Oh, hail no.

On June 30th, we received the worst hail storm I have ever seen in my life. We had golf ball to softball sized hail and it caused millions of dollars worth of damage just in Bozeman. Not only were the hail stones huge, they were chunks of solid ice. A lot of times the hail around here is pretty crumbly, like snow balls. Not this time.

Here is a picture of the hail I got in our front yard about TWO HOURS after the storm. They were still this size even though they had been melting for TWO HOURS!!!

They were also very cold.

The storm happened at 4 o'clock on my last day of work as an insurance agent (phew!!). The hail smashed out windshields, rear windows and sun roofs, broke taillights, dented every car that was exposed to it and smashed thousands of windows in homes and businesses around town. We were extremely lucky didn't have any windows on our home or car broken.

This is the only visible damage on our house. However, we have damage to the entire west side of the house. We will be getting half a new roof, new fascia, new end caps, new gutters, and more stuff that I didn't understand.

You can see the marks on the side of the house where the hail hit the dusty part of the house. Just brings attention to the fact that I need to power wash the house now that the construction on our street is done. :)

Here is the biggest dent it made in the car.

Some of the smaller dents it made. The car looks like it has chicken pox or something. The hood, roof, trunk, passenger side doors and fenders all look like someone was playing tennis with the car and the car was not playing back.

The car thing is pretty hard for me to take. I bought this car brand new right out of college and worked my butt off to pay it off (at times having a full time job and two part time jobs). I took really good care of it and it had a couple scratches in the paint but not a single dent in it.

We are going to do all the repairs on the house but we are pretty torn on what to do about the car. The truth of the matter is, these are just cosmetic issues and aren't important to how the car runs or anything.

Here are the three options we are deciding among:

1) Do all the repairs on the car. Insurance pays for it and it will help the car hold it's value a little better and it will look nicer. It will also make it much easier to get paid by insurance again if we get another hail storm or there is some other damage to the car. Downside - do we really need to spend all that money for cosmetics?

2) Do no repairs to the car and put the money from the insurance company in a special savings account and put it toward buying our next car that we are planning for in another two years. Downside - could be harder to get any future payments we need from the insurance company we may need. I'll also be driving around an "ugly" car. Also, the hail caused the paint to crack in a couple spots and that could lead to peeling or rust.

3) Do some of the repairs - get the major dents out and fix where the hail caused the paint to crack so we don't end up with a rusty/peeling car. Put the left over money toward the new car in a couple years. Downside of this - by the time they do some of the repairs it might be worth it to just do all of them since so much of the labor will be done already.

I am welcoming feedback so if you have any thoughts on what we should do, I'm very interested to hear it.

June - a month of celebration at our house!

June was a big month for the Bitzes. Henry and I celebrated our second anniversary on June 7th. It fell on a Monday this year so we both took the day off and had a long weekend to spend together. We kept it pretty low key since the rest of our life was in a bit of turmoil and spent a quiet weekend at home and went out to a nice dinner.

We tried to take a family portrait to commemorate the day. Please ignore my red eyes and the annoyed looks on the dog and cat's faces. I think there was a tennis ball that Siri was dying to get to.

Also in June, we celebrated Siri's fifth birthday! I can't believe it has been five years since that little guy came into my life. He is the best dog ever to walk the earth.

Here he is the first day I met him. He was five days old and weighed 16 ounces.

Siri was born weighing 14 ounces. He was one of 11 in the litter and the only surviving black puppy. After the puppies were born, Siri's mom got pretty sick and wasn't producing milk. She also got some pretty bad mastitis and ended up only having four nipples for 11 puppies. Unfortunately, four of the puppies died, including Siri's sister, the other black puppy. I had originally requested any black female puppy born in the litter (the mom was yellow and the dad was chocolate so there was only going to be one ore two) but the breeder somehow thought I wanted a black male so she didn't call when the other puppy died. She felt pretty bad when she realized what happened and told me I could pick any other puppy or I could take the black male. I ended up taking Siri and it was one of the best decisions of my life.

I can't imagine having a different dog than him and he wouldn't have been as happy in any other home. Siri was the runt of the litter and the breeder spent a lot of time hand feeding him and giving him special care. That has clearly shaped his personality since he believes that he should always be at the center of whatever is happening and he is clearly the most important thing in the room. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I also believe he should be at the center of everything is mostly always the most important thing in the room.

Here is the little tyke five years later...

He is the little black dot in the middle of the water.

We celebrated his special day with a trip to the park (above) and some new toys and special doggy treats from a local doggy bakery.

His treats are shaped like a cupcake and martini. I decided I would love to celebrate my birthday with cupcakes and cocktails so I was sure Siri would, too.

Thank you Henry for two wonderful years of marriage and thank you Siri for five wonderful years of life! Because of the two of you, June is my favorite month!

Where has the time gone...

It seems like just the other day we had our trip to California and SOOO much has changed since then! We have had a very busy and exciting last few months. I'm going to break this up into posts by topics/events so I don't end up with a hugely long post.

So first things first - my new big life changes. I had been unhappy at my job for quite awhile. I did not find insurance fulfilling or stimulating but haven't been able to figure out exactly what I want to do for the last several years (since I graduated college). Also, since we bought our house, it is not really an option to quit my job and "find myself" since we need a certain amount of steady income coming in.

I've spent some time researching things I've thought I'd be interested in - mostly copy editing and culinary school. Somehow, I could never quite fully commit to either of those options. The more I learned about copy editing, the more I realized it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do and while I would go to culinary school in a heartbeat, I don't actually want to work restaurant hours. Especially with the prospect of starting a family in the next few years, being a chef is not my first choice for a career while having little babies. Henry would always ask me, "if you could do ANYTHING, and money was no object, what would you do?" My answer would always end up being, "I would read books and talk about them" which is basically what I did for four years in college. It was awesome.

Shortly after we got home from California, there was the "perfect storm" of negative things that happened at my job. I won't go into the details of it, because I am trying to move on from the negativity I felt, but I will say I don't think I have cried so hard since my dad threw me in the car and forced me to go to college. (Thanks, by the way.) After a talk with Henry that lasted multiple hours, I finally realized the best way for me to do what I wanted - read books and talk about them - was to go back to my original career goal of being an English teacher. Being able to correct people's grammar and spelling is just an added bonus for me.

So it was decided! Well, after a few weeks of working VERY hard to bring Henry around to the idea. He wasn't so keen on me going back to school while he is still in school. I must admit, it will be a challenge for our little family, but I think it will be completely worth it. He was hesitant at first but is now being incredibly supportive. We think it will be fun having both of us in school - I'm imagining a wintry day with our books and papers spread across a table at the library.

After doing a fair bit of research, we decided the best option was for me to attend Montana State University here in Bozeman. Since I already have my B.A., I am enrolled as a non - degree seeking graduate student, meaning I will just be taking the coursework to get my Montana teacher's license. I decided to take three semesters rather than two to complete the coursework. Two semesters would have been possible but extremely difficult. After I complete the coursework, I will do my semester of student teaching and be ready to go! Then the next challenge will be finding a job as an English teacher in a town with only one high school....we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

The next challenge was deciding what to do about a job. I needed a job that would be flexible with a school schedule and still allow me to work forty hours a week. Also, we really wanted to avoid having me take a waitress job or something that could have me working nights and weekends so that I would be able to see my husband every now and then. Through the course of my research, I learned that if you are an employee of MSU, they happen to pay a certain amount of tuition for you!! Woo hoo!!! There just happened to be an opening that I thought I would be a good fit for and they agreed! I made it through the fairly stringent hiring process and now work at MSU as a program coordinator for the Residence Life department. To sum up the job in a very small nutshell, I help coordinate student's housing and administer stuff. I've only been there about two weeks so I am still learning exactly what it is I do and so far I am really enjoying it. I enjoy doing something new and the people I work with are very nice. The culture at MSU is really nice too - so many employees there are going to school and they are so supportive of people furthering their education and finding careers that truly make you happy. I love it. It's such a positive environment and I've already received such wonderful feedback. I feel appreciated and that was not the case at my last job. They actually told me that in the first three days, I had learned and taken on what they expected me to do in two weeks. That made me feel good.

So that is the major life change we have had in the last two months! I start school on August 30th and I'm really looking forward to continuing my new adventure. I feel so much happier already and can't wait to see what the future holds!