Day 35: Organizing!

Yesterday and today we worked a lot on cleaning and organizing the house, particularly the office.  We've got tons of stuff marked for garage sale, 3-4 full trash bags taken out, and 3 boxes of paperwork to be filed.  After this weekend we'll be able to bring things back from the storage unit and get more stuff ready to sell.

It looks like a crazy mess, but it's really improving!  I anticipate having it done by Monday.

This is all of the stuff we're selling!  I hope people buy it, because otherwise it's heading to be donated.

Also, here's a sneak peek of my classroom.

Day 34: High School Reunion

Eric and I had planned to go to Old Chicago to use his free birthday pizza tonight.  Right before we left the house I checked Facebook and saw that my friend, Kristie, had posted about wanting to go out tonight.  We invited her to join us and called Alison to join us too.  You see - Kristie, Alison, and I were inseparable during high school and spent all our free time at Walmart or Kristie's house.

We had a great time talking, drinking, and probably being too rowdy for a restaurant bar. :)

Eric poured a beer with too much foam and I poured a beer with not enough foam.

Together again!

Go us!

Love beer?  Eric does!

Day 33: New TV!

Eric was off of work, so he came out to Olathe with me.  He spent the morning with his mom while I was at the house of the boy I nanny for.  Later we went out to Best Buy to look at the 3 TV's that we had narrowed down to, so we could see them in person.  Luckily, the TV we decided on was on sale for $100 off the advertised price on their website.  Not so lucky, the closest store that had it in stock is 40 miles away.

So we set off to go swimming with Jack and laid out in the sun for awhile.  I took Jack to speech therapy while Eric went to the Harley dealership with Alan.  When I was done nannying for the day, we contacted the Lees Summit Best Buy and had them hold our TV - we jetted out there, after stopping by the bank, and paid cash!

Underwater shots turn out really well!

Here we are, turning money into a TV!

It filled up my whole car!

Mystic found a new home.

The TV is so big!  We watched 24 and it looked "too real," as though we were watching it from the set.

When we got home, it was set up pretty quickly and we had a fantastic dinner of homemade chicken strips, mashed potatoes with gravy, baked beans, and buttermilk biscuits with honey.  We also had fruit smoothies and wine, yum!

Eric made our smoothies.

I made the rest, in my lovely apron!

Chicken strips battered with mashed garlic potato flakes.

Bread, butter, salt, pepper, smoothie, wine, mmmmm.  Oh, and cat litter.

Day 32: Boooooring

Nothing really interesting happened today. 

We sold another item on Half.com and, since February, we've sold more than $460 worth of games, books, movies, and music on that website.  It feels nice to be getting rid of junk in the house and getting paid for it!

We also looked through various vendor and brand websites to make a list of the possible choices for our new TV.  Now that we're not moving, we can buy one as soon as we decide what to get!

Day 31: One Month of Mr. & Mrs. Green!

Eric and I made it through our first month of married life with more than enough adventure, and today was no exception.  I made it to the DMV today and waited in line for around forty minutes - according to social security and my drivers license, I'm officially Mrs. Jessica Elyse Green!  After I got my license fixed, with an AWESOME picture, I went to the bank and got my name/address/email address changed and all our wedding checks deposited, woo!

Look at us all married and stuff, and we didn't even lose our rings!

This evening we took apart one of our desks and soon I'll get to rearrange the office!  I can't wait to get it cleaned up and make the room functional again.

Day 30: Home Sweet Home!

We found out today that we get to stay in our apartment! The manager is also giving us a $300 incentive to stay on top of keeping rent at the same price, so it will only cost us $330 for August rent, WOO! We'll have to clear out the storage unit before August 1st in order to get our deposit back and not pay August rent, but that won't be hard.

In other news, the family of the boy I nanny for was all home sick and they wanted me to keep him out of the house because he wasn't sick. We spent all day out at the Schlitterbahn Vacation Village, a partially complete waterpark out at the Legends shopping center. I used this as an opportunity to test out the waterproof feature of my new camera while it is still under warranty. We had a blast on the waterslides and on the raging river and got out of it without sunburns!

Jack and I in the Raging River, people kept giving me funny looks for having my camera in the water.

Yea, yea, gross looking feet - but the camera was fully submerged, cool!

We also had lunch at the T-Rex restaurant - Jack had dino chicken nuggets and I had a T-Rexadilla, yum!

Finally, Eric and I worked on our budget today and figured that we will be able to pay for our fall semester classes AND finish paying off my credit card with one monster payment. We've paid off $1250 in the past 6 months, and with the money from my summer job we'll have enough to pay off the remaining $3000. We know it seems crazy to "blow" that much money on getting rid of debt when we could continue making payments on it. But we're sick of being normal! This will finally start our "debt snowball" and we'll put my credit card's minimum payment onto Eric's credit card payment, and pay it off twice as fast. Then we'll tack those payments onto my car and then Eric's car. We're in the range of having no credit card debt by our one year anniversary, and owning both of our cars outright in 2012 - how's that for crazy?

 This is our debt thermometer for my credit card.  Starting in February we marked the total balance plus a chunk of interest and each month we color in the amount we paid to show our progress.  We're only a third of the way done, but it will be full in a month!

P.S. Addy looooooves catnip!

Day 29: Birthday and Family Fun

Eric and I slept in today, way in, until around 1pm.  We did some cleaning and packing around the house in case we had to move - we packed up a lot of clothes and household items for a garage sale that we'll have in a few weeks.

Later in the afternoon Eric left for work and I headed out to Olathe for Emma's birthday barbecue.  It was fun to hang out with the family for a few hours.  Eric showed up a little bit later and everyone got to talk for awhile. 

Happy birthday Em!

Alan and Zayne playing with their noodles

Kris, Sarah, and famous photobomber Zayne

Eric and I with Andrew, who really enjoyed eating watermelon

Eric practicing the finer points of being a parent - juggling the baby and the beer

...and Andrew being Spongebaby Diaperpants