Just kidding

After only two hours of having hot water, we left to run some errands and realized that , for the third time in 16 days, the pilot light was out on the water heater and it will not light for us. :(

What is going on?!?!?

HOT water

It is amazing how a little thing like not having hot water impacts your life. After 9 days of not having any around here, our water heater has been repaired and we have water heating up as I type. We will finally be able to take hot showers here as well as wash dishes and clothes without having to heat up pots of water on the stove.

We are very excited!

1 week of vacation gone

Justin has only one week of vacation left, I have 2 weeks until classes start.

Our vacation started last Saturday, getting ready to head up to the Dallas area to celebrate an early Christmas with my family. We also realized that the water heater was out again and although I kept doing exactly what the plumber did to re-light the pilot light it wasn't working for me. :( At least we were leaving that day.

We celebrated our first Christmas of the year on Sunday, the 23rd. It was fun to surprise each other - in my family there are usually not many surprises because people make wish lists of stuff they want. This year most of us shopped on our own - no wish lists. For our "Christmas" dinner we had beef fajitas and tamales - also something a little out of the ordinary for my family but very tasty!

On Christmas Eve we drove from my parents' (up around Dallas) down to Montgomery to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Justin's dad's family. We originally planned to drive home (about a 75 minute drive) Monday night, then drive back out to Montgomery Christmas Day. Then with the problems with the water heater, we decided to stay in Montgomery Monday night. However, Colby changed our plans for us once again. As he has gotten older and gotten used to being around people he doesn't know very well, he has also gotten a little more bold with them. Meaning that he was a little too bold with Justin's cousin's kids who are not used to dogs. And there were also a few people there who are allergic to dogs.

So - in spite of having no hot water at home, we drove home Monday night. Christmas morning we woke up early and headed over to our friend's (Melissa) house to shower. Then we left Colby at home for the next 15 hours while we spent Christmas Day with Justin's dad's family (good thing we have a doggy door for him). It was neat to have two separate Christmases, but also a little weird, because when it was Christmas Eve it felt like Christmas was already over with.

With one week left of Justin's vacation, we still have 2 more days of no hot water until the plumber comes out to do the repair. Justin wishes that he just didn't have to go back to work - maybe we should start playing the lottery to make that happen.

what timing!

Have you noticed that I have plenty of time to post to the blog now?

This past weekend a cold front has visited us in the Houston area. We don't know if it has to do with the cold snap, but our hot water heater also went out. We thought something was weird yesterday morning when the last half of my shower was quite icy. But it was hours later when we were back home from church and realized that we still didn't have any hot water that we knew that something was wrong.

The plumber is coming out tomorrow to have a look at it and in the meantime we have some great friends who are going to let us come over to their house tonight so we can enjoy a nice warm shower.

I would much rather have the hot water heater go out in the summertime than when we are having winter weather!

And now I can breathe

The last couple weeks have been super busy for me. I know that everyone is busy around the holidays but when you are either a student or a teacher they are even more so because of finals. Luckily I am not the one having to do the studying, but writing final exams, grading them and determining course grades is no picnic. But I was all done with this on Friday - YAY!!!

On top of dealing with finals I was way behind this year getting my Christmas cards out. I typically send them out around the 1st of December - this year it was the 15th of December. But at least they are finished. I guess I should say most of them are finished - I have a few more to do for some friends in our ward.

A couple more Christmas gifts to get and then we are officially ready for Christmas!

Silly muddy Colby

It seems Colby enjoys mud baths. We took him to the dog park, after a long absence. He was pronounced cured from his hereditary mange two weeks ago, so that means he can get wet.




We had not taken him to the park because he likes to wade around in the pool there.

It did not surprise us in the least when he walked into the mud puddle.


But it took us off guard when he layed down and started crawling around in the mud.
He decided to inspect a few other mud puddles, and thoroughly enjoyed them.

We ended up at the pool, where he waded around and got most of the mud off. The arrival and interest in Colby of some larger dogs (Saint Bernard, Husky, etc) kind of freaked him out, so we left soon after.

And we are calling the decorations done!

It has been a busy couple of weeks for us, but today we finally had time to get our tree decorated and put our lights up outside. Here are some pics of our living room where the tree is.

Since we don't have a fireplace with a mantel, we use a bookcase to hang our stockings.


You can see some cute throw pillows that we have sitting on the loveseat (I hate this loveseat, but I like the pillows). The Christmas tree on the table is one that Justin's mom made a long time ago.

Have a great weekend!

Black Friday

In all the busyness of the past couple of weeks, I didn't get a chance to post about shopping on Black Friday. I typically do not shop on Black Friday, because I don't want to fight the crowds. However my older sister usually does the crowd fighting and I was caved when I thought of how many people Justin and I need to buy Christmas presents for.

If you weren't aware, Kohl's opened at 4am on Black Friday. Sherry and I got there a few minutes after 4 and ended up almost as far from Kohl's as we could have been and still be considered in the Kohl's parking lot. It was madness in the store. We waited in line for over an hour before we paid. During that time they didn't even have all the registers open at first. I made a comment to the people around us that they were probably were even letting people open credit card accounts at the registers as well. Turns out - I was right! When you open an account, you are given a certificate to save an extra 15% on your purchases for a day, so many people were taking them up on their offer to open an account. This means much more time in line. Kohl's is going to hear something from me about that.

After leaving Kohl's, we headed to Target. Luckily we weren't buying toys or fighting over the LCD monitors that they had. And we didn't have to wait in line there at all. From Target, we headed to Michael's. From Michael's we went to Bed, Bath and Beyond and from there we went to Joann's. We were back at my parents around 9am and ready for a nap!

I'm not sure if I will be out on Black Friday in the future, but it is nice to know that our Christmas shopping is almost done.

So much going on!!!

Not that we have meant to ignore our blog, but we have just been super busy!

Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving this year we headed up to the Dallas area to my (Julie's) parents' house. On the way we stopped at Justin's aunt and uncle's to see some of his dad's family and have a bite to eat. As much as Colby likes to chase after his cousin Baxter (who is half his size), he did not enjoy being chased by the Great Danes that his aunt and uncle have. I guess it serves him right, but by the next morning when he saw Baxter, he had completely forgotten how much he disliked being chased by a dog bigger than him and harrassed Baxter for 2 days.

Thanksgiving day it actually snowed!!! Of course the ground was far too warm for any accumulation, but it was the first time that I have seen snow on Thanksgiving day (even though I was at BYU for 4 years) and Justin hadn't seen snow on Thanksgiving day since his family lived in Idaho when he was a kid. Some of the flakes were super big, and Justin tried to get a picture for the blog, but I guess we needed a better camera than the ones he has on his phone or Blackberry if we had wanted to be able to see the flakes.

After Thanksgiving

We left to head back home on Saturday with plans to pull out the Christmas decorations. It rained the entire drive back and that meant no putting up Christmas lights that day. Plus I had exams to grade and Justin was busy working on something (probably Blackberry related). We did go out and get a tree though and it is still sitting undecorated in our living room. :(

Not that I hadn't been working on cards for the past couple of months, but with Thanksgiving weekend over, it meant the craft fair that my sisters and I were selling cards at was in less than a week, so I was super-busy working on cards for most of last week. Then we headed to Austin on Friday.

The Craft Fair

The weather for the fair was not good, however there were plenty of people that went to the Downtown Georgetown Christmas Stroll. It would have been nice if these people had gone to buy crafts. It was a very depressing day where we sold only about 2% of the cards we had made (not even enough to cover our booth fee). Not that we are happy for the other vendors, but it did make us feel tons better to find out that many of the other vendors were experiencing the same thing. It seems that people do not come to this for the craft fair (although they like to look at the crafts and not buy any), they come for all the free family activities. One thing that is most upsetting is that a couple different people walked past our booth, and then took pictures of our card displays! A few others came by, looked through our cards, told us how cute they were and then thanked us for the ideas before walking off.

Although we didn't sell much, we did have quite a few people pick up business cards, so we are hoping that we will unload more of this inventory that we have.

Everything else

Justin and I actually left the fair early to head back to Houston for PWC's Annual Holiday party at River Oaks Country Club. It was nice to get dressed up (in my new dress) and meet more of the people that Justin works with. But meeting everyone at once means that I won't remember or recognize any of them again and will have to be re-introduced next year.

We are hoping to get our house decorated for the holidays in the next few days, but since it gets dark so early lately, the outside lights will most likely have to wait until Saturday. I am in charge of the Enrichment Dinner at church tomorrow night (for those of you non-LDS, it just means for all the ladies at church), so that is my high-stress thing for the moment. Not to mention that I am trying to get my finals written since next week is finals week.

We are eager for 5pm or 6pm on December 21st, because it means that Justin will be off work until January 7th. Just a couple more weeks and then it is all about relaxing and getting things done around the house!