Our Smoky Mountains

This is a view of our new place from the street. That's the front door and the living room window. On the left are the master bedroom windows. There are two drive ways, one on either side, and that's our garage back there on the right, but it's mostly for storage and lawn equipment, not for a car. The staircase you see goes out to the street, so we don't really use it much, but it looks nice. One of these weekends I'm going to work on removing weeds and brush from that front yard. We're responsible for yard maintenance, so I figure I should take it seriously. Teresa just bought me a rake and shovel too! Isn't she thoughtful? Oh, and by the way, this picture was taken just after mowing with my fancy electric mower. If you look real close at the front door, you can see Hannah wondering what I'm doing.

Here is the back of the house. That door leads to the kitchen and the windows are to the 2nd and 3rd bedrooms. The larger bedroom will be a guest room and study. The third bedroom is slowly becoming a music room where I have my keyboard and stereo and various other items that don't fit anywhere else in the house. Again, I had just mowed the lawn, so it looks real nice. It had gone three weeks prior to this. It did take me two hours though. Even with a nice lawn mower, the lawn is just big. Speaking of the lawn.


Here is the back yard. It's fenced on the sides and at the back, which you see here, but not the front to either side of the house yet. I'm working on fixing that so we can let Hannah out without a leash. Supervised, but free to run. I'm pretty sure if we just left her on her own, she'd find a way out, but it would be nice to be able to play with her out there. The yard is sloped. High at the left, and low at the right, so it's really easy to mow going one direction, and lot harder going the other.


And this last picture is the view from the South side of the house taken from our front porch. If you're facing our front door, as in the first picture, and turn 90 degrees to your right, you'll see the mountains. It's really pretty. And in the mornings and some rainy days it's either completely obscured by fog and clouds, or you can see them lingering around the mountain tops. We're not sure, but we think that large gash in the mountain top might be preparation for a road leading to the new Tiger Woods golf course that they're building somewhere around there.

So that's our new place from the outside. Eventually when we get a couch and set things up how we want it and it's all clean, I'll take some inside pictures for you all to see. Speaking of a couch, we did some more shopping in Asheville and didn't really find anything. We did however revisit a store in Black Mountain and Teresa kept coming back to a couch she had tried out several weeks ago. It may end up being the one. I'll keep you posted since I know you're all riveted to the Luckman Couch Search 2009 adventure.

My New Electric Mower

So with our new house comes a huge yard. Well, maybe not huge, but big. Bigger than any yard I've had I think. Certainly since leaving Alaska.

Teresa thought it would be great to get a non gas powered mower. Better for the environment, less maintenance, slightly higher initial cost, but you save in other areas. Cool. Well, since we're trying to save money, we usually hit up Craigslist first to find stuff on the cheap, and she found something for a very good price. 25$! And it wasn't gas powered either. Neither was it electric.

Yes, we got a "Reel" mower. Get it? Reel?

Anyway, I mowed our big, no, huge yard our first weekend in the new house. I took 3 hours. That's a long time. But on top of that, the yard looked awful. Anything that was longer than 4 inches didn't get cut because it just laid down as the mower ran over it. This wasn't working out.

So a couple of days ago we found a fairly good deal on a barely used electric lawn mower. It had a 100 foot outdoor extension cord that came with it too, so I called the guy and went out to take a look at it.

The lawn mower was in Sylva, which is 30 minutes West of Asheville. I work in Marion, which is 40 minutes East of Asheville. So I drove for over an hour to get to this place. By the time I had arrived, I was determined to purchase it simply becuase I'd already come that far out. The seller was really nice, showed me how to use it, and I talked him down on the price a little bit. Enough to make me not feel too bad about the cost of getting there. So I loaded up the mower and headed home. There she is. A 12 amp, electric lawn mower. Comes with a bag and mulch plug and everything. Last night I took it out and did just the front yard, the most visible areas of the yard, and it worked really great. It took a bit of getting used to mowing with an extension cord following me, but after a while, it felt pretty natural and I never was in danger of running over it. It cut the gross really short, which I like, and didn't leave a lot of large grass clippings laying around. I guess it cut them up really fine.

It still takes me a long time to get the yard mowed though. I guess it's just that big. I'll tackle the back yard this weekend. I just hope 100 feet is enough to get to the back corners! Still need to get one more piece of yard equipement though. Our front yard has some areas I can't reach with the mower, so I'm looking for a weed eater to get into corners and the edgings of a fence. Criagslist, here we come.

Now, does anyone want to purchase a reel mower? Works great for small yards, and short grass.

Settling In

The house is wonderful, or at least I think so. It has it's quirks. The basement is kind of shabby, and the overall plumbing needs some kinks fixed, but it all works. The yard is a lot bigger than I was expecting. And by that, I mean the mowing size of it. It looked nice when we bought it, but I didn't realize how much yard was there until I walked every square foot of it with a scissor blade lawn mower. Yeah, no power, no motor, just a rotating blade and me pushing it. It was cheap, and we thought it would work, but it just doesn't cut the grass very well. Perusing craigslist for better one this week.

We still don't have a couch, so that's high on our priority list as the living room seems very empty without it, and we still haven't figured out where to put everything until we can figure out how big the couch will be. Our bedroom, the dining room, the kitchen and the bathroom are all in place. We have a washer and dryer down stairs that work well. All that's left are the two other bedrooms (which contain lots of boxes at the moment) and the aforementioned living room.

This weekend will be spent couch shopping, as well as some other household things. Hopefully I can find a cheap lawnmower to mow the yard with so I don't have to use the manual one. I've also got to start looking into fencing the yard at the front so we can let Hannah out without being on a leash, and still be reasonably certain that she's contained. I don't really think she would run away, but she would chase after any kind of animal or something that caught her fancy. I don't think we will ever train that out of her. Might be part of her beagle/hound instinct.

Speaking of Hannah, I believe we've successfully trained her to sleep on her mat on the floor in the bedroom now instead of on the bed. That's a pretty big step. She'll still get on the bed during the day if we don't watch her, but she's now sleeping all night long on her mat. Woohoo! When we get a couch, it will also be a no dog zone. Hopefully she picks that up as quickly as she learned not to sleep on the bed at night.

House Found, Getting Excited

So earlier this month we secured the lease on a really nice house in Swannanoa which is actually just a 5 to 10 minute drive from where we are currently staying in Black Mountain. It's got a great view of the mountains and a very nice backyard for Hannah to play in. It will need a fence added on one side to close it off from the road, but I've already spoken with the landlord and he seems like he'll be okay with that. I'm starting to get excited about having our own place again, and getting all of our stuff out of storage. I miss our dishes and our cookware, our TV and our Bed. We move in on August 1st! I found a washer and dryer from a co-worker who was selling hers. We're trying to find a couch and a futon mattress as well.

Teresa did quit her job, and she's already a lot happier. She's looking for something more manageable both in terms of time and in type of work. We were talking about it the other day in that now that she's gotten rid of the really crappy job, she needs to find a job that she doesn't mind so much. And then we can work on paying off our debts and getting to a place where she can get a job that she wants to do! That will be an exciting day. Maybe something to do with dance.

I'm still enjoying my job. It's a lot of responsibility which I've probably said before, but it's fun being in charge, instead of being the grunt. I was thinking about more long term, and I really think I'd like to eventually go into financial counseling or advising. Once I have a career and experience to back me up, I'd really love to help people with money. And I had felt like that long before I listened to Dave Ramsey. Prbably as early as my first year of college when I felt led to take business courses in the interest of being a Godly business man. Funny to think of where life has taken me since then.

Hannah is Hannah and we love her. I think she needs her own place and her own yard too. She's been really weird in the last few months about needing to go out and use the "yard" every hours or being especially needy. The training we put her through worked really well in terms of walking her. We're using one of those head harnesses now and she behaves great, stopping, and heeling when you ask her too.

So getting ready for the move and enjoying life. We had a great time with family of the fourth weekend and I think we're meeing a friend this weekend for hiking and pizza. Here's to good food and friends!

House Hunting

Now that we have stable jobs, we're trying to find a house in Black Mountain that we can rent for a couple years. We've found one really nice house in Swannanoa nearby, but it's a little out of the way to get to. I looked at a house in Black Mountain yesterday and it's decent, but the location is great. Both houses have yards that Hannah could play in, though the nicer house will need some extra fencing as it's not fully enclosed.

So the question is, nicer house, or nicer location? Considering how much we get out of the house, the location is probably not as important, and considering this is not going to be a permanent residence, it's probably better to go with the house we'll enjoy living in more. An extra hurdle is that the nicer house is about $100 more a month. Not a huge deal, but I'm sort of on a "kill debt" kick, so any thing we put in to rent will be less we can put towards debt. Teresa is going to look at the house in Black Mountain tomorrow and see what she thinks.

Speaking of debt, I've been listening to Dave Ramsey a lot. He's a Christian guy, and his job is helping people get out of debt and learn to invest and how best to do it, etc. He has a daily radio show and he wrote a book. I read the book first and then started listening to the radio show. It's really inspiring, and since I already was trying to pay off our credit cards and student loans, it was encouragement and a little more structured help. We've only just started the "Total Money Makeover," but I'm looking forward to knocking out some of these bills one by one.

Some of the costs of moving will have to be taken care of though. We'll likely end up buying a washer and dryer. I bet we can find some cheap ones on craigslist or something. I'll have to look around.

Teresa's job at the kennel isn't working out well. The hours are lousy and the work is crummy. She's applied for another job that's more her style at a library, and I really hope she gets it so she can quit this one. I think she'll be a lot happier and a little less trapped.

My job is going great. I really enjoy it and feel like I'm doing well at it. I'm starting to dig into the finer points of being a controller and organizing the financial future of the company. Scary! But exciting.

Here's to keeping this blog updated more with updates on Teresa, T.J. and Hannah.

Update On Life and Blogging

When I started this blog, it was to have an avenue to write about what's going in our lives for family and friends to read. Or random strangers I guess, thought my thinking is that they would lose interest quickly... but that's not what I'm concerned about.

I want to start writing again, at least weekly in this blog so that I have some sort of place to write thoughts, ideas and updates in our lives. It might be fun to make it more personal with pictures and what not as well. But with that said, here's a quick update on where we are.

In January Teresa and I moved back to North Carolina from Boston. We were lucky enough to have a place to stay until we found work, and about 5 weeks ago we found that! Hopefully we'll be moving into a place of our own buy late June or July. I love the area here so the plan is to find a nice small place for us and Hannah to rent while we work and save and adjust to living in a new state.

Teresa is working for a dog Kennel called the Bed & Biscuit. It's in Black Mountain, so it's not a far drive, and while it's hard work, I think she likes it. She's got some pretty lousy hours though, working a lot of weekends and 12 hour days. I got a really good opportunity and took a job as the controller for a manufacturing company in Marion, NC, just East of Black Mountain, so again a quick drive. About a 25 minute commute versus the 90 minute commute I had in Boston by subway. To facilitate us both working and driving, we just (as in this week) bought a brand new-to-us (read 13 year old) car! It's a Nissan Altima which we got on the cheap so we don't have any extra car payments. It will mainly be a driving to work and back car really. It's in great shape though. A manual transmission too, so it's fun to drive, and I get to teach Teresa how to drive it. That will be fun!

I think Hannah enjoys the mountains though she doesn't get out as often as she would like, I'm sure. We're taking her to another dog (or owner) training class so maybe we can work out some of the excitedness she has. Two things I would like to train in her the most. Not having separation issues whenever we leave the house, and not going crazy whenever she sees another dog or cat. Just the other day she saw a cat outside and pushed open the storm door to the house. She ran around the neighborhood for 15 minutes before ending up back at the front door. Well, at least she came back, right?

So jobs are a go, cars are registered and tagged, now we're saving money to rent a place in Black Mountain and we'll be able to get our stuff out of storage. Looking forward to that!

Hey Look! I Found My Blog Again

November 4th? I haven't written here since November 4th? Wow. Not a whole lot has happened I guess...oh! Except that we've decided to move back to North Carolina, so I have to find a place to live and a new job, and start worrying about packing up, loading a truck, and driving to old yet unfamiliar territory! And I thought my life wasn't exciting.

So yeah, we've got a lot on our plates. In the mean time I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft since the new expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, came out. My wife plays a lot too, but she's also involved in a Christmas ballet that takes up the majority of her time. I don't actually see her until after 10 PM at night when she gets home and she's dead tired.

Work is piling up at the office as I scramble to get everything done before I leave. My last day is on the 9th of January, but as I've mentioned, I don't have anything lined up in NC yet. I've discussed briefly with my manager about continuing to do work for my company after I leave, whether that's on a conulting basis or maybe part time from a home office type thing. He's checking with the human resources department on that. My fingers are crossed. Not only would it be beneficial as we move, but I always wanted to work from home. I'm not sure anyone would believe me, but I really feel like I would get more work done. It would at least be a lot more fun.

I mentioned in the last post about reading books by Terry Goodkind. The Sword of Truth series is really good. I don't know what it is, but the story draws me in. I read a book by another author after reading Wizard's First Rule, and it just couldn't compare. It was by a well respected author too, one who I had enjoyed when I was younger, but it was flat, boring, and the characters never seemed like they were in much trouble, or had a reason for their actions. I'm about down with the second book, Stone of Tears, and I've got the third book, Blood of the Fold in my bag, ready to start as soon as I close the cover on the other one. I'm excited.

I've been looking over past blog posts and really got the itch to write today. That's why I posted this at least. It's an online open journal that few if any people read. I'm thinking of posting a story on Elionene's Journal so that I can get both the creative fiction, and the self journaling writing cramps out. Wonder if anyone in NC wants to hire a blogger?