Settling Into a New Ward

Well, with the new house comes a new ward.  Our ward wasted no time getting us in to meet with the appropriate leaders and giving us callings.  We had a tithing settlement, then got called in to meet with a member of the Bishopric, then one with the Elders Quorum, and I got stopped in the hall and asked to teach the 3rd hour lesson the following week.  Now that they've done the sustaining, I can tell you that Elissa got called as a Primary teacher and I was called as a teacher for the 15-18yr old sunday school class (don't worry, there were only 6 kids this last week).  Elissa even got a visiting teaching assignment.

Church isn't the only thing that's been going on lately -- this last weekend we tried waiting outside a store for a deal for the first time.  Tiff's Treats (a local treat delivery company) was selling cookies for more than a 50% discount and we thought it would be fun to go.  We waited in line for quite a while but unfortunately we hadn't come soon enough because we had to go for tithing settlement before we got cookies.  We're pretty sure we were the first to give up on it.

Elissa had a great idea this year for Christmas for us to take Christmas money and plan some exciting dates for the upcoming year with it.  We split 6 months each and we're both really excited about them (but we can't share any details because Elissa doesn't know what I've planned and I don't know what she's planned).

Thanks everyone for reading our blog, and we hope you have a great Christmas!

Setting Up House

We have been busy setting up our new house. Yesterday we probably put 20 boxes out in recycling. It is good that most of our things are out of boxes now so we can find things again. We only have a couple more rooms to go, and we are completely unpacked! Also,  as an early Christmas present, my mom helped me get together the materials to make throw pillows for our new couches. I finally got all the pillows put together. They help coordinate our new valences and our couch and the whole room. You can't see it all, but here is a picture of our new pillows on our new couches.

We also started setting up for Christmas this week, as we started to empty our boxes. We have our Christmas tree all set up along with some other Christmas decorations!

Thanksgiving

Today was Thanksgiving, but before we talk about the joys of actual Thanksgiving, I have to talk about going to the grocery store the night before Thanksgiving because it was pretty crazy!

I'm not sure if any of you have ever been to the grocery store the night before Thanksgiving, but it is like a crazy mad house. First, we decided to go to a new grocery store that is closer to our new house. Since it was dark and we had never been there before, it was already hard to find. Once we got to the store, we  had to search for a parking spot and had to wait to get a cart because almost every cart was in use. Once we got inside we had to tread carefully around throngs of people. It was interesting because people that we started in the dairy section with were just about ready for check out at the same time, even though we didn't coordinate or follow each other around. It was basically crazy.  Fortunately, the store had everything super stocked so there were no fights over the last can of pumpkin or the last box of stuffing mix. Though it was a mad house inside, the store clearly did everything they could to make it a pleasant experience. Next year though, I'm just going to the store a week!

Today, I cooked a turkey for the first time. It was only a boned turkey breast (with extra meat), and I'm not sure I've graduated to a new grade. I put it in the oven and it cooked and cooked and cooked. It got two hours in and I was worried that I put it in upside down! After a lot of struggle, I got it turned over, but I'll do better next time. In fact, next time, maybe I'll just buy  boneless Turkey breast for Daniel and I. It seems a lot easier than a bone in chunk of turkey. (Or I could just buy a frozen pizza!) Everything else went pretty smoothly though. We have enough left overs for several meals. So all in all, I think we had a pretty successful dinner!

Making The House Our Own

Those dedicated readers who check our blog every waking moment (maybe it makes us feel better to pretend they exist ;) ) were probably wondering why we haven't made our post for this last week yet.  Well, the answer is pretty simple.  We have had a busy couple of weeks as we worked on moving our things from the apartment to the house.  Since we took 2 weeks to get this posted, we're each going to make a blog post.

Elissa's parents came down to help us out and with their help we were able to get a lot done around the house.  I'm going to talk about a few of the highlights.

We didn't really love the valances that were left in the main room, but Elissa managed to find a great fabric to re-upholster them with.

All it took was a little help from Elissa's mom and a staple gun (and lots of staples).  We think the blue looks a lot better for the color scheme we want in our house.

The other new and exciting thing I want to talk about is our couch/love seat combo.  We visited a place called Austin Couch Potatoes Furniture.  They had lots of great couches for reasonable prices and we found one we think will look good AND be comfortable.  We decided that we should do something to try to tie some of our colors together, and Elissa wanted a project, so we decided to make some throw pillows.  So far Elissa has made 2 very nice pillows with some more to come (sorry about the bad pictures, my phone doesn't do well with the lighting in that room):

Well, we'll be sure to give you all a picture tour of the house when we get everything set up and put away.  Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!

Keeping Busy

This week has been a busy one for us! Some of this busy-ness is self inflicted to keep us from stressing and getting antsy about our closing tomorrow. Some of it was not intentional at all on our parts but it kept us busy!

Early in the week we decided that we wanted to make mini apple pies. If you read our blog regularly, you'll already be familiar with our love of mini pies. (see Pumpkin Pie and Apple Pies)  But, what else are you to do when there are 5 kinds of apples are on sale for .50 a pound? This time, we decided to do dutch apple instead of the lattice top. If you look at the link for apple pies, you'll see how handy Daniel was was lattice tops, but we wanted to do something a little different this time. (We are working on making our food pictures better because we talk about food so much.)

If you didn't already know, Daniel had a fender bender down town over the weekend. This has solidified his desire to never drive downtown. Everybody was okay, but cars needed to be fixed up. Daniel got a citation from the police officer, but the other guy got taken away in hand cuffs (on unrelated charges.) Monday we had to find someone to fix up our car. He told us that is should take about 3 days to fix up.

Since we only have one car, we decided to get a rental for the three days. We got a little Nissan Versa.  As the lady led us out to the car, she mentioned that she thought it was pretty new. In this case pretty new was actually brand new. We decided to take a picture because it might be the newest car we'll ever drive. (and for all of you who read our blog!)

Other things that kept us busy this week: packing, Daniel was busy making his work project a reality, eat tasty pie, enjoying driving our rental car, doing a last walk through, and filling some nail holes. Just keeping busy! Hopefully everything goes well tomorrow at closing!

REALLY Late Blog Post

Sorry all of you who diligently stake out my blog at 7:00pm on Thursday nights! This week has been a little crazy, and I just didn't get around to posting in our blog! So I'll give you the rundown about what happened for the week up until about this last Thursday (So we have stuff to put in our blog this next Thursday!) It was actually a pretty quiet week leading up to the weekend, but we did go out to eat. While we were there we saw some crazy birds that were eating sweet and low packets! We finally got a chance to use our new fancy camera phones to take pictures of the action so we could post that along with the story.

This was one of the birds as you can see there are the sweet 'n' low packets are in the back ground. They pulled them off of the tables. It was hard to get them in the act of eating sweet 'n' low. 

But, if you look really closely at this one, you can see that the bird is right there. I think that is incriminating evidence! We were with someone who joked that it doesn't make sense because it isn't real sugar and it is supposed to be no calorie. What benefit is there to be birds? Who knows, but we all eat candy...

Speaking of candy, we did not have any trick or treaters again this year. We don't super love Halloween here anyway, so it wasn't really a moment to mourn over or anything. Next year we'll have  to find out if our house is in a neighborhood with trick or treaters or not! 

New Phones and Fajitias!

This week Daniel and I finally got to try out our new phones from Republic Wireless. They are trying to make a new kind of phone service where you use wifi around you (like at work or at home) to make phone calls which off sets the cost of using cellular minutes for the company. They are a new start up company, and we decided that it would be worth a shot to see how it goes. Especially since the first 30 days have a guarantee to test out the service and see if it is for you.

We are currently a quarter of the way through our thirty day trial. There are some things that we like and some thing that we don't like. It is fun to finally have new phones, and it could come at a better time because both of our phones have kind of had it. (Daniel's t-mobile phone won't hang up sometimes, and mine has a screen that sometimes just whites out so I can't see anything. ) We'll let you all know when we decide. If anyone is interested in joining Republic Wireless, we would be more than happy to tell you about our experiences so far so you can make an informed decision.

 I can tell you that as far as I can tell these cameras are probably superior to any digital camera that we have in the house.That isn't saying much because both of our cameras are kind of getting old.  But,  hopefully this means that we will take more pictures for our blog because we'll have a decent camera with us!

This week we all decided to make fajitas because peppers were on sale. We decided to go all out and get 4 different colors!  Usually, we only get one or two colors because the orange and yellow so expensive. Fortunately, they were all under eighty cents this week.. The adventure helped solidify  Daniel's that the colors do make a difference.

He also got to test out the cameras on our phones after I made I "plated" up my dinner. Pretty fancy!