It's ours . . . Our own . . . our prrrecioussss! OUR HOME!

Well, it'll be ours in about 30 years, but that's beside the point. 

It is official! The seller's leaseback period is over, he is moved out, and WE can begin moving in! The reality that we are homeowners, complete with all the financial and maintenance responsibilities is slowly hitting us, but we are thrilled. And praying that the house doesn't hit us with too much drama all at once. Spread it out, please.

Many of you have mentioned that you can't wait to see pictures, so I am here to satisfy your curiosity. And in keeping with the "Be A Good One" theme of this blog, I will demonstrate to you all the ways in which the house is, indeed, a good one, and some of the ways the ball has been dropped (not by us, mind you).

Here we go!

There she is! Pretty much a blank slate. She was built in 1964, so this year is its semi-centennial anniversary! Without the protection of gutters, the beds around the house have been pretty much decimated. As you can see, the yard is basically dead, too. Reviving the landscaping is high on our to-do list.

View of the front door and hall closet from inside the house. I don't know why, but I really like this photo.

To the right of the front door is what we are calling the "front room." It has a huge window and an awesome built-in situation; I am going to have to learn how to properly style display shelving. The floor hasn't been well-taken care of, but I don't like it anyway, and someday we plan to upgrade to more contemporary wood floors.

Built-in fail: The back of the shelving is mirrored, but they didn't paint the inside of the unit, which CLEARLY reflects in the mirror. I hate the color and plan to repaint the whole thing anyway, but FOR THE LOVE OF DUH, paint the parts that can be seen in the mirror, people! How do you not notice that, not have it drive you crazy, and not fix it?

Here is the living/family room. It is pretty big and we love that we'll have ceiling fans and overhead lighting all over the place in this house. HOWEVER. The walls in there are terrible painted paneling and the color of the walls in the house are, as you can see, BORING khaki. It is EVERYWHERE and it needs to be covered up as soon as we can afford gallon after gallon of paint. I can feel Drew wanting to attack the walls with a sledge hammer, so I could be in for a surprise project one of these days.

View opposite from the one above.

I. Hate. Almond. Outlets. It's like they only exist to remind us that the '60s happened. Does anybody choose these on purpose anymore? They gotta go.

The seller was really proud of his "updated" kitchen. The counter-tops and sink are awesome. I am going to have to take a while to get used to that style fridge/freezer. The cabinets are ancient and have a hard time closing and could really have stood to be upgraded with the counter-tops, but remodeling the kitchen is at the way bottom of our to-do list. We'll be making the best of what we've got.

Already littered with junk mail. But, I can turn on that sink with my elbow! No more salmonella hands on the faucet!

Not sure how I feel about the cooktop yet. Time will tell.

This is the only thing that truly bothers me about the kitchen. That oven is only 17 inches wide and 15 inches deep. My cookie sheet won't even fit in there. I doubt I could even safely roast a chicken. Drew has been scheming up solutions for accomodating a larger oven.

The kitchen might be smaller than my ultimate dream kitchen, but when I get through with it, this pantry is going to be UHMAYZING! I have plans for black and white tile floors, yellow walls, and epic shelving. This is also probably the best place to hide in the event of a tornado.

Eat-in section of the kitchen. It is larger than it looks and I think we can fit a sizable party around a table in there.

This bathroom sink is probably the object in the house most far removed from the 1960s. 

A whole room for laundry!

Ready to go upstairs? It's a little scarier up there.

Four dogs, two cats, and who knows what else have been living in the house for about a year. This is what happens when you lock your cats in one room while you show your house to prospective buyers. Needless to say, the carpet looks bad and smells AWFUL. We have carpet cleaners coming tomorrow, but we CAN NOT wait to rip it out and replace it. Let the months of penny-pinching begin.

One shockingly great feature of this home is the amount of closet space. This is the built in hallway closet upstairs. It is so big I could not get a full picture of it. Once we get some sliding drawers installed, this might become one of the best features of the place. Second only to the pantry, of course.

Master bath - I don't even know where to begin. We have been dreaming about how to re-do this for a while. It is going to involve some demolition and reconstruction and a lot of time and effort, because everything about it is pretty awful.

Master Vanity, complete with the same atrocious walls as the shower/toilet room, and a broken light fixture. Eventually we want to push that wall back into the bedroom and make this a double vanity. Because we are just that vain.

The bedrooms in this house are big! This is the master. Guess where they had their bed? We also have two walk-in closets. Can't wait to take care of those!

Some genius decided to install this chair rail upside down so that it catches loads of dust and dirt! Hopefully it can be taken down and gotten rid of, or at least replaced by something that doesn't make me feel gross.

This bedroom will initially serve as an office/craft room for Drew. We assume that we'll eventually be kicked out by children. That closet is huge, and on the opposite wall is a linen-style closet (that's going to become my craft closet!).

This is bedroom #2 with a built-in dresser and two sort of walk-in closets. It is a big room and will be our guestroom at first and eventually a room for our children.

This bathroom is connected to bedroom #2 and we'd love to Jack-and-Jill it to the office so that we can someday close off and create a truly master bathroom.

More ugly bathroom tile! Yay! In the house-hunting process I realized that I am really picky about bathrooms. I hate anything that even remotely looks pink. Clean and simple is my preference.

There is the view of the back of the house. This is likely to be an on-going project. There is so much we want to do back here, it hurts my head to think about it.

Poor Bruce is probably never going to fit in the garage. At least he is clean, though! Look how shiny he is when he isn't covered in mud!

The house is already helping us make our first mortgage payment. :)

This is what happens when you don't have proper drainage for the condensation from the A/C unit. Fortunately, Drew feels good about being able to come up with a fix for this.

It is hard for us to leave Home Depot without a plant, so here is our first flower for the new house. We just have to figure out where to plant this little beauty!

I fear that I may have come across as a bit negative in this post, but I am just so grateful to be moving into a house and really excited to put the "Angie & Drew" touch on it that will make it our home. Now, I need to get over there and work on cleaning and getting ready to move box after box after box after box . . .
Stay tuned for what I am sure will be more posts about our house projects than you care to read. :)

In the meantime:

Irish House Blessing

God Bless the Corners of this House
and be the Lintel Blessed
And Bless the Hearth
And Bless the Board
And Bless Each Place of Rest
Bless Each Door That Opens Wide To Strangers and to Kin
And Bless Each Crystal Windowpane
that lets the Sunshine In
And Bless the Rooftree Overhead
And Every Sturdy Wall
The Peace of Man
The Peace of God
The Peace of Love to All

Teacher Appreciation

As you probably know if you have read most of my blog posts, I decided not to immediately look for a teaching job when Drew and I moved to Texas. There were a variety of reasons behind that choice and sometimes I wonder if it was the right or best thing to do, but I can undeniably say that we have been happy to have the flexibility to travel to visit family, I have enjoyed exploring my crafty interests, and we love getting to spend time together each day that is not interrupted or overtaken by lesson planning and grading. Teaching is a special kind of stressful (open up any newspaper in America and find nearly any article about teachers or schools and you can understand why), and I can honestly say that the break has been very, very nice, and certainly welcome during this first year of marriage.

Now, it’s that time of year when we here in these United States are encouraged to show teachers our appreciation. This year it is throwing me into a tiny bit of an identity crisis. And when I say tiny, I really do mean tiny. This is not one of my  sarcastic litotic moments, so don’t get too worried about me. However, I do feel a little sad when I think about Teacher Appreciation Week, especially when I see the Chipotle buy-one-get-one ads and I remember all the free food we used to get at school. Isn't that why people get into teaching? Just kidding! I mean, I still have a teacher I.D. in my car, but using it to get discounts would be akin to lying and I just can’t bring myself to do it. Plus, using a Florida teacher I.D. here in Texas would be weird and awkward.

I still enjoy thinking about my three years with my high school students. Unlocking my classroom door every day was a privilege, and I couldn’t believe that, at such a young age, I was entrusted with educating those teenagers. I really miss being able to post on Facebook all the crazy things they said and did. Now, when I talk to people about my experiences, my brain stumbles to find the right words to convey who I was then compared to who I am now. We live in a culture where many people define themselves, at least in large part, by their job title, so I often find myself saying things like: “When I was teaching,” “When I was in the classroom,” “When I was with my students.” I can’t bear uttering the phrase, “When I WAS a teacher.” It is so final and definitive.

There are some jobs that you do, and some that you are. True teachers are called to their career as a vocation. I spent five years studying and working very hard to be able to be a teacher. I sometimes do still think about lesson plans and miss “my kids,” as I called them. Am I doing myself a disservice by having not taught this year? Some might say that I am neglecting that vocation right now, but I don’t really think so. I might not be in a classroom today, and maybe not tomorrow either, but who knows? It's not like I have abandoned the career altogether, I am just doing something different for now. Besides, a formal classroom setting does not define a teacher (although it does provide a paycheck). Just ask anyone who has ever wanted a short answer from me, or better yet, anyone for whom I have answered a question with a guiding question of my own. It doesn’t get more teacher-y than that. I love spending time with my young nieces, counting, naming letters, talking about colors and animals, reading books, and teaching them what the fox says (if you are wondering, they say “wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow”). And someday I will have children of my own and I’ll do the same things with them. And I am very excited that soon I am going to be working part time in a job where I think/hope that my instincts and experiences as a teacher will be useful- it is a great opportunity!

So, although I feel kind of awkward and, at times, perhaps even guilty during this Teacher Appreciation Week, I remember that the most important thing I did as a teacher was teach myself. Not just the American history content, but I learned to exude confidence, how to interact with all sorts of people, how to roll with the punches, and how to show enthusiasm and excitement despite being exhausted and stressed out. And the patience- I learned that there is a boatload of it inside me, sometimes too much in my opinion, but I think I would rather have too much than too little. So, this week I am Teacher Appreciating myself by celebrating the things that I learned during those three years. For now, I may be a teacher without a traditional classroom, but I will never stop teaching. I will never stop being a teacher.

I would like to note how grateful I am that nobody has ever criticized or questioned my choice to take a break from teaching. My husband, family, and friends have all been incredibly supportive and encouraging. So, please know that none of this "internal conversation" was caused by anyone, I have just been thinking about it, because that's what my brain does, whether I want it to or not. 

And to all the men and women who ever taught me, from pre-school through college, and those who I am proud to have called my colleagues, thank you so much for all of your hard work, dedication, and loyalty to your field and to your students. I would not be who I am today without you. And to my first teachers, my parents, you are the best I could have ever asked for. Though you did help me with my homework, you also taught me the things that will never be found in a textbook but are the most important parts of life – faith, hope, and love.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!

Gosh! There is so much to say about this picture: 1) This was my classroom and the second or third way that I arranged my desk. I liked to change it up and throw the kids off their guard. 2) This was THE day that I met Drew in real life. Woot Woot! 3) The blue card on the front of my desk says, "Whatever you are, be a good one," and was the inspiration for the title of this blog. 4) That R2D2 coffee mug is no longer with us because a student broke it by accident at the beginning of the next school year. It was a sad day. My C3PO PEZ dispenser was distraught. 5) The pile of papers on a teacher's desk never gets smaller. I am appalled by that stack in the back corner. 6) There is a family Christmas card on the board just behind my computer and several of my male students became obsessed with my sisters. It was the first time I realized that my youngest sister was a high schooler and theoretically could have been friends with students. And now she is about to go to college. NOT OKAY. 7) That is all. Thank you for reading!

Spring Cleaning

As I mentioned all sneaky-like in my last post, Drew and I recently closed on our first house and we will be moving in just a few weeks! Thank goodness, because we are busting the seams of this apartment, which has had me in “purge-the-junk” mode for many months now, but I want to feel very small in the new house, so my de-cluttering instincts have jumped into hyper-drive. Oh, my poor husband - just remember that I do love you, Drew!

This intense onset of pre-moving-spring-cleaning led me to do something really difficult the other day. Here’s the thing: I have always loved school, learning, going to class, taking notes, studying, and even taking tests just to see how I would perform on them. I am a super nerd, and proud of it.

One of my weaknesses as a lover of learning is that I have tended to hang on to every piece of paper from the courses I took that I felt would be relevant in the future – namely social studies and education courses. Especially in college, my thought process was, “Someday when I am a teacher, I might need this!” I did refer to many of my old notes during graduate school, and for the record, I used notes from my college American history course (thank goodness for those!), a book from my college course about imperialism, and an excerpt from an article from my high school AP European history course, but little else during the three years I taught US history. Still, I hung on to the notes and syllabi and blue books.

Indeed, it WAS helpful to be able to show my students what a college syllabus looks like or how a typical history test is structured, and I took great pride in making sure they would go into their collegiate careers already knowing what a blue book is, even though the one I showed them was green. "Don't be the freshman who has to ask what a blue book is," I said, "Be the cool kid who already knows. You're welcome." I took advantage of every opportunity to use the materials I had collected during high school and college, even if it was only to shame my students into realizing how spoiled they were, “See! I took notes WITHOUT an outline! I have spoiled you rotten, so don’t even complain to me!”

Although I did utilize these materials as much as possible, there was still far more that sat in boxes shoved under my bed (please note that over the years I had already gotten rid of many things and was not a terrible hoarder– I took great pleasure in discarding my math notes each year). Somewhere in the back of my mind I believe my intention was to someday type up my notes to digitally archive them and then get rid of the notebooks. Looking through the notes, though, I realized that my brain no longer contains the context to help them make sense and I no longer have the desire to spend hours transcribing the notes. If I wanted to remind myself about Brazilian history, I would be better off looking in one of the books my professor assigned or running a Google search; my own notes were pretty pointless without an index or the detail that I would need to make sense of them years later.

I sat down the other day determined to turn my two boxes of schoolwork into one box. There are awards and certificates in those boxes from before I was even in kindergarten that I can’t get rid of, even if they are only for completing a two week swimming class. Someday that stack of achievements will come in handy when I lord it over my children’s heads (Just kidding. Maybe.). I also have many of the essays and stories that I wrote throughout all of grade school. Those from when I was little are adorable and those from high school and college are usually pretty good and I am proud of them. So, I knew I could never get rid of everything; paring it down would be my challenge.

Early on in the process, I had two realizations that made the endeavor a lot easier. 1) the notebooks I used to take notes in college were colorful and pretty and on some days my handwriting was really good. REALITY CHECK: those are not good enough reasons to keep a notebook. 2) the notebooks contained a lot of information, but I treasured them because they reminded me of the experience of going to class, studying for hours with friends, and soaking in the college environment. REALITY CHECK: although the tangible cue for a memory is nice, I don’t need a notebook to trigger those happy recollections of my college years. 

So beautiful!

It was still tough to part with the notebooks, though. Other than my transcripts, they are proof that I did actual work in college! They also reveal a lot about my life at the time; I doodled on the days that I was tired and I wrote myself notes and reminders in the margins. I also loved writing down the silly things my professor would say, so I made sure to type them up and take pictures of a few, so I would still have a small piece of the notebooks. After that, it was rather easy to shrink my pile of course work. I kept essays, papers, and tests, and that was pretty much it. I got rid of study guides that I know are saved electronically somewhere and accepted the fact that I don’t actually need those articles or homework assignments from all those education classes. Granted, it was fun to look back and read some of my work, but it was freeing to say, “I don’t need it no mo’.”

This is probably only funny to me, but I took four classes with my Latin American history professor, and little gems like these were my favorite parts of his classes. His dry and serious delivery of sarcastic humor was right up my alley.

I am now satisfied and content that I have one box of awards, notes, tests, and proof that I worked for my education. It did take many days for me to actually get around to carrying it all to the dumpster (I was just a wee bit distracted by the Mother Trucking Mudpocalypse), but I didn’t hesitate to throw it in there. It is too late to retrieve it now anyway, even if I had changed my mind. My next goal is to organize what remains, maybe into a binder or two. I made a small dent in the clutter, but I checked off an item that has been on my to-do list for years, and that makes me feel good!

That is five and a half inches of work I parted with. Yes, I measure work in inches.

The pile of keepers.

The trash pile on the left is taller than the keeper pile on the right. I'd call that success!

Happy spring-cleaning to you all!

The Mother Trucking Mudpocalypse, PART 4: The Power of Prayer

The Mother Trucking Mudpocalypse, PART 4: The Power of Prayer

When the alarms rang Tuesday morning, we popped out of bed, eager to get our truck recovery on. Speaking of truck recovery, Drew mentioned on Monday that since I had already named the whole disaster the Mother Trucking Mudpocalypse, that we needed a name for our rescue efforts. I thought for a while and tossed around several simple, boring names, and then . . . it hit me. This would be “Operation Brucectomy.” BOOM. Clever, right? Drew loved it, I loved it, Izak loved it. We were ready to roll.

Izak arrived around 8am and I greeted him with coffee (I don’t know what we would have done without his help that day!). After packing up some snacks, gathering water bottles, and picking out some tools, we set out for the Home Depot. Again. This time we were in the market for a wheelbarrow and plywood. We hoped the plywood would serve as a wide track to spread out the weight of the truck over the mud as we guided it out of the pit. Thanks to the brilliant folks at the Home Depot, we were able to rent a truck to bring everything out to the pit. We left our supplies unattended, drove back to the H. D., and drove Ella back out. She did great on the much drier dirt road, which we felt was a great sign of imminent success. There was a brisk breeze, the sun was shining, and there was hardly a cloud in the sky – WE. FELT. GOOD!

The men took the wheelbarrow and headed out to find rocks and gravel that they could use to fill the space underneath Bruce’s wheels. Since I am useless for lifting heavy rocks and dragging a wheelbarrow through the mud, I stayed back at the car. Earlier that morning, in an effort to mentally prepare myself for the day, I had looked through all of my holy cards (imagine baseball cards for Catholic kids, but much cooler) and if there was a prayer on the back of the card, I prayed it. Saint Joseph, Saint Anthony, Saint Michael, Saint Raphael, Saint George, The Immaculate Heart of Mary – I shamelessly solicited the intercession of everyone to pray for the recovery of our stuck truck. Sitting in the car at the top of the pit with the Mudpocalypse just out of view, I decided to top off my pleas for divine intervention with a Rosary.

When I finished up my prayers, I had a photo shoot with some ladybugs I noticed wandering around, and then I decided to check on Drew and Izak. I started carefully making my way down the hill. That should have been my first sign that things weren’t going so well. The literal downhill turned into a realization that the men had not appeared to make much progress other than getting very muddy.

 

The problem was that, although much of the ground around and in the pit had dried a lot, the truck was in the bottom of it all and the mud and water ran deep. Drew was finding it nearly impossible to create a level, stable base for the high-lift jack. Every time he raised the jack another notch, it pushed the rocks and wood he used as a base down into the mud as well as back and away from the truck. CLICK. SQUSIH. SCOOT. Give up. Try again. CLICK. SQUISH. SCOOT. Sigh. Toss high-lift jack aside. Grab more rocks. CLICK. SQUISH. SCOOT. Rinse. Repeat.

I could see the wheels turning in Izak’s engineering mind; he knew our strategy was not working well, and Drew’s body language clearly broadcast extreme frustration. Daring to speak the truth, I stated the obvious, “Maybe we need to wait for the mud to dry up a little bit more.”

“No. This truck needs to get out today. The longer it stays here, the more likely it is going to get vandalized and the more likely it will stay stuck.” Drew had a point.

Izak pointed out one of the most important things about the situation. That mud literally sucked. The huge rocks that Drew was using to give the jack any sort of leverage had only sunk deeper into the ground. And according to Izak, the watery mud/clay was not showing any signs of bottoming out. Admittedly, it has been kind of fun to type the phrase “stuck truck” over and over again these past few days, but let me tell you that if we were the cursing types, I guarantee that all three of us would have found another word to add to the “stuck truck” poem. At that moment we felt very defeated.

When the going gets tough, the tough take a lunch break.  As we were heading up the hill we saw a Ford Explorer sitting near my car. It was the first sign of human activity we had seen in the area since the day Bruce entrenched himself in mud. Nobody got out of the vehicle and it didn’t drive away. Upon approaching my car I heard the driver say into his cell phone, “No, but he’s walking towards me now.” Great, these guys are talking about us. That could be either fabulous or terrible. Drew went over to the driver’s window and explained himself: The truck down there was his and he hadn’t come out here to mess around like so many local hooligans do. As it turns out, one of the men in the Explorer is the steward of the undeveloped land that will someday become part of the neighborhood that is under construction in the area. His appearance on the scene had, indeed, been a blessing. He told us one of his guys who had access to some equipment might be able to help us and he would come out and take a look at things. It pays to be nice, honest, and friendly when you are desperate for help.

Back within the wind–free safety of Ella we divvied out sandwiches, MREs, carrots, and water bottles for our lunch. The food served as a good distraction from our predicament and before we even had time to really consider devising a plan B, I saw a truck approaching on the dirt road. We put away our food and got out of the car, hoping this was the guy sent to help us. Lo and behold, it was our Knight in Shining Armor!

As Drew described it, the Knight in Shining Armor, named Cody, moved like a mountain goat down into the pit towards the truck. Upon examining the situation and pondering his options, he decided that our best bet would be a bulldozer. That’s right – A BULLDOZER. The very thing we had joked and dreamed and PRAYED about having available to us! Drew and Izak left to help Cody retrieve the buldozer, and since Drew left his keys to the truck at home, I had to go get them. I was glad to have something to do, since I had felt rather useless so far, and I appreciated the opportunity to use a restroom after a couple of hours in the middle of nowhere.

When I returned to the pit, the only things there were our abandoned supplies and a white SUV (Drew didn’t see it and since I know squat about cars, I can’t tell you exactly what kind it was). I called Drew, who confirmed that they were on their way with the bulldozer (I still didn’t really believe it at this point). The white car drove over to me and I had a conversation with a nice man who may or may not own/run/be high up in one of the companies that is developing the area. He wished us luck and drove off down the dirt road. You know, the amazing thing about all of this is how nice every single person we encountered was. I think their curiosity about the stuck truck partially motivated them to see it get unstuck. Whatever their reasons, they were all true examples of kindness, patience, and graciousness.

I was getting tired of eagerly waiting for Drew and Izak to return when a couple of guys on a cart-like vehicle drove up. They knew what was going on and I think they wanted to see the show. Not long after that, I looked down the dirt road and could see a growing cloud of dirt. Closer to me was Cody’s truck, being driven by Drew and Izak, and behind it was the most beautiful sight I beheld in all the days of the Mother Trucking Mudpocalypse. 

I. Love. This. Photo.

A FREAKING BULLDOZER WAS COMING TO HELP US. 

It was huge and yellow and dirty and AWESOME. MAGNIFICENT. THE BEST THING EVER. The font sizes in the editor of this blog do not get large enough to illustrate how utterly stupendous that bulldozer was and will always be to me.

So much beautiful, heavy, strong, construction equipment. :)

The bulldozer has to travel on tires in order to not break the concrete. Drew and Izak got to do a lot of manual labor moving the tires around to get it on its way!

And let me tell you, that bulldozer just scooted down into the pit like it was climbing into a child’s sandbox. It dwarfed the sunken truck and we all knew we were about to witness the kind of thing that you only see in YouTube videos but never in real life. Drew and one of the guys from the cart hooked up the bulldozer’s winch to the tow hitch on Bruce’s backside, and then we waited with baited breath, cell phones and cameras in hand like any decent modern-day American, to document what would happen next.

Winch it! Winch it good!

Standing by with recovery straps, just in case, but more worried about the camera and not falling in the mud.

We learned Saturday night that the yank-the-truck-out-of-the-mud-as-harshly-as-possible method is both painfully loud and destructive to the vehicles, so watching the bulldozer work was refreshing. Cody pulled the winch taught and then slowly but surely began to inch forward. Drew was standing closest to Bruce and says that except for one moment right when the truck first moved, there was no sound from Bruce (which, based by Drew's amazement, I assume was a good thing). As the rear tires gradually made their way out of the mud I could not help but cry tears of joy and relief. Something that had been impossible for many men to achieve Saturday night, and would continue to be impossible for us to do on our own, was happening right before my eyes. Bruce was coming free!

FREEDOM!!

That bulldozer cut across the mud like a hot knife through butter, and it brought the truck (along with a lot of mud) with it. The ride was so smooth that a water bottle stayed upright on top of the tailgate for most of the journey out of the pit. Since we were apparently going to be successful and I knew I'd be able to blog about all of this, I raced to the top so that I could take pictures of the bulldozer and Bruce emerging from the mud like butterflies from a cocoon. It was quite a run up the soft mud, and I was breathless at the end of my sprint, but I got the pictures I wanted. You’re welcome.

I walked over to Drew, threw my arms around him, and as you have probably guessed by now – cried. A weight had been lifted off our shoulders. Well, the weight had actually been lifted out of the mud pit, but at least now we could move it around ourselves. Brucectomy success!

THE MOTHER TRUCKING MUDPOCALYPSE WAS OVER, BABY!

Proud truck owner and Bruce.

Someone needs a b-a-t-h.

We couldn’t say enough “thank yous” to our Knight in Shining Armor, but he insisted that it was no big deal. I mean, in the grand scheme of building houses day in and day out, the Brucectomy HAD to be a lot more fun and exciting, right? To us, Cody was exactly what we had prayed for: someone with a large enough vehicle that had a winch on it who would find our situation a challenge worth tackling. When I had exhausted my prayer cards and said the Rosary that morning, I felt like I was praying for a miracle, and since we literally got what we prayed for, I'd say that we got one. Some people may argue that this was fate, or a set of circumstances that would have happened anyway, but once I pray, coincidence gets thrown out the window. It ceases to exist. God answered our prayers with a resounding “Yes!” that happened to be shaped like a bulldozer and I won't ever be convinced otherwise.

We eventually packed everything into Drew’s truck (Because it was out of the mud! Woot! Woot!), returned some unused supplies to Home Depot, and went home to plan our victory celebration. Drew and I invited Izak and Kris to join us for dinner at P.F. Chang’s to celebrate Bruce’s freedom. It also happened to be our ten month wedding anniversary and we decided, that since two reasons to celebrate weren’t enough, we would treat dinner as a pre-house-closing congratulatory dinner. THAT’S RIGHT - after four days of truck-stuckness, we hardly remembered that we were days away from purchasing our first home! Well, as of this past Friday, it is ours! And, lucky you, I am sure you’ll be hearing about it a lot on here. We move in about six weeks!

Thanks for the photo, Kris! You and Izak are the best. :)

Anyway, we couldn’t have had better company with whom to celebrate than Kris and Izak; they were there to encourage and sympathize with us the whole way through the Mudpocalypse. We are blessed in so many ways – with great friends, a muddy but functional truck, and a house just waiting for us to live in it! Thanks for “sticking” with me through the Mother Trucking Mudpocalypse story telling.

If you learned nothing else from these four posts, allow me to leave you with this lesson: As one of the guys said to us Saturday night, “Four wheel drive is good for one thing – getting you stuck.” And if you do decide to get yourself stuck, do make sure you are very nearby a paved road or a construction site being developed by sympathetic people. 

DO NOT go into the mud unless this is your vehicle.

 THE END.