to slow down at least a little so i can get  pictures haha. I got some pics but they aren't the best, we decided to stop for our second night in a small town Columbus Indiana, because we didn't want to stay in Kentucky like last time. for some reason every motel we passed in Kentucky looked gross. 

Day 3- 

     Yay! its day 3 only one more days drive and we should make it home by tonight! well maybe... not to far out of Columbus, I was on the phone with my mom but Steven noticed a funny noise from his back tires and someone in another car pointing at the trailer.. uh oh.. We pulled off on to an off ramp and found out that our back tire on the trailer had been completely shredded. So Steven spent the next half hour on the phone talking to some lady with U-Haul who seemed to know absolutely nothing. Finally they got a man to come and bring us a replacement tire, we would have fixed it ourselves but they don't have spare tires on their trailers.. maybe something they should learn in the future? and back on the road again! It only took about an hour and a half off our drive time. After a few gas/bathroom/food stops we finally made it to North Carolina yay! sadly my picure didn't turn out to well because it was raining. But we did make it home in only 3 days at about 10:30 PM. at which point i was ready to just crawl in bed but Steven was running off caffeine and candy, so he insisted on taking my Jeep off the trailer that night and unloading some of our stuff, (not all of it that would take forever). 

The Road signs are in order. we went thru Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and finally North Carolina 

Family

I'm trying to keep the past month in order so unfortunately I am still in the month of October and trying to catch up on the Colorado trip.
October  13-24th
The rest of our trip after Glenwood we spent with family. The majority of the time we spent at Mama Jo's house, aka Steven's mom. Thanks for putting us up! We really enjoyed our visit, we got to spend time with most of the family and all of the immediate family, Mom and Kirk, Dad,  Brian and Mellissa, Becky and Andrew, April and Dan, Mikel, Greg, Sara, David, and Savanna. Along with all our nieces and nephews. Annika, Sharlynne, Taren, Caden,Adaiah, Denver, and Elizabeth. Stevens Grandparents even came down from Idaho to see him, it was a really nice time.
 During that Time we also went to Chucky Cheese with Stevens Dad and the family, Steven got addicted to a maze game and was pretty much the only game he played the whole time we were there, after everyone turned in their tickets we had over 3,000 tickets, which was enough to get all the kids something that they wanted.
A couple days before we left, we took a trip to the Flea Market and walked around, it was a new experience for me because all of these years living in Co and i had never been to the flea market. It was fun we got to spend more time with family and look around at some of the neat things they have there.
Oh and I cant forget to mention the dinner we went to with Stevens Dad and brother Mikel, we went to Landry's seafood restaurant where they have an endless crab legs day. The funny thing is when Steven and his brothers get together it turns more in to competition so during dinner they were racing to see who could eat the most, In the end they ended up eating about 7 lbs each! thats alot of Crab.
Finally the Last Sunday in Co we spent at Stevens Dad's house, we had a mini football party with a bunch of food and family. After all the disappointment of the game, we still had a pretty good time. We didn't let the Broncos horrible game plan ruin our last day with the fam. I was mostly doing homework during the game so it didn't bother me much, but i did manage to fit a pie or two in there, the only sad thing from the trip is that my pies didn't cool off in time to eat before Brian and the families started going back home : ( .  

The pictures are of family from the trip not necessarily in any order, the picture in the top right with Becky, April, Sara and David, is a picture of them making this blog for me :) . The bottom right picture is one of my favorites because it really does give that family like feeling, they were all singing along as Mama Jo played the piano before church on Sunday morning.

Glenwood

OCT 10th - 12th 

Most of you already know and probably already saw some of our pictures, but i will post some anyway since it is the blogger thing to do.

 On our trip back to CO Steven and I went up to Glenwood to have a mini vacation/ never really got a honey moon, before all the fun of visiting family started. We stayed 2 nights at The Glenwood Suites, which was really nice, i could get used to that lol. While we were up there we went to the Glenwood caverns at the top of a mountain and did the cave tour, rode the gondola thing, rode on the Alpine Slide, went to the restaurant, and Steven was brave enough to even ride the swing over the side of the mountain, similar to the swing over the Royal Gorge but a little smaller. Then we took a nice relaxing dip in the hot springs and had alot of fun playing with the water settings on his camera. We got a bunch of good pics from the mountains and what not, it was really hard to pick which ones to share. 

HOMECOMING!

So after hanging out by myself bored out of my mind, i finally found out that Stevens unit was to come home on September 30th, and all of a sudden I was completely overwhelmed. I had an entire to-do list that could probably keep me busy for a month yet alone get done, in a week and a couple days before the Mr gets back. I had tons and tons of homework, that just never ends, but i had it in my head that i wanted to get ahead on my homework so when he came home i wouldn't have to worry about it, then i started thinking about what i was going to feed him when he got back, and where he wanted me to put his laundry and what side of the closet he would want, and AHHH! any way for about the next 3 days i was running around like a crazy person trying to get things done, and it seemed that it wasn't working to well.
 And then... well i noticed that it was starting to rain outside, you know the kind of weather that is really gloomy and dark and wet, that makes you want to just curl up in your blankets all day and do nothing? well thats what happened, for a couple hours any way. The next few days, still raining, it just didn't seem to want to stop i got some stuff done but the weather was just damping my mood, so i got the house clean, and all the laundry done... well most of it anyway ;) but that homework was just not working for me haha.
 So about 2 or three days before Steven came home we will say the 28th or so... that was a Tuesday, it started to rain a little harder not to bad though... until Tuesday night, Then it got really windy and a whole lot of rain.. i thought it was alot anyway, i learned what alot meant later. 
Wednesday the 29- I finally learned that that horrible rain and wind Tuesday night was the beginning of Tropical Strom Nicole. I made plans to go out Wed night with a couple friends for dinner to calm our nerves and hopefully make the time go by a little faster. All three of us were expecting our men to come home the next day and were definitely going a little nuts by ourselves. Dinner was good, we ate, and laughed and looked up how long this horrible rain was going to stick around, it said online at the weather service that the worst of the storm would be Wed night, and would be passed over us and sunny by about 12-2 pm on Thursday.. Whew.. that made me feel better the plan as of then was that the plane was going to land at about 5 pm Thursday. After dinner we went to Walmart because none of us wanted to go home yet, and what was the point if we weren't going to be able to sleep anyway we were all to excited!... we walked around and of course were very loud and giggly turning lots of heads, and thought it would be fun and a little ironic, to get an umbrella haha. any way we went home, and my friend dropped me off back home because i didn't have a car at the time, and amazingly i went to bed and slept like a ROCK. untill about 4 am at least.
Thursday- So much for the storm blowing over.. I woke up really early to the sound of rain pounding my bedroom window, and actually seeing the wind shaking the picture frames on my wall. You remember how i told you in my last post how there was a forest in my back yard? scratch that it is now a river in my back yard, and in my front yard, and in the streets. I was still going to stay positive though, this storm was going to pass over us.. well maybe. It ended up raining for about 2 more days, amazingly the day went pretty fast. untill about 5 Oclock, the time had been changed for their homecoming to 6. and i was going frantic, there was no way this little cheap rental car was going to make it through the lake in the street in front of our house, and all the way down the steet. So i waited. it was amazing how hard it was raining, thats when i learned what alot of rain was. It was coming in waves so i waited for the rain to stop, and right when it started back up i zoomed down the street so i could catch it while the water was half drained and not filling back up. (i probably over reacted a little bit)... (more like alot). I looked online later and found this about the tropical storm "In North Carolina, Wilmington received 22.54 inches of rain, the most it had received for a five-day period since 1871. Kinston recorded 15 inches. Many eastern North Carolina communities experienced flooding that continued on October 2"  but i made it on base... now for me to meet my hubby finally! I called my friend i went to dinner with when i got there and she was on her way too, then suddenly freaking out on the phone because she just saw their plane land... and relief is what i felt.. so happy they have landed and all i had to do was wait another hour for them to get their bags and such. NOT,  we sat around in a building on base, just us wives and family talking and waiting for get this.. 3 Hours! it took them 3 whole hours to get off the plane, get the bags loaded and return their guns. 

Finally at about 9 ish, the buses got here and we saw the first Marine walk through the doors, excitement and chaos everywhere it was loud and the energy in the room was crazy. so i stood there looking and waiting for Steven.... I pointed out one of the guys we were waiting for to my friend and then spotted another person i knew and still... no steven.. it was starting to quiet down when my friend asked me "Amanda where is your husband?" i was getting a little worried at that point, and then.. yay! he was home :) and i was happy lol. thanks to a really great friend and awesome photographer Jeri Jo , she got some great shots of not just us but alot of other homecoming couples :) 

The very first UPDATE!!!!!!!!!!!

alright, so i guess its time to update this blog. I guess ill start it where all the fun began :) 


Sept 16th - (seems forever ago doesn't it?) This is when i consider all the fun began, my mom and I flew out from Colorado to the very humid North Carolina to find us a new Home, at this point all I knew was that Steven would be coming home anytime between the 26th of September to the 1st of October, which was a little nerve racking, not having a time or even a day. So we spent most of the day that Thursday on the plane with about an hour layover in Charlotte, the flight wasn't bad it really does go by faster if you have someone with you! we looked around at a few places after we got settled in, but didn't find anything we liked until Friday, i had stayed up really late online looking for places that were both affordable and not really gross with a bunch of bugs and mold, mold is the biggest problem out there/here. its so humid that it is nearly impossible to find a place that doesn't have any. Any way we found a place, i pretty much fell in love with it the second we drove up, guess what color it is... you guessed it PINK! haha, It is a 2 bed 2 bath duplex with a garage and a really nice kitchen and a pretty spacious living room too. we have a small back yard but it isn't fenced in. and we practically have a forest in the back yard. I'm sorry i don't have any pictures yet, i hadn't really had the time to take pictures but i'm sure i will when we get back. 
Our rental company is Town and Country, and let me just tell you now, I do NOT like them at all, they were very friendly when we went to look around but when we found a place their face suddenly changed from "i'm nice and will do anything you need" to "I don't care who you are or where your living all i want is your money and thats it" . It took alot of working with them to be able to move in without Steven. Because Steven is the Fishy who makes the money in our little family they wanted documents of his LES which is pretty much a statement that says who he is getting paid from etc. And of course I didn't have that, I also didn't have power of attorney so i couldn't sign his name on the lease or any papers or try to find his LES to give to them. And with that they pretty much said no sorry, you cant move in. After arguing and playing phone tag with them for an entire day, I finally got them to let me in, but with a catch, they had me pay double the security deposit, AND, 2 months rent in advance along with the pro-rated rent for the month, all up front. YUCK!. oh and get this, they wouldn't accept, checks or credit/debit cards , or cash... huh? so i had to either get a cashiers check or money order in the next day, because it was a Friday, and they wanted the money on Saturday, but thats not so hard right? wrong again, we bank with Wells Fargo, and they don't have any of those our in north Carolina, so our best bet was to take a trip down to the next town over and find a Wachovia bank,(wells fargo bought them out a couple years ago). when i got there they told us that they could do it , but then it took about 45 min for them to figure out how to get me a cashiers check from my account because... dun dun dun.... North Carolina is the very last state to be transfered from Wachovia to Wells Fargo so once again we hit another speed bump but finally got it all figured out, it just took, a very long time and a whole lot of driving around. Thank goodness for rental cars right? I don't know if i would have been able to do all of that and keep my head on straight if my Mom wasn't with me, she couldn't do much because all the papers and what not are in my name but she was my support system and kept me from going crazy! and to think I managed to get all of that done in about 3 days, whew!  
now for the more relaxing. kinda.
Saturday- My mom and i woke up bright and early and signed the lease at about 10 am. we then managed to move all of our stuff in a storage unit to the new house by ourselves except a book shelf and a Christmas tree, and get this, we moved it all in a little PT Cruiser haha. it took about 10 trips but we got it all! :) then we went shopping for some furniture. I ended up getting a Queen Size mattress with Box Springs for only $199 !, granted it isn't a pillow top or anything fancy , it is comfortable though, and bran spanking new, the reason it is so cheap is because it is a crazy quilt mattress, it is half mattress material and the other half is funny patterned quilt looking material. but who cares, you cover it in sheets and blankets anyway. And i got a nice black futon for the same price, they were delivered the next Monday. After shopping i took my mom to the beach, it wouldn't be fare to drag here all the way out there just to help me move and not show here the beach when its only 25 min away. She really had fun, we collected seashells and ended up getting soaked, we weren't wearing proper beach attire, oops. 
Sunday- I took my mom to the airport in the morning, and started unpacking all the boxes we moved the previous day, that took most of the day. 
The next week or so was pretty boring, i spent my time home alone unpacking, cleaning, laundry, homework, laundry, playing with the stray cat by our house, and yet more laundry, who knew that Steven and i combined had so many clothes and linens, all of which smelled pretty funny after being in a storage unit for 8 months. 

Little fishys in a BIG pond

I decided to join the realm of bloggers...more specifically the little pond that includes my sisters in law in keeping family informed via the world of internet.  Instead of being annoyed and hounding them on their sites for not updating their sites I will come and update my own site or fear the wrath of the sisters in law.