We are all moved in to our house! We had some amazing friends come help us and we got the whole thing done in three hours. Now comes the unpacking which is taking much longer. We got the blinds for our windows on Wednesday which was amazing because I really don't enjoy people being able to see EVERYTHING we are doing in our house. They look wonderful. I took a few days off work to get unpacked and somewhat settled. I am all moved into the kitchen and our master bathroom. I am still working on the bedroom and living room. It is a bit of a challenge getting everything settled - some of the furniture we had before was left over from post college days or bachelorhood and was not deemed worthy enough to be moved to the new house. This means Henry doesn't have a dresser and we don't have any bookcases. This means there are clothes and books everywhere. When the chaos gets to be too much, I just look at my kitchen that is neat and clean.

The other downside is the lack of fence and grass. We actually have to pay attention to Siri when he goes outside and he gets super muddy and we have to wipe off his feet every time he goes outside. Poor Siri is spending quite a bit of time inside now. :(

Last but not least, we don't have the internet hooked up yet. I hate Qwest. It would take hours to post all the bull they have put us through. Since we moved into a developing sub division, it is taking them forever to get internet to our house. I'm not really sure why, since everything is in place - we can see it in our yard and in all the empty lots on our street and across it. I have seen their trucks driving slowly up and down our street and stopping and staring at our house but no one ever gets out and does any work. We are currently pilfering some wireless internet from an unknown neighbor which means by blog posts may be sporadic and I have to Facebook from my Blackberry.

All in all, it is amazing to actually own our own home. I stand in the house and look around and can't believe we finally did it and all this is ours.
Once everything is unpacked and organized, I will post pictures. Hmm...where is the camera?

The Countdown...

Only three more days to go until we are the proud owner of a dishwasher!!!! And a house. But mostly the dishwasher. Four years of doing dishes by hand...





Here it is! The house we are moving into on Valentine's Day!

5 Questions About Me

Thank you Sara for getting me back into my blog by giving me five questions to answer! It is a nice break - we are currently working on getting our house all packed up and cleaned and ready to move next weekend!

1) How did you and Henry meet?
Henry was my bank teller. He worked at my bank for almost five years. I was not a fan of electronic banking so I would go every two weeks to deposit my paycheck. We also had a couple mutual friends. I thought he was cute but I always said I wouldn't go out with someone who knew my bank balance. I thought it was weird. Halloween weekend of 2005, we ran into each other downtown. I was in normal clothes and he was dressed as a pirate - full beard and everything. I had no idea who he was when he started talking to me. It was a darn good thing we ran into each other because he was about to put in his notice at the bank and I wouldn't have seen him anymore! We ended up hanging out all night and started dating a few days later. We dated for about 6 months and then broke up. Then he called me about 9 months later saying he needed to buy some insurance and the rest is history! My favorite part of the story - Henry worked with this lady who didn't think Henry was dating the right kind of girls. She pointed at me and said he needed to marry a girl like me. (This was before we ever dated.) It was pretty funny when he went back to the bank a few years later and he told her he married that girl!

2)How did Henry propose?
Henry proposed on July 15, 2007 after I had come home from a nine mile training run. It was very hot and I was very gross. We had seen the ring the day before at the mall but decided not to get it and we weren't ready to get married. While I was out running, he went and got the ring. When I came home, I went and was looking at the ring online when he came up behind me and asked if it looked better in person and then put the ring in front of me. Then he spun my computer chair around and got down on one knee and proposed. It was very romantic.

3)What is the most exciting thing about buying your first home?
Everything. We have been obsessed with this since before we got married but we took it to another level once we got back from our honeymoon. I am so excited that this house is brand new and perfectly clean. I have been living in old houses for a long time and I am ready to have a new clean house with energy efficiency. I am really excited to see our first power bill. We currently live in a home with no insulation anywhere and really old windows and appliances. And yes, it is winter in Montana. Our last power bill was $300. I am really excited for my new kitchen. It has amazing counter space, granite counter tops, beautiful cabinetry and hardwood floors. I am excited for being able to open the blinds during the winter because we won't have frost on the inside of our windows. I am really excited for the sense of ownership and responsibility. I cannot wait to landscape my yard. I have always wanted to do stuff like that but have never wanted to do it for someone else. I can't think of anything I am not excited about!

4)) Since you are new to blogging, are there any topics that you and Henry decided would be off limits on the blog?
We actually never discussed it. Henry is pretty private and I have a pretty good idea about most things he wouldn't want me to talk about. Definitely our personal life, any issues we are working through, etc. I guess my rule of thumb is, if I wouldn't say it at a dinner party, I shouldn't put it in the blog

5) How would you spend your ideal day?
I think I would need an ideal week. There are so many ways I like to spend my days depending on my mood. One day of the week should be either rainy or snowy and I would snuggle up on the couch and watch movies, read and drink cocoa. The rest of the week should be summery -but not too hot - 75-80 degrees is perfect for me. I would spend one day just puttering in the new house and getting everything organized. One day would be spent working in the yard. One day would be spent hiking with the dog. One day Henry and I would take the dog to a lake and swim around and be goofy. One day would be spent watching someone else clean my house and do my laundry. :) And of course, during all these days, I would never get tired so I could get all those things accomplished!

Thanks for the great questions Sara! These let me relive some great memories and made me think!

Ninja Surprise

This morning I went to breakfast with my friend Michelle. She is home for Christmas break from grad school in Syracuse - art history and museum studies. We went to one of my favorite breakfast places - Nova Cafe. It is this great local cafe that uses local ingredients, organic goods and makes a lot of its food gluten free, for those of you allergic to gluten. I had the huckleberry cream cheese filled french toast with a side of fruit. It was delicious.

Why am I talking about breakfast when the title of this post clearly led you to believe it was going to be a story about me being attacked by ninjas? Keep reading.

Nova has a bamboo plant on every table. I was staring at the one at our booth, and through my very sleepy haze, realized there was something not quite right about ours. See photo:

There was a ninja in our bamboo plant! It pretty much made my day. How often does this happen? I will tell you! Once! And that is all! Sorry the picture is a little blurry - I took this with my phone. Let me tell you, that restaurant is lucky all I did was take a picture and didn't just grab the whole thing and go running out of there. A house is not a home without a bamboo dwelling ninja.

I urge all of you to keep an eye out for small ninjas hiding places - and if any of you know how to keep a bamboo plant alive in Montana, let me know - we killed ours. And if you ever come to Bozeman, go to Nova - the food is great and so is the decor. :)

Wii would like to play...

Last night, Henry and I had several of our friends over to experience the joy of the Wii. We got our Wii as a wedding present and have been having a blast with it. Henry got Rockband for Christmas and we figured this was a great opportunity to watch our friends turn into Rockstars.

The evening started with a healthy dose of Rockband.

I love the look of extreme concentration on Allie's face.

We then moved on to the always exciting Mario Kart. It was great watching the different styles of driving. Some people moved their whole bodies with the wheels (Allie), while others went with the "less is more" approach and barely turned the wheels at all (Jim).

Tennis followed, and at this point it got a little dangerous. Four people standing in a row and swinging rackets...let's just say we didn't bring out the good crystal.

We ended the night with some boxing, which was hilarious.

I think we will have a real life rematch in the backyard.

All in all, Henry and I had a great time and loved having our friends over to play. It brought out the little kid in everyone and it was great to see inhibitions being lowered. I was pleasantly surprised with how many people were willing to sing with Rockband!

We are definitely going to do it again but I think next time we will carry the theme further. We'll have Nintendo inspired food (Stuffed mushrooms, chocolate coins, Princess Peach Cobbler) and costumes will be encouraged. Perhaps a Halloween party next year.....

This blogging situation is harder than it looks...

So after becoming a certified blog stalker, I decided it was about time I started one myself - and what better time than the start of a new year! It is a great way to keep up with what is going on in people's lives and an easy way to update many people about our day to day life. I struggled for awhile because I wasn't sure our day to day life is really that interesting so this might be the most boring blog ever. However, starting a blog is much easier said than done. I never realized how much went in to setting up even simple pages. I have no idea how some people get theirs so fancy (Sara McG). Please bear with me as I go through the growing pains of figuring this all out.

Henry and I just had our first holiday season as newlyweds and it was wonderful. We had a very simple and quiet Christmas, just the two of us.

This is a picture of our very small tree with a very large strand of lights.

We had a great long Christmas weekend and played a lot of Rockband (Henry's Christmas present) and just relaxed and rejuvenated. This is a very busy time of year in my industry (Health Insurance) and work can be really intense and stressful. It was great to have that time to ourselves and make some great memories of our first Christmas together.

We then worked a strenuous three day week and now we have another four day weekend for New Year. For New Year's Eve, we went to our friends Dave and Sara's house and had a really great time playing games and staying up late.

We are looking forward to the rest of our long weekend - it will involve lots of housecleaning, some friends coming over, and our first moving/packing project.

Moving you say? Yes, we are planning on moving sometime in the first half of this year. We are planning on buying a house (Hooray!) and we hope to being doing it in the next 3-5 months. So, why are we packing already? Well, for those of you who know me well, this isn't exactly a surprising answer. I tend to get a little stressed/overwhelmed/bitchy when it comes to big projects like moving. We have somehow managed to accumulate rooms full of stuff and I have no idea where it all came from (actually, our wedding created most of it and there are boxes we still haven't unpacked from our last move in 2007). For those of you who know my husband, he tends to be pretty relaxed and easy going. Doing huge house projects is not exactly his cup of tea. So, in the interest of both our sanities, we have divided our house and yard into several zones to tackle one at a time. We will go through our house and do one zone each weekend (clean, organize, get rid of most of it) in the hopes that when it is actually time to move, I will not turn into a crazy woman. (I HATE moving.) So we are starting this weekend with the linen closet. Our thought is to start small and work our way up to the big projects (dirty, scary, smelly basement and guest room/everything from our wedding room).

Look forward to more updates on our cleaning and packing! (I warned you this might not be an interesting blog!)

That's all for now - thanks for reading this and if you have any tips on how to make the blog page cool, I welcome comments. Or you can come to my house and just do it for me. :)