Say it with iPods

Chris and I got engaged over the family vacation from which we just returned! We are both so happy! And now the most FAQs are

1. When's the wedding? to which I have to say, we don't know but are considering either June or September, 2009. It will be a small "GREEN" beach wedding and that's about all we've decided so far.

And

2. How did he do it? Well, we were on the first night of our little river trip to New Braunfels with the family and after settling the kids in for the night, Chris asked me if I wanted to go for a drive. He said he had been looking at the map of the area and there was meant to be some nice scenic overlooks around. We had, earlier, been at the Canyon Lake Dam and watched the sun set over the hills so I was prepped for more gorgeous scenery in the winding river roads of New Braunfels. We kept hitting dead ends and closed roads at first so I was beginning to like the idea of finding a bar and going out for a pitcher of beer but Chris was determined so I just enjoyed the drive and the company. We found a little hill with a great view of the stars and got out to have a look. Chris and I are notorious star gazers anyways so this was simply amazing.

Then Chris told me that he had a present for me and to close my eyes and hold out my hands. I did and he gave me one of the brand new iPod shuffles that's tiny with a little clip on. He had the clip of the iPod engraved with the words "Then it's Love, Yes it's Love" - lyrics from an Echo & the Bunnymen song. I was very happy with the iPod and opend it up all unsuspecting and put in the head phones. The first song playing was that Echo song - What if We Are.

The new iPod shuffle talks to you. You press a button and it tells you the name of the song. So he told me to press the button to find out the name of the song. I did and the little digital voice came back with "Melissa, I love you. Will you marry me?" So I looked at Chris like, Wait, What was that??? and he pulled out the ring and repeated the words from the iPod. I said Yes! It was so romantic and wonderful and perfect.

Not only did I get a gorgeous engagement ring, a wonderful fiance, and a nice star-gazing evening, but I also got one of the new iPod shuffles! Really, though, I couldn't be any happier.

Chelsea is a Licensed Driver

My daughter got her driver's license on Thursday. Chris has been teaching her to drive for the mental health of all involved. I'm a very nervous passenger and have an unnatural fear of falling off the road into the ditch or over a cliff edge. I have no idea why but I recognize that it is my problem and not necessarily that there is anything wrong with the driving. So when I've taught Chelsea to drive in the past, I have really freaked out and it has, on occasion, ended with both of us in tears, me scared to death and Chelsea wounded as if she couldn't do it. This is all my own fault.

So Chris took over teaching the rules of the road to Chelsea and she took her driver's test on Thursday during spring break. I must say that she is an excellent driver. Way to Go Chels!

House Hunting

Chris and I looked at a house today that I loved immediately. In terms of changes that would be necessary to the house there are only two minor things we could note - a carpet change in one upstairs room and a new fence all the way around. Otherwise, the house was absolutely perfect! It has loads of space! Three bedrooms with extra space between the kids' rooms for a game room, an upstairs office area for the computers and an extra room downstairs for a den/library which we've wanted to have for a while. There are lots of great windows and great landscaping and a nice, not-too-big back yard but with just enough space and a magnolia tree. It has a sunken tub and shower in the master bath and an ironing space in the walk in closet. The kitchen isn't the biggest attraction but it's still nice with enough counter space. The pantry is a little small but it will be fine. It's on a corner lot on a small cul-de-sac with a park on the street and walking distance to a Randall's and little strip center of shops.

We feel like we should look at at least one other house so we don't just buy the first house we see but this one really would be perfect. There is another house on the same street also for sale so we're going to look at that one as well. The location is perfect for us. It's zone to different schools though. Chelsea will have to choose what school she wants to go to - Lake where she is now and I'll sign and out-of-zone form and she'll just drive there or Brook where she was a Freshman and which we'll once again be zone to. Chris and I will be marginally closer to Houston and our jobs. We pass this neighborhood on the way there now.

I'm very excited about the move now. Before it seemed like it would be this daunting task of trying to find a suitable house that meets all of our combined needs but this one nailed it on the first try. I'm amazed.

LOVE

Lessons Learned from Making a Ding Dong Cake

1. If you go to bed while the almond bark is drying on the cake you could wake up to find the top half hardened into place slightly askew of where you left it and trails of marshmallow ooze dripping down the sides of the bottom half. This doesn't create a complete ding dong look exactly.

2. You can't push candles through a hardened shell of almond bark without first cutting tiny X's with a knife into the top shell of the cake.

3. You need a sharp knife to cut the cake into wedges. But it will fall apart anyway - there's a hard chocolate outer shell and a creamy marshmallow center.

4. This cake tasted just exactly like a ding dong if even more delicious. It was the sweetest most chocolatey most marshmallowy goodness ever. It was, in fact, unfinishable.

5. There is a reason ding dongs come in small packages and this rule of life should be followed. Only one of Colin's guests, out of all of us eating cake, was able to finish his whole piece. The rest of us were incapacitated.

Nerf wars are currently in progress. I've deemed my area a no-fire zone.
We're having fun!
LOVE

The Great Ding Dong

I'm currently making Colin a birthday cake. He likes ding dongs and wanted a cake that was like a giant ding dong. So here's the idea. I have made two round cake halves of a Pilsbury devil's food chocolate cake. Then I melted a package of chocolate flavored almond bark. I've iced the bottom of the cake which is currently setting. Once it's dry I will flip it onto the cake plate and cut out a section of the middle. I will fill the middle with marshmallow creme - the kind of marshmallow creme from a jar that you never really knew what to do with before. Well, I think its for making ding dong filling because I've never really used a jar of marshmallow filling before. Anyway, after filling that hole I will cut out a section of the other half and heap the marshmallow up a little to fit into the hole in the top half. Then I'll pour the almond bark all over the top and sides. It should be set and solid by morning. We will be totally ready for this party by tomorrow! I'm very excited!

My nephews are coming to the sleep-over party which should be fun. I like the idea of Michael and Justin getting to know Colin better. They need to hang out more. They will essentially be like cousins sort of. Anyway, Chris is picking them up first thing tomorrow after he gets off work which he's leaving early. Then, with the boys, Chris is going to pick up Colin from school so they can be home by 3:30ish to wait for the other guests. I'm leaving work a little early tomorrow - like 4:30 so I should be home in time to join the fun.

We're ordering pizzas for dinner and having ding dong cake and ice cream. The boys will all have a nerf gun war using the nerf gun arsenal that Colin has collected. In the morning, I'll make pancakes for breakfast which is Colin's favorite breakfast. Colin's friends from school and after-care program will leave around 10 - 11 and then we'll take Colin and my nephews out to Jack Brooks Park for disc golf. I think they'll love it!

I formed a team at work to raise scholarships for kids going to UH's Bauer College of Business. It sort of fell together so if you have any fund raising ideas or items to donate for sale on our online auction - please share. We haven't come up with a team name yet. Maybe we'll auction off the naming rights to our team. That should be fun. So anyway, we'll be raising money for scholarships for the next couple of months - till the end of May. Anything helps!

I gotta go check on my ding dong cake. I'll take pictures.

Time Gets Away from Me

Eight days into February before a post. Argh! I'm not meeting my goals at all.
I've added Carmen's new French Blog to my roll and removed Chris since he hasn't posted in more than 6 months. Check out what is happening with Carmen here.

Below are some shots from Christmas that I finally got from Chris; some shots of Carmen, Kevin, and Carmen's Aunt Linda who we partied with at Christmas time; and some random shots from disc golf games we have recently played. Oh and perhaps a shot of Chris with his new Prius.

Chris told me a week or so ago as we drove along in his new car that the Prius truly suits him and he feels very at home as a Prius owner. He went on to explain how it fits in with his Go Green mentality and plan as well as his high-tech geek personality and the secret compartment loving stasher he fancies himself. It's also quite nice in terms of a family car and he feels better about being able to drive all of us around in his own car as it has a lot of space. The Prius really is a nice car. I have to agree.

Colin LOVES him some Granddad! I think that Granddad is definitely Colin's hero. AND he always gets just what Colin wants for Christmas every year. So here he is getting thanked in Colin's favorite way - the big squeezy hug.









Carmen and Kevin. Ah! La amour.

This was the night they stayed with us in Clear Lake.
















Here's an action shot of Chris chunking his frisbee at Jack Brooks Park on hole 11.











Here's Chris in action again on Hole 12 at Spring Valley Disc Golf course.















Here's a pic of me and Honey girl at hole 13 at Jack Brooks Park. What a gorgeous day in January in the great state of Texas.















Here's Chris with the new Prius out at Jack Brooks Park in January right after he bought it. It was actually here that the car got it's first ding. A white car apparently opened the door into the Prius. Chris wasn't too worried about it.















Chris bought me a new disc golf bag at the pro shop on the Spring Valley course. It's exactly like his new bag only pink! And I love it!!! My favorite part about it is that it holds my drink (up to a liter size bottle of water or gatoraid so that I don't have to hold it separately. I can also carry a lot more discs but the first day I had it, I did not see this as all that advantageous. The ability to carry a host of discs begets actually doing so and my bag was considerably heavier as I went from 4 discs to 9.
















Today, Chris and I walked the new course at Jack Brooks Park. It's still a little under construction but is being built to be a world class course with a lot of challenge. This year the World's Biggest Disc Golf weekend is happening in Houston, Woot! but like ON my birthday weekend - so not so woot maybe. Shouldn't it all be about me?

Anyway, while walking the new course today Chris and I carried 2 frisbees each - a new Oddessy mid-range and the wheel for both of us. The course was treacherous and we decided we need new shoes to do those hills. But here's the fun part - Chris found this block of wood that had been marked on three sides by some disc golf buddies but the 4th side of this block said this. We loved it and left it near the hole where we found it.














So that's it for an update.
I found a good price on a new wind shield that I'm going to have installed soon. I did my taxes and I'm getting a nice refund which will go entirely towards my debt. I'm still trying to reduce debt. Chris and I are going to be house hunting and spending the next few months cleaning out Chris's old house and putting it on the market. There's lots of busy-ness all around us.

much LOVE

My Family Frustrates Me

This sort of falls under not having anything nice to say and so I should say nothing at all. But at the same time I'm not going to sit idly by with my feelings bottled up festering. And what better place than the internet for a rant.

My mom suffers from obsessive hoarding disease. Her house is overrun with boxes. There are whole rooms that are unavailable to her and the rest of the inhabitants of the house - my dad and two brothers - because they simply became too full of stuff and eventually blocked off. Except for the main bathroom which just simply became too broken to utilize so it was closed with an Out of Order sign for the last several years. There is a path from the front door to the living room, some space in the living room for a few people, some space in the breakfast room for one person - my dad, generally; some space in the kitchen and my mom's bedroom and one working bathroom. No front two rooms, no dining room, and no clear hallways. It looks bad and its embarrassing. I remember the first time Chris saw my parents house - I was mortified that he had to go in there. Colin has still never been over there and I don't want him to go.

Well my dad had knee replacement surgery a couple of months ago and from that developed a staph infection which hospitalized him for several days until they released him to go home. But home was no place for him. He has not been able to take a shower in a month - he just gets sponge baths. He can't move from room to room easily with his walker because the path between the boxes densely stacked 6 - 7 feet high on all sides is not wide enough for his walker and he had to scoot sideways with a walker to move around in his own house.

This enrages me. I am so angry about it that I could just spit.

Several of my siblings and I decided to take matters into our own hands and coerce my mother into moving her boxes to a storage unit just temporarily until my dad can walk around again and then she can have her stuff back. This ensued fights. It was ugly. My mom screamed at me that I was making her out to be a monster. Which maybe, on some level, I was. Reason didn't seem to work so perhaps I slipped into blame. She agreed to "condense" some of the boxes so that there were fewer of them which turned into 4 solid days of one sibling or another going to my parents' house going through boxes.

She has a problem and no one will stop her. She can't part with anything. In cleaning up my mother's house, I found a pile of broken things covered in dust including 3 broken vcr's that would cost more to repair than they were worth. And she insisted that she wanted all of those things. The next day when she went to church my dad told us to get rid of that pile - into the trash it went. I'm sure she hasn't missed her broken things. She had 2 TRUCK LOADS of boxes of video tapes that had been pulled out from under STACKS of other boxes and out from under the dining room table just to make room for some of the boxes of "inventory" that she allowed me to take to Chris's house for storage insisting the whole time that she needed those movies. Who even has a VCR anymore? And how would she know what movies she has when they've been under all the other stuff for years now? These are just the little things. The things that are mentionable on the web. I'm frustrated beyond my wits.

Unfortunately, the only actual removed items from my mom's house to this day are the video tapes at Chris's and a truck bed full of the trash that she decided she could part with. Some trash she insisted on keeping. One pile of boxes is actually empty boxes that she 'might need' but won't move, even for the health of her husband. Does this make her a monster? I don't know. Define: monster.

None of this inventory / condensing / not agreeing with the plan was part of the plan. The plan was to clear out the boxes once and for all now that there's something that should have been more important than the boxes. It was supposed to be the perfect plan - mom would finally "have" to give up all her crap-filled boxes because times have changed, they are aging, my dad is in very poor health and what a great reason to change old bad hoarding habits! It didn't work.

What was supposed to be a moving truck hauling away all the stuff to a storage unit for my DAD, turned into something totally about my mother instead and an unorganized organization of the stuff. Problem is that there's no place to put anything in order to organize it. Literally - there is no room. There have been so many fights over these THINGS that everyone in the family has now pretty much given up. Its no longer about my dad at all and he doesn't seem to care much when my mom is in the room.

There's also been fights about a storage unit. Some of the siblings don't want to pitch in because it wasn't their idea to put the stuff in storage and my mom is against it anyway. Some of the siblings want to only pay for a 7th of the storage unit because they feel everyone should pitch in. Some say it should only be for a set amount of time during which mom needs to liquidate her inventory and give up this "business." I say mom needs to pay a 7th also since it's her stuff and her business should be making enough in sales to spend a 7th of the cost of storage. Except that she has so much stuff, so many boxes, so much 'inventory' that only the largest 20' x 24' storage unit will hold it all by our estimations and she insists on having a climate controlled unit on the ground floor so that she can go in to get items if she sells them, she wants isles and shelves so she knows where everything is, and she wants it in her name.

Anyway, its tearing us all apart as a family trying to help my dad. I wrote an e-mail to my family expressing my opinions about the matter which was followed up by an even uglier e-mail from my sister-in-law to my whole family. She said to everyone that she agreed with everything I said but went on from there to express feelings that were much stronger and full of anger and hate. So now we have both been ostracized from the family.

I hope all of this can get resolved somehow but I don't have any ideas for now. As it stands, I don't have to do anything anymore. Which is fine with me. NONE of this was originally my idea in the first place. I was approached by Brian & Sheryl and Kevin and Sophia about this. They wanted to invite my parents over to Kevin and Sophia's and have the whole house moved out while they were away so that they could come home to a clear space. I was against that plan and for including my mom in the solution but there's just too much stuff to deal with any of it in a logical way.

May I never be so attached to any THING that is causes a wedge between me and my immediate family members. That's all I hope for personally.