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.