Justin's Beach House: October 2005

From MO and back

Hello everyone! Sorry it's been so long since we posted but I was home in Missouri for nine days and Justin was a busy bee about the house. Going home was great, and necessary, as I was really starting to miss my family and friends. I spent a few days in KC and hung out with my brother, went to a spa party with my cousins and hit the American Royal rodeo with Andy. One cool thing about being friends with him (well there's a lot of cool things) but one of the cooler parts is that I always do interesting things with him. I found that I enjoyed the rodeo (we normally hit horse shows together) except for the calf wrestling/tying. That just seems unneccesary. Goes to show you why I don't live on a ranch!
Got to spend time in Jeff City too and tried to help my folks settle into the new house. Saw one of my bestest friends in the world, James, and was sorry I couldn't spend more time with her. Visited with the relatives I could catch up with and spent a lot of time dog-walking (Mum has two Jack Russells that have completely replaced the children in her life!):-).
It was great to be in KC and if there were mountains nearby, I'd try to get Justin to move there. For those who haven't been there, it's one of the best-kept secrets of the midwest, in my opinion.
I went to the Nelson, a beautiful art museum, and walked around the Plaza, huge outdoor shopping/entertainment area, and hit the Valentine area to go to my favorite used book store ever, Prosperos (they have t-shirts there-for anyone who gets my name, they're only $10 and I wear a L). Tom was even kind enough to sell me an early edition of Gone with the Wind since I loaned mine out only to have it eaten by a dog. And I got to see Ms. Heather who is six months pregnant and still going strong!! We went to Lulu's Thai Noodle Shop where they incidentally also have t-shirts (remember, I'm a L).
I'll have more pics later to post but just wanted to start off with a few right now. It was wierd to be homesick for Charlotte but I was mainly because I have a house and a family here now and that's the longest I've ever been apart from Justin and, well, I always miss Oscar if I don't see him everyday! But we survived it and the boyfriend channeled his missing me into doing numerous home improvement projects such as organizing the gear closet and painting the kitchen a color best described as paprika. I'm beginning to think that a space shuttle in the atmosphere above Charlotte will be able to see the house glow. But we like it!
And for anyone keeping track, we celebrated our 8 month anniversary a little early to accomodate my travelling - a nice dinner at Lang Vans where it all started!
Okay, I'll write more later but now I need to finish laundry and wait for trick or treaters - and I hope we have lots or Justin will be taking a lot of candy to work tomorrow!

Justin the cow playing with his udders...as did many people at CarnEvil ...thankfully I'm not too jealous of a girlfriend. :-)

Justin the cow and his dead prom queen of a girlfriend. I think his costume was cuter...

What Justin did while I was away....Just kidding....he was a hard-working man and I came back to a nice neat yard and a bright paprika colored kitchen (more on that later). A big thanks too to Justin's parents for working on the yard too!

My parent's new house back in the States - it was a little wierd not being at the old place but it's a cute house.

This is a great shot of my mother (left) and Josh's mother.

Here is a silly shot of Stace and I at sis's rehearsal dinner. And no, that's not a sweat stain on my shirt - darn camera flash off a glass tabletop..

Josh and Hayden getting ready - the big day

There she is... my hottie love. The boy you should all know - my nephew Hayden. He loves her. asks for her more then he does me...

Kara and Josh, at the rehearsal dinner...

one of my favorite pictures...

a not so striking contrast shot of the hallway and bedroom. They are different colors, I promise.

This is a contrast of the koi in the hallway to the dafodil in the bedroom

Some pictures of the Dafodil guest bedroom

The Fall Cleaning

It's amazing how much clutter can amass in only four months! I decided in the spirit of feng shui that this weekend I was going to go through my oh-so-messy closet and every little pile of paper I had formed and just clean and organize. The closet alone took two hours....groan..... Oh well, it's a necessary evil.
We took the pictures of the mess (posted below) to make my folks feel better about the state of their house right now. Not only are they adjusting to a new house, but they're readjusting to the United States and this on top of full-time jobs. I'll be home in a few weeks and the last thing I wanted was for them to stress about the state of the house. I am well acclimated to mess - as long as there's food and a bed and a dog I can borrow to snuggle with, I'm all good.
Take note Missourians - I will be home from the 19 - 28 of this month and am looking forward to seeing everyone. It's been too long since I've been home and I'm a little more homesick than I like to admit. The Irwins just need to relocate to NC and it'd be alright! :-)
That's about it for tonight. We'll post pics tomorrow from our adventures in Tennesse last weekend!

Wanna See a Mess?

Justin: So, if it were April I'd call it Spring Cleaning. As it is October, I'll just call it darn messy. Not sure how it happend, but our house is TRASHED. I suppose it is the multitude of small projects we have going on at the moment, but man... Yes, I remember us saying we were going to wait on the big things for a while - and we are - we just decided to do a few smaller things in the meantime.

The guest bedroom is painted Dafodil. Yes, Dafodil. And it looks nice, thank you. And of course everything that was in that room is now scattered about the house.

We took the rest of the floor up in the kitchen and are daydreaming of having it finished one day.

The office is a mess as we are going thru and dumping things we don't need on top of reorganizing. GOOD NOTE: We have some furniture coming on Wednesday. Hopefully that will help with the clutter. I guess I'll have to go thru again and ditch what I no longer use and I HATE that because as SOON as I do, I'll need something. You all know what I'm talking about.

Stacey is reorganizing her closet... and folks, that mess is just astounding. :)

What else... the side porch is actually slowly getting cleaned off, however it always seems to the first to catch any fall out from the rest of the house.

And we won't even discuss the monster that is the Gear Closet.

All right, I need a beer and to kiss my sweet girlfriend who did most of the painting today and helped prying nails out of the kitchen floor after picking up dinner.

Be safe.
Justin out.