Far Too Long...

Ok, I know it has been over 2 months since I last posted which just shows how incredibly busy we have been! I think my last post was shortly before midterms and it has been chaotic ever since. I had midterms for school, followed by a lot of group projects and service learning projects, then it was my 28th birthday, then Henry's 30th birthday, we threw in a trip to California for Thanksgiving and now it is time for finals and Christmas is in 3 weeks! I can't believe how fast the last couple months have gone. My last day of class is tomorrow and then it is finals week! I have 1 paper, 1 project and 1 final to do. Then, I have to arrange to go in and get 18 hours of observation in the classroom over Christmas break for a class I am taking next semester. In addition, I have been EXTREMELY busy at work. I went back to working a bit of overtime in November to try to stay caught up. The Residence Halls close next Saturday so the students will be gone which should make it a bit quieter. Henry is still busy with school but has dropped his credit load a bit this semester. I think it was a good choice - he doesn't get summers or breaks between terms (just 3 weeks at Christmas and 1 week in May) off so he was getting a bit burned out.

The animals are doing great, Henry and I are healthy and the house is doing great! We still need to get our new roof but that will be a spring project. We are getting all geared up to host Christmas at our house for 11 people - I'm looking forward to it! We bought our tree last weekend. We went fake this year - prelit with hinged branches. Basically I pulled it out of the box, put the three pieces together and the branches unfolded themselves. Then I plugged it in and TA -DA! Instant Christmas tree. So happy we went that way. I didn't mind pine needles in my house and the risk of fire hazard when I rented - not so keen on those things when we own. :)

Have to run to bed - I've been running myself on too little sleep the last couple weeks - more posts to come soon - probably after finals!

Best Weekend Ever!

Due to our incredibly busy work and school schedules, Henry and I have been feeling a little burned out and overwhelmed. Our evenings are usually spent doing homework, or being so exhausted we can’t do homework. Then our weekends are spent doing homework and trying to run the household. Even Sirius has been feeling a little neglected lately. So we decided to plan a weekend away for ourselves. Thought we would just get out of town for a couple days and have a little change of pace to help us feel refreshed. We aren’t even halfway through the semester so we thought we’d better do something to nip this in the bud.

However, when we were planning where to go on our mini holiday, we ended up getting so stressed out that it wasn’t even fun anymore! Henry had the brilliant idea of doing a Staycation, where we just stayed at home and relaxed. I was pretty hesitant at first – I didn’t want to get caught up in all the stuff at home – housework, TV, computers, etc. But we came up with a great plan. We got all our homework done in advance, the housework was done enough, and we made a rule of not TV or computers for the weekend. We planned to do things we always say we want to do but never end up doing and going out to a nice dinner.

I have to say it was a resounding success! I had so much comp time that I was able to take Friday off of work so after my 8 am class, I was free for three days! I had a great day hanging out by myself, visiting some friends and playing with Siri. Then at 5 pm, Staycation started! Henry got home and we went out to dinner. Then on Saturday, we went to an energy fair and got a bunch of free stuff to weatherize our home, went to a great, new Thai restaurant for lunch and went to the Museum of the Rockies. We became members there this summer and decided to take advantage of it. We went to go see a planetarium show but ended up getting sidetracked by some interesting lectures that just happened to be going on right after we got there. Then we went to a planetarium show about Mars (very cool!) and strolled around downtown before we went to our nice dinner. Sunday we relaxed all morning and then took Siri to the park and got Pumpkin Pie blizzards from Dairy Queen on the way home. The whole weekend was perfect. We were so relaxed and had such a good time – it was really hard to go to bed Sunday night and know it would be over! We decided we are going to do this at least once a semester, if not more! By staying at home, we saved a lot of money and were so relaxed. Plus, we got to really enjoy some of the benefits of this town we live in!

Here is a picture of the dessert we had on Friday night. It was delicious!


This is a picture of Siri trapped in the garage. I had to go down into the crawl space to clean out the dryer vent and didn't realize Siri had walked out there and then I moved a bunch of stuff. Apparently, it was far too traumatizing for him to walk around the stuff, jump over it, or walk around the car. He refused to move, even when we called him and got really excited and he would just stand there and cry. We eventually moved the recycle bin so he could get back in the house. But not before I snapped a picture to always remind me of what a giant baby he really is.

New Job and Back to School

I have been so busy with my new job I barely have time to think - let alone blog! As you can imagine, opening residence halls at a University would be a very busy time of year, but this year it is quite different due to the number of overflow housing students we have. We received so many more applications than we had rooms for and I have been made the temp housing coordinator. When I say many, I mean a few hundred male students in temporary housing.

It definitely has presented some challenges in the new job. I've been working anywhere from a 9-12 hour day for the last three weeks. I could stay for 12 hours everyday but I am forcing myself to go home just so I don't get burned out. I'm usually exhausted by Wednesday and start going to bed at about 9 or so every night. On the bright side, I have earned enough comp time to get me through the entire semester until I am able to use vacation time in January! (I need to use comp time to go to class or I have unpaid time - and who can afford that!) I earned around 40 hours of comp time since August 10th so I am set until December!

In addition to the crazy work schedule, I started school this week! It's been good so far - I'm really happy with the decisions I made about school and work. I originally was going to take 14 credits (ended up with 8) and I'm SO GLAD!! I really don't think I could handle any more. Also, working on campus was the best decision. It is so convenient and I think if I had to drive across town and look for a parking spot multiple times a day I would pull my hair out. The people I work with are extremely understanding and supportive of me going to school so it is a wonderful environment in which to be. :)

I've been pleasantly surprised to find that I am not even close to being the oldest or only post-Baccalaureate student in my classes. In one of them, I would say post-Bacc students make up at least half the class. Apparently going back to school to get a teaching cert is the thing to do. Plus, I don't look anywhere near older than the traditional college students so it probably wouldn't matter even if I was the only "older" student. One of my new job duties is to supervise our Resident Hall tour program and I gave the tour for about three weeks while all our student workers were gone. Someone asked me if I was a sophomore or a junior while I was giving the tour. After that I started mentioning my high school graduation year in the beginning of my tours. :)

Everything else is going really well. Henry just finished a really hard term in school so he is getting a "break" this term. He is taking one class instead of two but that class is Calculus so it remains to be seen how much of a "break" it really is. Siri is doing wonderfully but is feeling the neglect of the last few weeks. We took him to a pond with a dock a couple weekends ago and he jumped off a dock for the first time ever! We took some videos with our phones that I will try to get posted because they are HILARIOUS!!! At least to me.

We got the hail damage on the car fixed (nice week of biking to work for me) and we have yet to call the roofers but that should be happening soon. I had my ten year high school reunion at the beginning of August and that was a lot of fun. I had a blast seeing people I hadn't seen in a long time. I cannot believe it has been 10 years.

I think that's everything for catch up for now - we're getting very excited for Labor Day weekend - three whole days to do whatever. I can't wait!!

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!

Agility, Surprises and Houseguests!

(I created this post a few days ago and tried to upload the videos but couldn't get them to work. I figured I better get this post up before weeks went by. I'll work on the videos more and getting them posted.)

There has been quite a lot going on that I need to catch up with!

Firstly, Sirius and I spent 8 weeks taking a beginner's agility class. We had a lot of fun learning to do some beginner obstacles and how to get through a course. Henry was able to go to the graduation class with us on May 3rd and was able to take some videos of us going through the course. We were in a metal building at the Fairgrounds during a CRAZY storm so the video is pretty loud.



My hand is filled with hot dogs to give him treats but he would get so excited to get a hot dog piece that he would bite me a lot. He actually made me bleed at one class. He did a great job and we are very proud of him.

Our next adventure involved a surprise trip to California for my dad's 60th birthday. We had actually been discussing this trip for a year and a half, unbeknown to him. We flew in on May 5th, his birthday, and were picked up at the airport by Rob. Then Karen had arranged for a limo to pick up all the kids and spouses first, and get them last.

Here is the video of us surprising Dad:

Everything went so perfectly! After that, we went to an AMAZING restaurant called The Kitchen. It was the best meal I have ever had in my life. Ever. First you come in and are taken to your table and order whatever you want to drink. Then for the next half hour or so, you are free to wander around anywhere you want, including the kitchen! They told us nowhere is off limits. We could go back and watch the chefs preparing the food at anytime and they would explain everything they were doing. It was so fun. It was also amazing how nice the whole staff was - they servers were running around trying to get all the water filled and the chefs were trying to cook and you have a bunch of civilians wandering everywhere. At no point did we ever feel in the way or that we were bothering someone.

After that, they came out and introduced everybody, explained what to expect from the evening, and talked about the menu and where it all came from. Then the insanity started. I can't even say enough about the food. Words don't describe how good it was. The best part, was after the second course, we were raving about how good it was and the server asked if we wanted some more. Turns out, it's all you can eat!!!!! If you want seconds or thirds or fourths of anything, they'll make you another one!! Let me tell you, we all took advantage of that. Especially at the dessert course. It was five courses, with an intermission of sushi and sashimi. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. The whole evening took about four and a half hours. Even the tea they made was the best ever. You would go up and tell you what flavors they wanted and they took these cast iron tea pots and a huge box of fresh herbs and made you herbal tea. Seriously? I didn't even know you could do that. I thought it had to come dried in a tea bag. I could go on for hours about the food but I will try to restrain myself.

We had a few more days in California after that so we got to do some really fun stuff like go to the Cheesecake Factory and spend a day in San Francisco. Henry had been there once before a long time ago but it was really fun to show him around, show him the marathon course, and take him to USF.

Then we got to go see Iron Man 2 at IMAX and have a dinner with the whole family - kids included this time. It was a great way to spend the weekend and fun for us to get out of town for a little while.

In the meantime, the ten days leading up to our trip to CA, we had a little furry houseguest staying with us! Dad and Karen had found a little Brussels Griffon puppy from Absorkee. They were able to get the puppy to us and she stayed with us until we left for California and took her to her permanent home. We had a pretty fun time with little Dali while she was here. It took some getting used to - the only dog I have had is Siri and we definitely know how to take care of big dogs more than little dogs. The little nugget was only four and a half pounds and went with us everywhere. She came to work with me and loved sleeping on our laps. She was a lot of fun but we realized we are a one dog family, and that dog shall be a Labrador.

We had such a busy and fun start to our May! It's nice to be home and getting ready to start summer in Montana. We have a lot of house and yard projects we're trying to get done and Henry is staying busy with school. It's shaping up to be a great summer!