My New Year's Resolution

For the past several weeks, I have been getting some crafts together and doing some research, preparing to put my New Year's Resolution into action. I kind of have an unusual one this year. While most people are trying to lose weight or save money or whatever, I'm trying to start a family. Brandon and I would like to pursue an international adoption this year- without incurring any debt. Now, my goal is not to complete the adoption process by the end of the year. But I would like to be a respectable way into it by Christmas. I'm thinking that we'd like to have at least a home study done by the end of the year. If we weren't trying to do the debt-free thing, I'd set a higher goal. But the process takes time and money, so my big thing for this year is trying to save as much as I can, to put toward the process. I'm also going to be fundraising by selling crafts on an Etsy store. So far I only have one item listed, but I've got several more ready to post, and a lot of stuff that's halfway completed. I'd really appreciate it if my readers would check it out, and share with their friends!

My Etsy store can be found here.

Kentucky weather is a freak show.

Yesterday was the CRAZIEST day.

I had a 4-hour test at the hospital in the morning, and check-in time was at 6, so I was up really early. I met my mom at her house and she drove me to the hospital. And we sat around (the test is really boring) and watched TV in the waiting room. There were occasional blurbs about severe weather north of us in Indiana, but everything would die down by the time it reached Louisville.

After the hospital, we ran over to Kroger to pick some stuff up for Bible study kick-off, and then intended to stop at Steak N Shake for lunch. After we checked out at Kroger, we headed for the door, and heard tornado sirens. They test the sirens every Tuesday at noon, so I asked mom if it was 12 yet. She said no. We were walking to the car and this lady came power-walking out of the store behind us, and she said that "the girl at the counter said something about a tornado warning." Uh huh. Have I mentioned that tornado warnings seriously freak me out? That's another story for another time. So we got in the car and turned on the radio, and mom was talking on the phone, alternating between asking dad if he knew what was going on (he is basically a meteorologist without a TV job) and talking to her coworkers, who were actually across the street from the Kroger we stopped at. Meanwhile, the lady on the radio is saying something about the storms heading our way, and circulation over downtown Louisville. The areas of town she is listing are on the opposite end of the county from us. Mom asked if I still wanted to stop and get lunch, and I said that I didn't because I didn't feel like eating anymore. I repeat: tornado warnings freak me out.

So we're driving back to the house, and mom calls my brother and tells him to go ahead and head toward the bathroom, one of the safest parts of the house. We take our refrigerated groceries inside and leave everything else in the car. Jonathan turns on the TV and we keep losing the satellite signal. The brief glimpse we had of the radar showed a huge gash of red covering, well, pretty much the whole city. If you weren't red, you were orange. Then the power went out. I went ahead and took my purse and my tote bag to the bathroom and sat down on the closed toilet lid and started texting my friend to distract myself. I texted Brandon, too, to let him know about the tornado warning (not that he really gets concerned over those things.) I remember mom was in the living room, still on the phone off and on, and she was looking out the front window. The wind kicked up and she said "oh my gosh" a couple of times. The wind I guess had twisted or bent the "children at play" sign across the street. She told Jonathan to get in the bathroom NOW and she came back, too. At this point I was openly sobbing, of course. Diego, my dog, was freaking out and digging in the comforter I had asked Jonathan to bring into the bathroom. The wind picked up again, and again, and I remember my mom saying something to the effect of "oh my gosh", but seriously, I was too busy crying to notice. Then there was this sound, like someone holding a microphone up to their mouth and blowing really hard. I think mom said "oh!" and I said "oh, crap" and grabbed the dog around the neck with one arm and the towel bar with my other hand (not that it would do any good), and after maybe two or three seconds, it was over. Now, when you hear a tornado, and your brain registers "hey! That's a tornado!", you honestly don't know whether it will be over in a millisecond or if the house you're in is about to be lifted off the foundation and smashed into the ground. You don't know if the side of the house is going to blow off or what. That was the craziest part for me. It kind of sounds like exaggeration, but I know what tornadoes can do. I mean, look at Joplin and all those places that got hit by those freak tornadoes last year. They came out of nowhere, and people DIED. But it passed over pretty quickly, the wind died down, and the rain started. Mom and Jonathan left the bathroom and started looking at the damage, but I was still just sitting around crying, texting my friend Zach and praying that everyone I knew was ok. I ended up calling Brandon at work, and he said "you're fine, I'm working, bye." Everything was fine over huge parts of Louisville- I even saw one tacky post by someone on facebook that the storm was a "letdown". Um, no. No, it was not, thank you.

No one lost their house and no one died, but we did find some damage when we went outside. For instance, there was a gutter laying in the yard to the left of my parents' driveway. We later figured out that it came from the far right side of the neighbor's house, to the right of my parents' house. Half of the backyard fence was down (meaning the dogs couldn't go outside), but it fell in the opposite direction that the gutter was thrown. You could see through neighbors' yards several houses down because of the fences that had broken. It was a clean, clear path of destruction. A house across the street lost a lot of shingles, rolled up like carpet in some spots to expose the plywood underneath. Tree branches (not big ones) were everywhere. Part of the gutter to my parents' house was torn off, but it was found nearby. More shingles were rolled up or strewn around yards of several nearby houses. The power was out for several hours. There was a lot more damage a little further down the street- a street on the left hand side had entire trees down, electricity poles snapped in half, powerlines down, lamp posts broken with their "lamps" thrown two doors down. Big chunks of roof were peeled up; even the plywood underneath was gone on some houses. It was just insanity. I did not appreciate it. It certainly was not the way I planned on spending my day off.

Meanwhile, everything was fine at my inlaws' house, and my house. Brandon got home a few hours after the storm and said the power was on, so after ordering some pizza for a late lunch, Jonathan and I took the stuff from mom and dad's fridge over to my house, and he got to play video games for a few hours with Brandon. The power came on late in the afternoon and mom and dad came to pick him and their food up. Bible study got canceled- mom is kind of the leader and she wasn't going to be able to go, but she left the decision up to everyone else and they decided to just go ahead and meet next week. I'm looking forward to that. Hopefully we won't have a hurricane or a blizzard or anything, though. Really, tornadoes scare me more than just about anything else, so I don't think I'd have a meltdown if different kinds of bad weather happened.

So that's how I spent my Tuesday. It was the scariest/most interesting day I've had in a while, so I came here to tell my harrowing tale, and then I'll go take myself a nap. The last 24 hours or so have been kind of exhausting.

New year, new home

Hi everyone!

I know it's been a while. That's because I don't have the internet. It's a long and depressing tale centering around the incompetence and soullessness of AT&T's employees. They're probably all gingers. But I digress.

Brandon and I have moved into our new house, after some hectic days of uncertainty. There were a few paperwork issues regarding our house (not our fault, stuff from several years ago that was actually cleared up in 2004, and again in 2008.) But we closed on the afternoon of Friday, December 23, and moved out of our apartment on Christmas Eve. It was definitely the busiest holiday I think I've ever had. We started moving a little before 8 in the morning and I think the last of the stuff was placed in our new home around 2:30 in the afternoon. Then pretty much everyone went home and I stared at the boxes (and boxes and boxes...) while my sweet husband sat on the couch. I got things looking decent in time to head to Brandon's maternal grandparents' house for Christmas Eve. We ate and opened gifts and sat around for a bit, then headed back to the house while I continued to clean and put things away. Again, Brandon sat. It's ok, though- he worked really hard moving furniture and boxes and made about a dozen trips back and forth between our old home and our new home. I'm sure he was tired.

The next morning, my parents and my brother came over. All my life I've had Christmas morning with them and my mom's parents. Mimi and Pappaw didn't come over this year because Christmas was on a Sunday and Pappaw teaches Sunday school. After breakfast we went to church. After church we went to spend time with my dad's side of the family. After that we went straight to Brandon's dad's parents' house and spent time with that part of the family. Then we left there and went to my aunt's house. Then we went back home and Brandon's family came over. Christmas went by so quickly this year, and aside from the presents and copious amounts of fudge, it didn't feel very Christmas-y. The weather has been disturbingly warm almost every day this winter, and I didn't get my Christmas decorations up until Christmas Eve (I didn't see much of a point in decorating the apartment since we would be leaving it before the actual holiday.) I had a good Christmas, though. I'm very thankful to have my house. I am also thankful to live so close to so much of my family. Holidays are busy times for us because there are soooo many people to see, but really that's a good thing. An overwhelming majority of my family (and Brandon's) lives in Louisville. Quite a few of us cover the same few zip codes, too. So it's a good thing.

We didn't do anything special for New Year's. We ordered a pizza but technically that was our anniversary dinner (a day early) and watched The Office on DVD. It was a good time. We're pretty low key...most of the time. We celebrated our second anniversary on the 2nd of this month. Go, us! That's 10.5 times longer than Kim Kardashian was married, just FYI.

And that's all I have to say at the moment. Figured I'd better get the details on here while I had the opportunity.