ATTENTION: those of you who have already booked tickets to come stay at our new house, postpone your trip.  We will no longer be moving in this weekend. It just so happens that the sellers love our house too much to leave, so we have conceded to let them stay one more month. Actually the story is a bit longer and more boring, but we don’t need to go into it. We will definitely be in the house by September, or else me and my pregnant angry temper will come down on whoever wrecks my plans. Because by then I will be 7 months along and HUGE.

By the way, if you’re ever in Dallas, you are welcome to come see us! Just not yet.

This weekend we had a hot Saturday night.  it was just too hot and muggy to be outside and have any fun, so we stayed inside to stay cool.  We ate dinner, watched a movie, and then played a game together.  We played Ticket To Ride.  For those of you who don’t know, Ticket to Ride is a game where you place trains between cities to complete routes and score points.  Andrea and I have played this game many times before, but this time was different.  After we had placed all of our trains we counted up our points, and Andrea was ahead by one. Then we counted our route points, and we were tied! Dead serious. THEN the tie breaker came down to whoever’s train was the longest. I came out victorious by only one train!!!  Although the victory looks impressive because I ended up winning by 10 points, don’t be deceived it was close, very close!

Ticket To Ride

This game got me thinking about how often this happens.  So we’ve been married for almost 2 1/2 years right? In that much time, we’ve played numerous games together. With the exception of Sequence, in which I consistently dominate, we tie everything! Last summer we decided to learn how to golf. We’ve probably played about 10 rounds of golf together. The largest margin of victory we’ve had is only 3 strokes. However, most of the time we’re dead even. It’s probably good for our marriage, but it sure is bad for my self-confidence.   At least playing is fun, because tying isn’t!

I usually start blog posts with an apology for not writing to such a long time, but today I am not going to do that but update you on some of the crazy things that have happened to me since starting my first real job.  I am working for Grant Thornton LLP an international accounting firm.  I work in their Advisory Services group as an IT Auditor.

On my third week of work, I was at a client, and we were having a wrap up meeting.  My boss showed up for the meeting and we were presenting our findings.  When I got to the conference room, it was packed.  There was only one seat left in the back corner.  After I climbed over a number of individuals to get to the seat I sat down and noticed that I was too far away from the table.  I needed to scoot up so I grabbed the bottom of my seat lifted up and then tried to slide across the floor.  Apparently, I did not lift up enough because as I tried to scoot across the room, the leg of the chair broke and there was this loud cracking noise.  Unfortunately, the sound was loud enough that the meeting stopped and everyone looked at me.  I apologized ensured them that I was okay and then the meeting started back up.  Well now I was in a real tricky spot, I had to use my left leg to hold up my chair because there were no spares.  In addition, I had to present for half of the meeting.  I needed to seem intelligent and dependable but the whole time I am sweating like a stuck pig because I am doing a 45-minute squat exercise.  As if that wasn’t enough, at the end of the meeting, the CFO asked me, so who is going to pay for the chair?  I laughed while cursing her under my breath, and then said I would cover it.  Luckily, I have yet to receive a bill!

A few weeks later, I was traveling to London Kentucky.  London is about 1.5 hours south of Lexington Kentucky.  I flew out to Kentucky on a Sunday and was spending the afternoon driving around the beautiful Kentucky countryside.  Well as I was driving down this one country lane, I was in a serious auto accident.  I was traveling about 10 miles an hour down the road back toward the Interstate when another driver was going the opposite direction at 40-50 miles an hour.  He was coming off the top of a hill and did not see me until he had crashed until me.  I did not see him until I looked out my window after the accident and saw his car in the ditch.  I was not seriously injured luckily I had a seatbelt and an airbag which protected me.  In addition, I was lucky to have a rental car that had the On-star system, which called the EMT’s for me and told them where we were.  I could go in to more detail about what happened, but it is sufficient to note that I am feeling better and it looks like everything is going to work out in the end.   Here are some photos:

The accident scene

My Car

The other drivers car

Look at the window, YIKES!

As you can see this has been a very crazy first six weeks of a new job.  I hope that these types of things will stop and I can just get into a routine.  I will be traveling a lot in the next few weeks and we are moving into our new house so it will be crazy, but a routine should be close around the corner.  I hope!

I am just starting to realize how big of a deal this home ownership thing is.  There is so much to think about! There’s setting up utilities, carpet cleaning, pest controlling, lock changing, moving in, unpacking and organizing, buying new furniture, some repairing (luckily we don’t have much of that), and updating (not much of that either). And I’m sure there’s hundreds of things I haven’t even thought of yet! It is so exciting, but a lot of work.  Plus we just started our baby registry, and I pretty much spend all my free time on BabiesRus.com now. They just have so many cute things. Except for I’m realizing there IS such a thing as too much pink. My cute husband was so good to go with me and set up the registry, and he was actually excited about it, which was really fun. By the way, here’s me at 5 1/2 months along…

Another thing that’s on my mind is teaching. I’m starting a private voice studio in my home, which makes it necessary for us to have a piano of some sort. We’ve been doing some major piano shopping lately, and I’ve pretty much narrowed it down (based on our price range). But it’s still such a big purchase, that we are kind of waiting to see if that’s what we really really want. So we just keep going to new stores and trying new things. We went to the Steinway store yesterday, and it was quite an experience. If any of you didn’t know, Steinway pianos are a big deal. They are the only pianos in the world that are handcrafted (so they say), which means that only .001% of the population of the world can afford the $70,000 price tag. Needless to say, we won’t be one of those people. But it was interesting to go and play one just to see the difference. Frankly, I couldn’t tell too much of a difference between the Steinway and the noname brands. But that probably just means I’m not a serious enough pianist. Which I admit I’m not. So I think we’ll go with a lesser known brand that will look and sound good in our home. I’ll post pictures as soon as we decide.