Sunmer Favorites

Here are some pictures from the summer that I like.

July 4 at the beach:

View from our room during the honeymoon:
Me and Jeff during an evening walk on the beach:
The wedding:

House Update!

Jeff and I went on our honeymoon to Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, and all week long we were excitedly anticipating carpet being installed in our house. We came home and it was beautiful!

The day after we got home we had the family over to open wedding gifts with us. Everyone was so generous!
Lastly for this post, Mom came over and I helped her lay the new linoleum in the entryway. It looks so much better now!

New Arrival #1!

Welcome to the world little Liam! My newest nephew arrived yesterday around 12:30 p.m. He weighed 8 pounds and 1 ounce. I picked up my sister's mother-in-law from the airport, and along with my husband and friend we all went straight to the hospital (about an hour away).


Uncle Jeff getting a lesson on how to hold a baby from Grandma:
Big brother and Auntie Christine looking at Liam!
Big sister spending time with mom:No longer the youngest, Sean is entertained by Uncle Jeff:And the happy but tired mom:

Now Boarding Together

I was up late with my sister talking about Egypt tonight. She's gone to bed, but I was left thinking about how different next year will be from the last, what with having a husband and all. I don't know if this sounds strange, but one thing I'm really looking forward to is not having to get on a plane alone. I hate it: the unknown of who I'll end up sitting next to, the lack of meaningful conversation, no one to remember the trip with. Now I get a travel partner for life!

The Transformation

Here are some pictures of our house. It closed around June 10, and we've been working nonstop! We met some of the neighbors last night, and they were telling us about the previous owners. We are only the second owners. While they had taken great care of the house, it was all the original carpet, light fixtures, wallpaper and so on.

Okay - now to the pictures! Most of the work in the pictures involves ripping out the carpet and scraping wallpaper. The wallpaper was terrible to remove. We will never, ever, put wallpaper in a home!

From the outside, with all the carpet in the truck:
Here's the living room:
The wallpaper was finally ripped out, and we got to prime the living room and pick paint colors. We chose the upper right color:
Painting has started!The kitchen and dining area before work started...
...and after work started:
And some fun momentos from the kitchen that were quickly removed!The hallway before any work (well, without the light fixture): The hallway with wallpaper beginning to be removed:The hallway primed for paint! The hallway painted, and the ceiling too! And some views of the backyard:That's it for now. I'll post more when we make more progress. Carpet will be installed in the next two weeks!

Chastised

I've been chastised for not blogging lately. I will try in the next few weeks to post about the progress on our new house and the wedding things. It's been really fun to spend time with my family and friends! Both my sisters are pregnant and it's funny to watch them try to navigate the kitchen and dining room table and such things.

Anyway, I'll post soon. With pictures!

My Last Day

I go home tonight! The taxi will come at 2 a.m. to take me to the airport. I can't wait! Today I've sat around, cleaning, packing, checking my email. I'm so bored!! I'm just wasting time now. I have nothing else to pack, buy, or throw away.

I'm so excited to be somewhere that is a reasonable temperature and doesn't have mosquitoes.

It's so close!

Backup Plans Gone Awry

This morning in class I had a great plan. Come in to class, hand back some papers, and do a practice listening test. I had the CD player and the test packet all ready to go. I opened up the test packet and the CD was not there. Hm. I contemplated reading the script for them, but decided that is not good practice, especially as I was not about to change my voice 50 times to sound like a man!

I sent a student to the computer labs to see if one was available. They could do listening practice on the computer. They are normally available, but not today! Hm.

What did we do? We played Simon Says. That's right, the kids' game. They loved it. We played for probably 30-40 minutes. Since I had already planned to play the game later this week, I didn't feel too guilty for "wasting" a class period. We got a nice little workout - my heart rate was climbing!

Upper Egypt - The Train

Over the next few posts I'll share about our Spring Break trip to Upper Egypt. We took the overnight train about 14 hours south to Aswan then a cruise ship north to Luxor, then another overnight train back to Cairo. Here are some pictures from the train to and from Upper (southern) Egypt. We had adjoining cabins. It was fun, although sleep was kind of difficult!

Out the window: