Thankful November Wrap-up

I haven’t had a chance to catch up with my blog since I got back from our Thanksgiving trip so being it is now the last day of November, I thought it would be a good day to wrap up my Thankful November posts.

Today I am thankful for a number of things, but first I want to talk about how thankful I am for family.  Chris and I traveled up to SD with my Dad and Stepmom last week to go visit my brother’s for Thanksgiving.  Although the 9 hour drive in the car each way was brutal from a comfort standpoint, it gave us a chance to catch up with my dad and stepmom.  Even though we are in the same greater metropolitan area, we still live an hour away from each other so it was nice to be able to catch up. 

I am also thankful that we got to see my brothers, sister-in-laws, and niece/nephew for Thanksgiving.  That was the first time all three of us and our spouses were able to be together in the same location.  Paula (and somewhat Tom) put a LOT of work into making Thanksgiving lunch and they were wonderful hosts.  Thank you for having everyone at your house for the weekend.  I think we all needed it.

I also had the opportunity to Skype with my mom on Thanksgiving Day.  It was sad to not have her there with us for the weekend, but it was good to see her face and catch up.

I am thankful for our friend Daren for watching Gypsy while we were gone.  She hates going to the kennel so it was really nice of him to watch her while we were away so that she could be comfortable in his house instead of being anxious at the kennel.

I am thankful for my friend Vicki and want to wish her a Happy Birthday tomorrow.  Although we live states away from each other and don’t get to chat as much as I would like because life gets in the way, I always know she is there if I need her.  I am grateful for her friendship.  It’s her husband’s birthday tomorrow as well.  They were born exactly a year apart.  I always thought that was kind of cool that they shared the same birthday.

I am thankful that Chris and I both have jobs that we like and that we have been fortunate to have stable income these last couple of years while the economy has been struggling.  We both have some great coworkers that makes our jobs that much more enjoyable.  We also were able to find a renter for my condo up north this year which has helped as well.

All in all, 2011 has been a really great year.  The best yet in my opinion.  I have had a lot of major life changes this past year and they have all helped me grow as a person and made my life better.  I hope the rest of the week goes well for everyone.  I know I still owe pictures of the painting of our bedroom but I still haven’t gotten around to taking a picture of the finished product.  I haven’t forgotten and will get to it eventually…

Bessie

Let the holiday family gatherings begin!

I hope everyone had a good weekend.  We had a wonderful weekend here full of friends and family.  We also started the holiday season early.

Chris and I went to the Melting Pot on Friday night for dinner.  Two hours and four courses of food later, they pretty much had to roll us out of there.  The dinner process at the Melting Pot is really an experience and it usually lasts about 3 hours.  They were not as busy as usual which cut out about an hour of time.  Personally, I would rather they have mad it last longer so that I had more time to let the food settle but we had a great time as always.  It made me very thankful for a nice date night out with my husband.  I love sharing those moments with him.

On Saturday we did the 1 hr drive over to my dad’s to celebrate Thanksgiving with my stepmom’s family.  We had a great time and were thankful to be included in the day.  I hadn’t saw my stepmom’s parents since our wedding so it was good to see them as well as the rest of the family.

Saturday evening and Sunday for football we were able to get together with some friends to hang out.  I have really fit in well with Chris’ friends here which has made my move so much easier.  I can hardly believe I have almost been here two years already.  Time flies when you are having fun!  I miss my MN and ND friends ever day but am glad that I made the move further south.  The weather this time of year makes it worth the move as well.  No snow here yet!

I am anxiously awaiting to get through these next two days so that we can head up to my brother’s for Thanksgiving.  This will be the first time all 6 of us (siblings and spouses) will have gotten together at the same time.  It should be a great time.  I will be packing Loaded Questions with so that we can get in a round or two of board game fun!

Bessie

Friday MishMash

So I haven’t kept up very well this week on the blog front.  My apologies.

Today I am thankful for my friends Mary and Kevin.  They were some of my first friends in MN and I am glad we have been able to stay in touch.  They both just accepted positions with a company in Columbus, OH and will be moving in a few weeks.  I wish them all the best in their move.

I also want to wish my dear friend Barb a happy early birthday.  I hope she celebrates the weekend and that she has a wonderful year to come.

Finally, today I am thankful for an “all-clear” on my foot injury.  I can finally go back to wearing something other than tennis shoes all the time for the first time in 4 months.  Don’t get me wrong, the tennis shoes are comfortable; they are just hard to coordinate with when I need to dress up once in a while.  Hopefully my crappy high arches hold up better now so that I don’t have to eventually have surgery.  I successfully avoided it these last few months and hope that continues.

It has been a quiet week in our house.  Nothing major going on.  We spent the evening watching football and the TV show Whitney.  I LOVE this show!  I find myself laughing out loud every time I watch it.  If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, I highly recommend it.  It was a good break from the very slow moving football game last night, but once again Tebow proved everyone wrong in the last 5 minutes of the game to score a touchdown to win the game.  All of his four starting wins this season have been very ugly, but who said it had to be a pretty win right?  I think it great that he continues to prove his critics wrong.  At least they are winning games unlike my Colts.  I gave up on this season a while ago and am hoping for a full Peyton recovery and a good first round draft pick.  It's called “Suck for Luck” for a reason!

We are both very ready for a vacation next week.  Hope you all enjoy the weekend!

Bessie

Weekend Roundup

So after a three day weekend I have a lot of catching up to do for my Thankful November.  This will be things I was thankful for from the weekend as well as today.

I want to wish a happy Veteran’s Day to all of our retired and current military members, especially to those that are my family and friends.  For the first time in a while, I can’t think of anyone that is stationed overseas at the present moment.  My generation has done a lot of tours overseas with the two wars we were fighting and for that I am grateful.  It is because of you all that I enjoy the freedom that I do each and every day.  Thank you for risking your lives for the betterment of the rest of us.

I am also thankful for technology.  The other night, we took Gypsy for a walk around the block and noticed a very bright star just off to the right of the moon.  It hadn’t moved while we were out so we knew it wasn’t a plane or satellite so when we got home, Chris went inside and grabbed his phone so that we could pull up the star app.  He held the phone up to the sky and it identified the “star” as Jupiter.  Pretty fun that at the touch of a button we are able to learn something new.

I am thankful for my awesome dog Gypsy.  Not sure what has gotten into her lately but she has been very loving these last few days.  She would always jump into my lap, sit there for a minute and jump back down to go lay down on the floor.  Not lately…lately she has been jumping up into the chair with me and lying down for at least 30 minutes.  She has even let me hug and squeeze her without getting all jumpy.  I’m not sure what did it, but I’ll keep it!  I love my puppy dog!

I am thankful for Sunday afternoon football with my husband.  It has turned into tradition that Sunday afternoon we go out and watch the first round of games with friends, and then we come home to watch the second round of afternoon games before we go to church.  It makes for a fun and relaxing Sunday afternoon.  During the second game  I usually catch up on laundry, cook, bake, nap, etc so we aren’t lazy all afternoon (unless it’s for a nap) but it makes for a fun day.

I am thankful that my coworkers like the help support my cake decorating habit by serving as guinnea pigs for my projects so that I can continue to bake and not get fat from eating it all myself.  I brought in a strawberry and blueberry “checker board” cake with cream cheese frosting and am going home with an empty container and lots of compliments. 

I think that is all for today.  I am looking forward to cuddling with my dog this evening!

Bessie

TTA Burnouts

Today I am thankful for my former coworkers in MN.  For the past 5 years I have been playing in a fantasy football league with my former coworkers from my first team in MN.  Not only do some of us live in different states now, only one of us still works for that department.  My first team in MN really made me feel welcome and I have met many of my lifelong friends (and father-in-law) from that group.  Not many people can say that they still keep in touch with former coworkers and I am blessed that this FF league has given us an opportunity to keep in touch.

Many of us have had major life changes (new marriages, new babies, new jobs, new homes, new states) and even through all of that, we can count on getting an invite each fall to join the football league.  I look forward to the challenge of beating everyone in the league (this year that is not really happening, I am about the middle of the pack) as I have 2 out of the last 5 years.  Mostly though, I look forward to catching up with everyone to see how the summer went for each of them and reminiscing about the past.

Bessie

In-Laws Visit

Hello everyone!  I hope you all had a wonderful weekend.  Chris’ mom and Mike came down to visit us this weekend and today I am thankful for them.  I am very lucky and blessed to have such wonderful in-laws.  I really enjoy spending time with them and it was great to have them in town for a few days even though it was a quick trip for them.  They started their 10 hr drive back to MN today and I am hoping they have good roads today being it was raining here when they left.

I knew my mother-in-law and Mike before I even knew Chris.  It was because of Mike that I met Chris in the first place.  I hear from other friends “awful in-law” stories but I do not have that at all.  I feel like part of the family and really enjoy spending time with all of Chris’ immediate and extended family members.

Mike did a LOT of work for us around the house this weekend.  I felt really bad that he spent his vacation time working around the house, but he taught both of us a lot of things.  They ran speaker wire for the two back speakers for the surround sound, changed out a couple of the light switches, and installed a ceiling fan.  They one project we thought would be quick and easy was hanging a shelf to put one of the speakers on in the family room.  It turned out to be the most difficult including needing an extra trip to Lowe’s to fix it.  If there is one piece of advice I can give on home ownership, it is to NEVER buy a “floating” wall shelf.  We finally ended up buying some decorative wall brackets to mount underneath the shelf so that it would hold on the wall instead of continuing to fall off the back bracket.  In doing so, we determined that the shelf itself was warped and would not lay flat on the brackets.  After resting the speaker on the shelf for a while, the shelf started to settle and the warping seemed to ease.  Needless to say there multiple people had a few choice words throughout that project.  Now we know to just buy shelves with angle brackets to begin with.  It would have saved us a lot of headache.

We did squeeze in some board game fun this weekend as well as a lot of eating out so it wasn’t all work.  All in all it was a great weekend and we look forward to seeing them again for the holidays.

Bessie

PS – as a follow up to my last posting, Grandpa is now out of the hospital with antibiotics in tow to help get rid of his pneumonia.

Grandparents

Today I am thankful for grandparents – both mine and Chris’.  We both have been blessed to have gotten to know all of our grandparents and even being in our mid-late 20’s I have 2 grandparents living and he has 3 still living and we hope they will be around for a long time to come.  I was just told this morning that my grandpa was admitted to the hospital today for pneumonia.  From what it sounds, he should be fine but they wanted to keep a close eye on him.

Also, last week I received a typed letter from Chris’ gram in PA.  She shared a few of her favorite recipes with me as well as let me know how they are doing.  She is such a sweet lady.  I have only gotten to meet her once in person but we try to talk to them regularly on the phone.  It was so sweet of her to send me that letter.  It made my whole day.  People don’t write letters anymore so I am looking forward to writing her back.  Her and Pop (Chris’ gpa) have very much welcomed me into the family and for that I am very grateful.

I hope that when we have kids someday, they will be able to know and be as close with their grandparents as we have been with ours.  It makes me sad that Chris and my grandma V never met, but we started dating a couple weeks before she passed and I was able to tell her all about him.  She was very happy for me and said that he sounded like a nice young man.  It was nice to have her approval and I know she would have loved him.  My great aunt Toni(Grandma V’s sister who passed about 1.5 years ago) also told me that same weekend that she thought that Chris had a “nice mouth” after she saw a picture of him – lol!  She said, “Most people are eyes people.  Not me.  If they have a nice mouth, that catches my attention first.”  I love it when people say exactly what they are thinking and my grandma and her sister were very good at that.

Grandpa – I wish you a speedy recovery!  Sorry I can’t be there with you today but you are in good hands with the nurses!

Bessie

I’m Singing in the Rain

Today I am thankful for two things, rain in November and the gift of being able to sing.  As I was driving into work this morning through the rain I had to sit back and appreciate the fact that it was raining out in November.  My hometown is expecting snow this weekend.  I am quite glad that we are still having rain here instead of having to deal with snow already.  I am not ready for snow yet.  Spring and Fall are my favorite months as far as weather goes so I am glad that I now live in an area where I can experience seasonal weather instead of the two seasons we had up north: Winter and Road Construction.

I also was singing along to the radio on my way into work this morning as I do most days to keep myself awake.  I am not a morning person so if I have to sing to wake my brain up for the day, I do it.  Just within the privacy of my own car J  God blessed me with a great voice for singing and for that I am very grateful.  I have been singing ever since I can remember.  I made my first public solo debut as a 1^st grader at the school talent show and never looked back.  When I was a sophomore in HS, I was ranked #5 for Sopranos in the state of ND for All-State choir.  I have had the pleasure of singing at my brother’s wedding, sang to Chris at our wedding reception in Mexico, and will be singing at my mom’s wedding next summer.  It is such an honor to be asked to play such an important role in a wedding and I was able to do it while being a bridesmaid as well (scheduled to be MoH at mom’s wedding too).

As I have gotten older, I am no longer part of a choir so I have lost some of my vocal range, but I hope to get that back at some point.  I pray that I am able to continue to sing for the rest of my life.  Music is a very big part of my life and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Bessie

November 2, 1889

Today I am thankful for my home state of ND.  122 years ago today, North Dakota was admitted to the Union when President Benjamin Harrison signed the Proclamation of Admission.  I don’t really keep track of this date, but I am a news junkie and I tend to catch up on the happenings in Bismarck each day by visiting the Bismarck Tribune’s website.  I mainly glance at the headlines of the main articles and then check the nubs of the news to see if anyone I know had a baby.  It is also Sunday tradition for me to check the Celebrate section to see who is getting married although this section is starting to make me feel old as there are kids that were not even in HS yet when I graduated that are now getting married.  I digress…

Anyway, even though I no longer live in ND, it will always hold a special place in my heart.  It is a little crazy that it has been 6 years since I lived there last.  It doesn’t seem that long.  A lot has changed up there since I left.  Every time I go back to Bismarck for a visit, I am amazed at how much it has grown over the past 6 years.

To top that off, the whole western half of the state is now being referred to as Boomtown, USA as a result of new technology allowing for the oil under the state to be drilled.  I remember travelling to Williston for my brother’s basketball games and hating the trip because it was such a long drive and there was nothing there other than the Super 8 hotel with a swimming pool.  With this oil boom growing as quickly as it is, people are now living in their cars because they can’t keep up with the housing demand.  It is almost the exact opposite of what the rest of the country is experiencing in this economy.  I am very happy for the state and the condition of the economy up there and hope that the crime and small town feel are able to remain intact as this boom continues.

I have many fond memories of ND including faint memories of partaking in the 100^th Anniversary of the state 22 years ago.  I look forward to my visits back to see family.  I can only hope the next 122 years of ND are as beautiful and as prosperous as the last 122 have been.

Bessie

Things I am Thankful For

For those of you that follow my blog, last November, I tried to post something I am thankful for for every day in the month of November leading up to Thanksgiving.  I can’t guarantee a post every single day but if I do miss a couple of days, I will make up for it in the next posting.  Also, we painted our master bedroom this past weekend so I hope to sneak in another post in the next week to show you pictures of the finished project.

Day 1 – Today I am thankful first and foremost for my husband.  I gush about him a lot on here and maybe it’s because we are still in the honeymoon phase, but I truly am blessed to be married to my best friend.  I had a rough day a few weeks ago, and when I got home from work, I ended up unloading a lot of built up frustration from the day on Chris.  I tend to do that once in a while as I don’t like to share with others when I am having a hard day, but every once in a while I let it all out at once and usually end up in tears.  I used to do this with my dad prior to Chris coming along and unfortunately he has now inherited the having to listen to me when I am upset.  He was so sweet.  He listened, helped me feel better about everything, made sure we had a fun night the rest of the evening, and the next day when I came home from work, he had gone out and bought me flowers.  Those flowers made my whole day.  It was completely unexpected and unnecessary but it made me love him even more.  I tend to be a pretty independent woman so to have someone else take care of me once in a while is nice.

My favorite part of each day is coming home from work and seeing his face.  I love that man with all my heart and I am grateful that I was delayed on a flight 6.5 years ago to be able to meet Mike and in turn meet his step-son Chris.  It was a work of God that brought us together and I wouldn’t be where I am right now if it wasn’t for that one plane ride.

-Bessie