What you missed

Compliments of Ange's iphone:

Don't worry we'll do it again sometime if you missed it the first time :)

Success! And my legs hurt . .

Alright so the party was a big success! Thanks to all my peeps who brought salad and deserts and beer and laughter and yes I know peeps is 90's but whatever. I think we had almost 50 people in our house yesterday afternoon and it was awesome! We had our old bathtub all full of beer and soda and water, and Spencer grilled hamburgers and hot dogs and we all just hung out and took tours of our remodeled crib (again I know I'm ridiculous) and ate delicious food and talked about house remodeling stories and gardening and everything else you can think of. The brennan girls were outside with hungry hungry hippo and volleyballs and i think even a baseball, although I swear I did not give them that, someone else must have :). We also decided, thanks to the new round of TU kids, that our shed would be the perfect place for a hot tub and a retractable glass roof. Next time I win the lottery I'm on it! I think the biggest compliment we got was that our house looks like it came straight off HGTV! woo hoo thanks! And biggest accomplishment: we did not run out of food! I'm telling you I was having mini nightmares about hungry unhappy people wandering around the house haha. Oh and also we didn't need air conditioning which was another of my nightmares, hungry unhappy wilting people!

I think heaven will be something like yesterday. Okay don't read into that too much. It was just pretty awesome to spend the morning helping out an elderly lady with a bunch of Redeemer people, think SOS but not quite so dirty, and then getting to spend the evening laughing and eating and talking with people of all ages, some of whom I hadn't even met until yesterday morning. But I liked all of them :) and it just felt right. Maybe the only non heaven like thing was all the mud I had to sweep off the floor after the party but it was totally worth it :). Oh and also how my legs are really sore today from all the standing and climbing up and down step stools to do paint edging. That will definitely not happen in heaven!

Alright I'm off to enjoy the beautiful sunshine in Tulsa today. Front porches are AWESOME!

Getting Ready for the PARTY

Alright so this weekend is our first big party! Okay by that I mean we did open invitation to everyone in the church to come see our house in north tulsa and have a barbecue cook out. We're tying it with a Rebuild Tulsa event to try to get more people to help in north tulsa and also to convince some people that you don't need a gun to come north of 41st street. I'm sorry but the world does not exist only south of woodland hills mall. Ha okay mini rant on the suburbs done :). So in efforts to get ready, and also just for fun, we've been doing a little decorating! Okay mostly Spencer's just been putting up curtain rods and dry wall screws for me. He didn't do the sea shell arrangements I promise.

I love the ocean in case you can't tell from the blues and the sea shells everywhere. I wish my house were on the beach but instead you'll just have to use your imagination :).

Lovely curtains we reused from our bedroom in our rent house. I think they worked out pretty well with our new dining room color.

And last but not least our wedding picture is finally up! We are officially married haha.

Okay so on another note, we've been taking a gardening class! And yes the average age in the class is probably 60. We are by far the youngest people there. I don't think I've ever heard so many happy sighs over slides of shrubs. And also we're pretty convinced this garden guy is on speed or doesn't have to ever breathe or something because he literally didn't pause for two straight hours of listing all the shrubs that grow well in Oklahoma and anything you'd ever want to know about them. It is pretty fun though to get all excited about landscaping. And also we definitely have a date planned to the Linnaes Teaching garden. You should google it, it's pretty sweet! Alright, time to hit the sack, dishes are washing, cleaning is mostly done, and bath mats are in the washer. We might just be ready by saturday, since I've already decided the spare bedroom is just going to be full of junk. There is just no way around it :).

Random House Owner Joy

So last night I was cooking dinner and I realized that lettuce and cilantro that had been in the crisper draw for over a week were still good!!! Okay if you saw our old rent house midget fridge that spoiled everything in two days you'd know how happy I was. I really felt like doing a little dance :). Oh the joys of a crisper drawer haha.

Yard Work And a Random Question

Okay so Sunday afternoon we decided to start tackling yard work. Okay actually our labors started on Saturday. Spencer went off to Stillwater to get a bunch of plants from his parent's backyard and I headed off to the Tulsa Garden Show to see if I could find any cool plants to add to our already spiraling out of control collection. Seriously last year we only managed to keep alive a jalapeno plant and a habanero plant, I'm not sure how we think we can keep alive 20 or so random plants including to seeding trays full of herbs and peppers, but we're going to try! We're even taking a gardening class the next two weeks to learn all about what grows in Oklahoma :).

So I came home with this! It smells so good and the guy promised me it was an easy one to grow and that I could call him with any questions I had. So we'll see how it goes. It just made me so happy to actually have a rose plant. I've always wanted roses. I'll start with this one and who knows, we have a giant yard :).





So Spencer came back with all kinds of plants, nandinas, red buds, lilies, irises and a bunch of other things I can't remember. We headed to lowes, got another shovel, a bunch of mulch, and some peat moss and then hit the ground running.

\

Ha he's cuter covered in dirt than me. Plus I couldn't stop sneezing for more than a few seconds at a time. Apparently I picked the prime allergy days to ty and plant things in the yard. I lasted about an hour and a half in the yard and I was done for, so most of this planting is his work not mine, I just supervised ah hem from the couch :).

Lovely nandina. Hopefully one day it will be a big bush!

Make that three big bushes!

Alright and the one part of our landscaping that is already done due to the previous owner. The lovely irises on our front steps. They are gorgeous!

Okay random question of the day: Does anyone else have one rootbeer they like in rootbeer floats and another they like to drink by itself?

I do. Okay I know random, but I was just having a rootbeer float and I really would rather have Barqs rootbeer for the float, but I like drinking A&W rootbeer better.

Okay enough on that note :). If you see no more posts on plants, you'll know we failed haha.

Extreme Spring Cleaning and . . . My New Friend!

Alright so first off it is SPRING finally! I seriously think I get seasonal depression, or at least seasonal annoyance. Every spring when the sun is out and things are blooming I feel a million times better about all of life. I've decided it is entirely appropriate that Easter happens in spring, new life in several different ways. Okay enough philosophical talk for now.

Okay so while it's nice out and we don't have to pay to keep our house cool, we decided (okay I forced Spencer to help me because I was annoyed by the mess) to clean out our creepy, someone had to have died here room next to the attic. If you've been in our house you know it is sorely lacking in closet space (apparently back in the day they had way less junk, umm I mean all important boxes of college books and notes and decorations for different seasons and sleeping bags and dorm room furniture okay you get the picture). So we've decided this creepy attic room needs to be where we put the bulk of our things that aren't needed every day. So we started tackling it and quickly discovered we were going to need different attire.

TA DA:

Our lovely make shift dust masks. Basically there were junks of dry wall and pieces of wood and inches of dust all over the floor and it started being impossible to breathe, so we improvized :).

Yep somehow all I could find that was long enough to go around my head was this lovely scarf :).

Just some of the junk we had to carry down the stairs! Random pieces of wood, an old door, leftover hard wood floor pieces from the spare bedroom, dry wall chunks, pieces of pipe, insulation, nails, and more dust!

See how we thought it was a torture room?!?

Well no more! Now it is a mostly clean, definitelyl organized storage room full of plastic bins of our stuff! Talk about sense of accomplishment :). And also sense of sore legs . . . okay bad wording but whatever, basically we took so many trips up and down stairs that I definitely got a leg workout.

Okay on a completely different note, most of you know I gave up alot marrying Spencer, mainly I lost the opportunity to ever own a cat!!!!! I know travesty, I really had to think about that one pretty hard, Spencer or cute little kitty roaming around the house :).

Well now I can have both!!! Well mostly at least :). Meet our neighbors' outdoor cat that used to live in our house, so pretty much our porch is her domain. Every day we come home from work and she wants to be petted and purrs and purrs when I hold her and rubs on my legs if I'm out reading on the porch chairs. It just makes me so happy! And Spencer happy because I'm happy without him having to take allergy medicine for the rest of his life, or without us having to spend 20 grand on a hypoallerginic baby cheetah. Yes that is a real thing, google it.

Alright time to do some recipe looking. We've finally gone on a budget, yes I know we're a little behind but mortgage is now a part of our vocabulary so it must be done :). So as a part of trying to make budgeting fun, I'm looking for new recipes to try so we don't eat out all the time. Wish me luck!

Taxes!!

Okay so I've decided in the last month that doing taxes on a home renovation is possibly the most confusing and undefined thing ever. So first I did our taxes on Turbo Tax and I was about to send them in with the value on our second settlement statement (yes we have two, one from closing on the property and one from closing on the house) but I chickened out because it didn't say "purchase price of property" on it. So I called a tax guy my friend at work uses, he said he had no idea. He asked all his coworkers, they had no idea. He said call the IRS. Note to self, never try this again. First I was on hold for 15 minutes till I got someone who asked me how they could direct my call. I told them home buyer credit, they transfered me and then I got a message saying we're sorry but due to the volume of calls we are dropping your call. Why now I was thinking? Why not when I first called? Stupid automated phone systems. So I called back a few days later and finally got through to a real person who repeated the form for me which I had already read several times, it says nothing about what we did. But apparently she thought it did because she just kept repeating the same thing over and over again so I hung up. Finally I just decided to efile the taxes and then ammend for the house credit. At least this way I'll get some money back asap and I'l see if I ever get the house credit part of it back again. Probably not, oh well.

Yeah for taxes. I feel like saying no taxation without representation, which one of the senators did what I did the past four months? Ha yes I know that is ridiculous. Just needed to vent :).