Merry Christmas!

I'm not sure why, but for some reason, I'm on a blogging fail.  One of my New Year goals will be to blog more consistently.  You can chalk the absence up to Christmas gift making, errands, and house care.  It won't get any better during Christmas break, so you'll just have to wait for me to go back to sharing all our boring stories and updates.  

Christmas this year will be different for us.  We aren't flying out to New Jersey to see Steve's family like we usually do.  Instead, we'll be staying local, visiting his siblings in Cincinnati  and spending some time with my family in Indiana.  Christmas is our favorite time of year, not just because of seeing family and the break from work for Steve, but we love all that goes with Christmas -- lights, music, cookies, hot cocoa. . . Mmmmm

We started early this year on the Christmas music/movies.  I am not ashamed to admit I watched White Christmas at the end of October -- this snow from Sandy should count!  Christmas music has been listened to since the beginning of November.  By the middle of November, I had all my Christmas decorations up and the lights up outside; although, we didn't turn on our lights until after Thanksgiving!

Since we have been enjoying all our decorations, we wanted to share them, for you to enjoy, too!

(It is really hard to try to capture a picture of our Christmas lights & the house now that it gets dark so early! You will just have to trust me that our lights are way prettier than this picture.  We've even gotten several compliments on our lights!)

(What do you do with a little tree??  Put it inside an old fireplace!  I went crazy this year and made the fireplace in our room very festive.)

(Fireplace in the Living Room -- Look how nice that tv looks on the wall!  So glad we, well Scott, mounted it :-)!)

(Christmas tree in the living room.  Notice all my nutcrackers hidden throughout the pictures.  I now have 17 nutcrackers and hoping that number just keeps climbing!)

(It's really hard to tell in the previous picture, but there are bows above each of the windows.  They blend right into the wall, which makes them perfect Christmas accents.  My mom is an awesome bow maker & made these for me while visiting back in November.  Thanks mom!)

(No Christmas decorations are complete without a nativity.  I have 3 set-up throughout the house.)

(How better to celebrate the 12 days of Christmas than with 12 nutcrackers each showcasing 1 day of Christmas!  My grandma used to collect (not by choice) nutcrackers and I was given this set after she passed away.  What a great way to remember Grandma!)

(The windows in the kitchen are decorated with window clings.  Now the windowsill is full of Christmas pictures and cards, but I didn't take a new picture.  Washing dishes now is a much pretty process.)

(Even Ramses is in the Christmas spirit!)

(We've been having lots of issues with Ramses drinking bottle.  The blue one -- in previous picture-- would just drip out all the water and make his bedding all wet.  He doesn't like wet bedding -- we'd find him all the way on the opposite side of the cage hiding under the dry food dish.  So we bought a new bottle.  The wire is too small and wouldn't stay attached.  So we gave Ramses a new friend -- The Viking Nutcracker to hold up his water bottle.

 (Last but not least, I have to brag on my husband.  A few weeks ago, he came home with this beautiful winter mix.  These flowers were absolutely beautiful for almost 2 weeks!  No he wasn't in the doghouse, he just simply got them "just because"; and yes, he did score big brownie points for these flowers!)

Mischief Managed

Thanks to my favorite brother & husband, the "picture storage full" conundrum has been solved.  I don't really understand the solution other than that some how the pictures are shared between google+ and picasa. I don't know.  I'll have to go back through the 901 photos already on the blog and upload them the new way to empty out the storage.  So that's kind of ridiculous. . .

Also, in solving the issue, we discovered there's new storage available on my picasa account, so we're hoping we aren't being charged for that :-/.

Here are the pictures from Gabbie's visit last week!

(Ha ha, she loves taking pictures with my camera.  Most of the pictures are of random things like sippy cups and fingers.  This was the best picture with us in it -- thanks to front facing phone cameras!)

(She begged to take baths just so she could play with some McDonald's toy Chipmunks.  She played with them for over an hour in the tub one day!  Her poor little knees aren't used to playing on a ceramic tub & she came out with some burns & bruises :-/)

(Whenever a niece comes to visit, I'll let them chose some little special craft.  She chose to paint your own tea set, only she painted about 3 pieces.  I think I'll save the rest and have the other nieces paint the left items.)

I know, I know

I know. . it's been waaaaaaay too long for a real blog update.  Part of the hiatus has been because I've been busy and the other part is that not much is going on that is blog worthy - ha!

All last week I was knee deep in a new house project.  I was going to just repaint a spare bedroom, when I discovered that it there was wallpaper underneath the current paint.  I wasn't going to take the wallpaper down, but I noticed a spot that was peeling up.  Before I knew it, half the top layer was off; however, there was at least 2 more layers stuck on the wall.  So all last week I worked on soaking and peeling off layers of wall paper.  You will have to wait for pictures in a later blog post.

Last Friday, Steve and I got all dressed up and went to a P&G Lima Plant Christmas Party at the Inn at Ohio Northern University (Steve's parents' Alma Mater!).  We were not thrilled about the party in the beginning because it started at 8pm and Ada is 30 minutes away.  By the end of the week, Steve is burnt out and the last thing he wanted to do was dress up and go schmooze at a party.

When we first got there, none of his close co-workers were there.  So we did the awkward chat with some people until people started to show up.  The theme was Casino Night and there were lots of games set up.  We hadn't planned on staying long, but we jumped in with some friends to learn how to play Craps.  Steve was a great roller and we both got in on the action.  Soon, we found ourselves up (we had play money to gamble with) at the Craps table, so we headed off to Black Jack.  The dealer at the Black Jack table was pretty funny and we had a good time, but we started to lose quite a bit there.  We were debating on leaving halfway through, but more people got into the games and pretty soon it was 11:30pm, the tables were shutting down and we were bidding on prizes with our earnings (which by the way, on the last black jack hand, we both put all our money down and the dealer had Black Jack and we lost everything.  The dealer quickly changed his hand and gave us a bunch of money instead of following the rules -- ha!).  At the prize auction, we one The Shawshank Redemption DVD!  What a fun night with work friends!!

We spent this week with a little visitor from IN -- Gabbie!!  While she was here, we took her to see Christmas Lights in Bluffton, saw our Owl friend, went shopping, colored, played Nintendo  and much more!  I have pictures from her visit, but I'm having issues with the blog.

Who knew that you were only allotted so many photos to put on the blog for free?!  I definitely didn't know and am now out of photo space.  Hmmmm, what to do, what to do.  I could go back and delete photos from previous posts, but what's the fun in that?!  The whole point of the blog is to document our lives, and taking off photos doesn't achieve that purpose!

Apparently all the photos on the blog are stored in my picasa albums which are maxed out, so we have to figure out how to resize those photos without screwing everything up.  Steve is doing some research to see if there's a loophole, so if anyone has advice we'd appreciate it!

So for now, you're stuck with words and no photos :-/

Happy Thanksgiving!

Steve and I have a lot to be thankful for this year!  From a new house to new friends, and even a couple trips to Europe.  But, we are mostly thankful for a loving God and Christ's pure sacrifice.  God has been good to us!

Things have been a little crazy in our household, hence the long blog hiatus.  I was sick and out of commission for a couple of weeks and have finally bounced back and pulled the house back together (for some reason the status of the house is directly correlated with my status).

My mom even came for a few days to be with me after being down.  I'm extremely blessed with an awesome mother who drops everything to spend time with her kids (and grandkids!).  Thanks mom!  While she was here, she helped me get up all our Christmas decorations -- yeah that's right, our Christmas decorations were up 2 weeks prior to Thanksgiving.  That's how we roll!

Thanksgiving crept up on us quickly!  We had a total of 4 thanksgivings this year -- whew!  My tummy is a pretty happy camper right now.  We celebrated Thanksgiving at a church dinner, friend (Steve's coworkers) dinner, and 2 dinners with my family.  This year, we changed things up and spent our break visiting my family. Usually, we spend the holiday in CO with Steve's family and celebrate with my family on a different weekend.  We spent Thursday at an aunt's thanksgiving (just Steve & I, my parents, & 1 sister) and Saturday my mom hosted a Thanksgiving with the rest of my siblings and family.

We returned from our long weekend listening to Christmas music to a house decked out with Christmas (see now why I decorated so early??)!    We are so ready for Christmas, even though we haven't finalized all our Christmas plans yet.  Now to finalize our Christmas lists, purchase gifts, and enjoy the Christmas season!

Birdies

Who knew that Steve was so into birds?  We live in a perfect area for him, as there are all sorts of little birds flying around.  Over the summer, he put out a suet block, but the squirrels ate it right away.  After some research, he bought a window bird feeder that squirrels are unable to reach.

All summer long, we were convinced that the birds were too scared to eat out of it because of the reflection in the window.  Steve switched out the food a couple times, but we never saw any birds.  In early fall, I was sitting in the living room and heard a noise and discovered a little bird in it!  I tried to take a picture, but I had to move to get the camera, which scared the bird and resulted in a very fuzzy picture.  Steve just had to take my word that there was a bird in the feeder.

Since then, Steve has seen birds in it, but we've never been able to take a picture.  As soon as we move in the house, the bird jumps ship and doesn't return.  Until yesterday --- I caught a bird in the act!

(Not the best picture, but you can totally see the bird in the feeder!  I watched either the same bird, or multiple birds, come in and out of the feeder for awhile.  Steve claims that the feeder being at an angle has intrigued the birds to come into it -- sure dear!)

Ever since we've lived here, we've heard owls hoot randomly.  We've talked to the neighbors and were told that a big owl lives in one of our trees, but we've never been able to see him.  I've even had the neighbor came over and tell me that we missed it!  

Last Friday night, we were headed to meet friends at the movies.  We had just gotten out of the driveway when Steve parks the car in the road and jumps out of the car saying "THE OWL!".  Ha ha, he had seen it swoop across the street and land in the tree across the street from our house.  It was too dark to take a picture but it was neat to finally see an owl!

Yesterday, when Steve came home, he came straight in and said -- "The Owl's outside!  I have to take a picture!!"  He ran out and soon brought back some pretty neat shots of the owl in our tree.  I don't understand his fascination with all birds, but I definitely understand his fascination with owls!

(There's something about the eyes that just fascinate me.)

(Steve's doing research to see if we can figure out what kind of owl this is.  So if you know -- let us know!)

(So pretty!)

We're not sure if the owl we saw Friday night is the same as the one we got the pictures.  We'll have to keep our eyes and ears open and see if we can find another and document it.

Refrigerator Repairman

I have now added a new skill onto my resume -- refrigerator repairman.

We've been noticing some temperature issues in our fridge over the past week.  At first I was just noticing that items in the drawers were freezing -- like the carrots and lunch meat.  So at first we thought the fridge temperature control was up to high, so we turned it down.  Stuff in the drawer was still frozen while items on the shelves were warmer than they should be.  So we turned the temperature back up and discovered there's a control knob for just the drawers.  We put it on the warmer setting, but didn't notice any change.

We didn't think much of it until a few days later when I went to get chocolate chips out of the freezer door.  Everything in the door had thawed!!  I immediately checked the meat on the shelves, but they were still frozen.  Weird.  I decided there was just an issue in the door and though I'd deal with it later.  That night, I went to get ice cream from out of the freezer, and the ice cream was all soft!  Ahhhhh!

So obviously, there were major issues going on.  I called up my parents -- I remember them having issues with their fridge before.  My dad gave me some advice and said I'd need to take the back panel off the inside of the freezer and see what was going on with the coils & fan.

I put all my freezer items into cooler bags, turned the freezer on the warmest setting, and started to dissassemble the freezer.  There was a layer of frost on the panel that I had to get rid of first.  Then once the panel was off, i discovered that the entire coil system was frozen over -- yikes!

(The entire coil system frozen over -- not a good sign!)

With hair dryer in hand, I began to melt all the ice.  I'd take breaks and just let the ice melt on its own.  After a couple of hours, all the ice was melted and I got the freezer all dried up.  My next task was to locate the fan and make sure it was working.  My dad said that generally, just taking off the one panel would reveal the coils and fan; however, that's not how our model worked.  After looking up the model number online (thanks dad!), I found a diagram and figured out I had to take out the ice bucket motor and another panel.  Eventually we found the fan (Steve jumped in and helped), and discovered it was working fan.  It's possible that it was frozen up too, but I don't know.  It was fine when we got to it.  

With the freezer all defrosted and dried, I began to put it back together.  I got all the screws and bolts in the right place and was almost done when I realized I had a random plastic piece left over.  I remember taking it out of the freezer, because it was just taped in, but I couldn't remember where it went.  So we made up a spot for it (the diagram I found online didn't explain its location well).  I put the ice maker back in and turned it on, then all this water started pouring through the system and got the freezer all wet.  Ugh.  This happened a few times until I gave up and turned the ice maker off. I cleaned up all the water, again.  

I got the freezer all assembled and turned back on.  Within an hour, it was back in business and cold again.  I restocked the freezer and made sure to not block the fan vent (highly likely that this was the issue).  I put a towel in the ice maker and turned it on.  If it overfilled with water as I thought it was doing, I would notice it frozen on the towel in the morning.  When I got up the next day, the towel was just cold and there was ice int he machine.  I'm guessing the system was too warm when I first turned it on.  Whew!

Now we just have to monitor the temperature and make sure it doesn't happen again!  It should also be noticed the the temperature in the fridge seems to be correct -- the stuff in the drawers are no longer frozen! Oh, and I left this out.  When we first moved in, we could get water out of the door, but recently it hasn't been working.  We've also had issues with the ice options not working in the door, but that fixed itself a few months back.  Well now, the water flows through the door again!  We have a fully functioning freezer and fridge -- yay!!  Thanks again dad for talking me through the problem!

Never-ending Leaf Raking

Steve and I spent our entire weekend working in the yard raking leaves.  Our city does a leaf collection starting this week.  They will come around to different areas and collect any piles of leaves at the edge of your yard.  Word on the street is that they come around 2x's, but we're not positive.  So we wanted to at least take advantage of the collection this week by putting as many leaves at the edge as we could.

We had a pretty good system -- I used the leaf blower in the front while Steve raked piles in the back and side yards.  The blower is easy to use and makes it nice that you don't have to bend over to pick the leaves up; however, when you get a lot of leaves blown together, moving them is a long and tedious process.  The verdict is still out on whether it is more efficient to just rake into piles or blow to the edge.

The next day, Steve worked on blowing leaves in our neighbor's yard to help them out while I went around and picked up the piles he had raked.  I have a very secret system of pickup up leaves involving a snow shovel -- so secret that no pictures are allowed.  Only a select few have witnessed the pick-up system.  I put the piles of leaves into our big rolling trash bin.  Once the bin was full, I'd wheel it to the front yard and dump it into piles on the edge.  Steve just wanted me to put it into a bag, but with my pick-up system, it was easier to dump the leaves into the bin. The extra work of dumping the bin was worth it.

We don't know when the city will pick up the leaves, we just know they started in our district today.  As I type up this blog, it seems that our trees have decided to drop the rest of their leaves. At times, it looks like its snowing leaves through the windows.  It looks like Steve and I have a lot more leaf raking to do.  Why can't the trees all decide to dump the leaves at once?!  At least this year, we're being proactive on picking them up; unlike last year where we were raking up soaking wet leaves in the middle of December because the previous owners didn't do it.

(Steve preferred to use the bamboo rake that his parents bought for us.  Unfortunately, Steve's raking is a little more intense than the rake was prepared for, and some of the tines came out.  It should be salvageable, though.)

(Me and my awesome leaf blowing skills.)

(Our pile along the edge of the yard.  I'm pretty sure we could double this pile just be raking the yard again.  Oh the joys of having trees!)