It's Been Too Long

A lot has happened since my last blog post.  Thankfully for my followers my cable is out.  Instead of spending my morning watching the Today show, I will spend it blogging about life events.  

First off, I officially got a job.  I am now the second assistant manager at Yankee Candle.  If you need any candle advice, just let me know.  I'm your girl.  I have been really fortunate to really enjoy working there.  It was exactly what I needed: a low-stress, part-time job.  The other girls that work there are a lot of fun to work with as well.  We just got a new store manager, so we will see how that all pans out.  Just as I had learned everything, now everything has changed just a little.  But it is still a lot of fun.  I really like working retail!

Unfortunately, Yoshi does not like that I have gone back to work.  He got a little stressed out and had some stomach problems.  Lee and I have had so much fun cleaning up poop.  There was poop on the dog, poop on the carpet, poop on the walls...yea.  Yoshi seems to be feeling better now.  We have been trying to go on a daily walk.  That seems to help.  I also leave the television on for him during the day.  Lee shaved Yoshi on Sunday.  So now Yoshi is ready for the warm weather.  He looks like an awkward calf.  Skinny body and big head.  But hopefully it will make for longer dog park visits in the future.

Next piece of info - I got into grad school.  I will start at University of Houston in the Fall.  Hopefully I will get some financial help from the school.  I am still keeping my fingers crossed for that.  I am so excited to get to study social work!!  I cannot wait.  I go to orientation in July.  I am so excited!!!!  

And...I got a new car.  (well...a new to me car)  The orange beetle came to the end of its days.  Due to my carport run-in, the beetle was going to cost about $2500 to fix...as a trade in, we got $2500 for it.  So, now i have a reliable Honda Fit that is made of metal, not fiberglass.  Any future carport run-ins (let's hope there are none) will not result in a huge amount of damage!  I love the way my new car drives!  It is also red.  Which is awesome.  It also gets great MPG.  

In the beginning of March, I got to go to Alabama to be in the wedding of a friend.  It was the first wedding that I had been to since getting married myself.  It was a little more emotional than I had expected.  I cried when I saw her coming down the aisle!  The wedding was beautiful.  My friend and her handsome groom were both so happy.  It was also so nice to meet her Alabama friends.  It was crazy how quickly the three from Texas and the three from Alabama bonded.  It was also great to see some other friends at the wedding as well.  I got to see my oldest friend.  That was awesome.  We really needed to catch up and we finally got the chance to do so.  I got to see my email buddy.  Yea!  I miss her so much now!!!  I also got to see the next bride-to-be.  I am definitely glad we will have a repeat of all of this love stuff in June.  I cannot wait.

March has been a great month for us.  We also got a visit from a friend from College Station.  He came and hung out with us.  I was really glad that he seemed really happy!  He even brought a girl to hang out with us.  That was nice.  :)  

My mother's birthday is tomorrow.  I am sad that I will not be there to witness the great event of her turning 50.  ( sorry for putting your age out there mom, but you should be proud!!)  She is coming to visit soon though!  Happy birthday mom!  I love you!

I am sure that I am leaving stuff out...I will probably remember tomorrow and have to post again, but that's how I roll.  Yes...I roll.
 

Apparently I Post in Twos

You can just call me the Noah of the blogosphere!  Whenever I finish a blog post, I always find I have more to say.  A lot of people have been asking me about our new home lately.  I'm against posting pictures of my home on Facebook.  It is a privacy thing.  Although, if people are in pictures in my house, that is a different situation.  But I will describe our home for you.  Here goes.

We live in a lovely townhome community.  It is a well-established, peaceful neighborhood complete with a lot of walking trails and a park nearby.  There is also a large community pool and a few satellite pools.  We actually live right across from one of the smaller satellite pools.  There is also a playground right across from our house.  Yoshi and I have tried it out.  It is very fun!  There are also tennis courts throughout the neighborhood.  I feel like our neighborhood is very safe.  We life within walking distance of a few schools.  We also live close to a couple of grocery stores, several restaurants, and an awesome fitness center.  We also have pretty good access to I-10 and the Sam Houston Tollway.  A prime location if you ask me!

As for our actual abode, it is a two-story townhome.  There are three bedrooms.  Why we have three bedrooms, I will never know, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.  The bedrooms are all upstairs along with the master bath and another bathroom.  The upstairs is all carpet except for the bathrooms which are tiled.  The master bath also has a nice vanity area.  We have a huge walk-in closet! 

The downstairs is pretty cool too.  We have a big window in our living room with a good view of the pool.  The whole downstairs has wood flooring.  (Well, close to wood anyways.)  There is a living area, a dining room, a kitchen, and a half bath.  We are using the dining room more as an office space.  The kitchen has a nice little breakfast nook where we have a table and chairs that we rarely use!  We are big sitting on the couch diners.  We did invest in some TV trays.  The kitchen fridge is new!  The oven, stove, and microwave are not.  None of them are digital.  I did not know that there was such a thing as a non-digital microwave outside of a dorm room.  But it works!  Also, did I mention that or washer and dryer are in our kitchen?  Right there...across from the pantry.  No doors to hide them...they are just there.  The ultimate haven for a housewife...I can cook dinner and wash laundry at the same time.  (Haven might be a strong word.)  (Cooking anything might be a stretch...)

Anyways...that's our house!  Our very own place!  Oh yeah...there is also a tiny backyard for Yoshi to do his business in.  The carport is right behind the backyard.  I have already become well acquainted with the carport poles...Overall, I love our new place!  Please feel free to stop by if you are in the area.  We have two extra rooms, might as well use them!

A Bit of an Update

It has been awhile since my last post.  Mostly this is due to our lives being rather uneventful.  We are really boring.

Anyway, Lee is still plugging away at his job.  He is currently working on his own project.  He feels a little overwhelmed at times, but he is learning a lot.  He also recently hosted a LAN party at our house.  He tells me that it was a huge success.  

Yoshi has been a little sick lately.  He is having some stomach issues.  I never thought that I would need to wipe my dog's behind, but apparently that is what it has come to.  I think I have cleaned poop off of every surface in my home.  Seriously.  The walls, the floor, the carpet, myself, the couch, my shoe, Lee, the dog...it is a mess.  Hopefully it will all be over soon.  He doesn't have any parasites.  I think he just has a sensitive stomach.  I wonder if I could get him to drink some of my tea?  On the upside, we did find a vet that we really liked!

I recently got a job!  I haven't officially started yet, but it should be any day now.  I am now the second assistant manager at Yankee Candle Company.  I am really excited!  I really enjoyed my other retail adventures.  So, if you need any candle or home fragrance advice in the future, I am your girl!  

As far as my grad school application, it is finally complete!  I had to resend my GRE scores, but all is well now!  Hopefully I will hear from UH soon.

Lee and I joined a gym.  We decided that we need to get fit.  It is a really nice place really close to our house.  We have been trying to go a couple of times a week.  I also talked Lee into finally going with me to a yoga class.  It was awesome.  Lee told me that he didn't hate it.  We are going back next week :)

I also bought a book called The NEW! Abs Diet.  I have decided that Lee and I will be attempting this sort of diet plan for a bit.  It is mostly about trying to incorporate certain "superfoods" into your diet and trying to build more muscle.  Hopefully we will see some results.  And hopefully I will not get too many complaints from Lee.  I will let y'all know how it goes.

I also recently hosted a bridal shower for a good friend.  I feel like my fellow hostesses and I did a very good job!  Especially considering that one of our hostesses lives in California and did all of her stuff from afar.  I can't wait for the wedding in a couple of weeks!  Yea!

We celebrated our first Valentine's Day as a married unit.  It was rather successful :)  We went to the Cheesecake Factory and ate way too much food.  

That is what is going on with us.  Not too much.  We pretty much lead rather quiet lives.  We would be perfect superhero alter-egos.  No one would ever suspect us.  

Special Request

This is a response to the special request that Nicky left on my last post.  I will now write about the goats.

As many of you know, I spent the last year working for the state of Texas in a very rural area.  I had a lot of interesting experiences.  Many of these experiences I will not write about either because it would violate some privacy stuff or because it is just too exhausting to recount some of these things again.  The latter are the reasons that I am currently taking a mini hiatus from working.  I need some time to recharge.


I learned a lot about myself during this year.  Thanks to one of my co-workers, Aleida, I learned that I am what she refers to as a "shit-magnet."  (Please excuse my language here.)  According to Aleida, if there is a crisis out there somewhere, it will somehow find me.  I have found that she is right.  I also occasionally partially create some of my own crises.  But really that is a different story altogether.  I also learned that I was extremely fortunate as a child.  I always had food,clothing, and a place to live.  We almost always had electricity at my house.  For most of my childhood, I had two supportive, loving parents.  My parents did not do drugs.  My parents did not have criminal histories.  But these things are far from goats.  Now I shall get into the goats.


Well, before the goats, you have to know a little bit about the kind of work environment we had.  Really, I could have made a sitcom about it.  Sadly, I do not think that the rest of the world is ready for a sitcom that makes light of awful living situations and abuse.  We really are a group of rather sick individuals.  My office consisted of six women.  There was another office in a neighboring county that we often worked out of.  This office was much bigger.  The office where my supervisor is located is also bigger.  Of these six women, I went to the required three months of training with three of them: Nicky, Phyllis, and Robin.  Together with these three women, I learned the ins and outs of our trade.  We laughed together and occasionally cried together.  We mostly laughed.  In a job like ours, you have to laugh.  If you do not laugh, you will not last.

Ok...goats.  Well, goats and other various animals.  My first experience with weird animals on the job was when I was with my mentor and we were driving back to the office.  I was looking out of the window of her truck.  There were some cows, some horses, some zebras.  Zebras??!!??  This is a town with less people that went to my high school.  Many of these people live below the federal poverty line.  But hey, here's some zebras.  I told my mentor, but she didn't believe me.  I am pretty sure she swears to this day that I am a crazy person who hallucinates zebras.  But there were some zebras there.

With my mentor, I also saw a dog that could smile.  It was creepy.  We also had to stop in the middle of the main road in town to allow a shepherd to lead his goats across the road.  Seriously.  A far cry from the suburb i grew up in.  I must also be a goat-magnet.  This was only the beginning.  I next learned that goats are a lot like dogs.  I was out on a case with a no-nonsense, seasoned investigator.  She grew up in the area, so she was familiar with goats.  We were at a family's home.  I kept hearing a really strange noise from outside.  It sounded like an animal in pain.  When we left the home, the resident told us that her goat was upset because it had not been fed yet.  The goat was the one making the awful noise.  When we went outside, she went to the goat's pen and called its name.  The goat came running to its name and wagged its tail.  I looked on in amazement.  The other worker laughed at me and proceeded to tell everyone the story about how I, the city girl, did not know that goats behaved in this way.  When I told Nicky about this story, I was relieved to hear that she was pretty amazed too.  Phyllis, on the other hand, thought we were both a little off.  But she thinks that often.


A month or so later, I went out to another house.  As I was walking up to the house, I was met by a dog and a goat.  The goat sniffed me like she was a dog.  She wanted me to pet her.  It was weird.  The resident of the home assured me that she was not dangerous.  The resident also had two horses.  One of the horses was her dream horse: a beautiful gray mare.  The other horse was one that she and her family had rescued.  She told me that when they rescued the horse, they were told that they had to take the goat.  They were a packaged deal.  I like to believe that they were best friends.  The woman invited me into her home.  Well, she opened the door and told me to run in while she kept the goat out.  She told me that the goat believes it is a dog and feels that it should be let into the house.  She then told me to not be frightened, but the goat was going to knock on the door with its horns in an attempt to be let in.  Inside the house I was greeted by another strange sight.  Puppies.  You may say, that is not strange.  But you were not looking at the mother of the puppies.  The dog had three legs.  Maybe you do not feel that this is strange.  Just wait.


I called my mom later that day to tell her about the animals I had met.  When I finished telling her the story, she told me that she had read about these animals in the newspaper.  She told me that she had actually cut out the article and sent it to me because she thought I would enjoy it.  She told me that the news story was about two dogs and a goat.  One of the dogs had three legs and puppies.  The trio were all great friends.  They had been adopted as a packaged deal.  I was a little skeptical that these were the same three animals, but my mom assured me that there could not possibly be another trio quite like that.  I later received the newspaper story in the mail.  Believe it or not, there are at least two trios of dog, three-legged dog, and goat.  There was a picture included in the news story.  The three animals in the story were very different than the three I had met in real life.  Weird.


Soon after, on a particularly rainy day, I received a call from Nicky.  She told me that she was out going to various clients' homes.  She told me that she had just seen the strangest thing.  She told me that she saw a goat on a roof.  Basically this goat was preparing for the worst.  He obviously feared that the rain was going to result in some kind of flooding.  He just wanted to be prepared.  Later that week, while walking Yoshi, I saw a goat in a dog crate in the back of a pick up truck.  The truck was just sitting in the driveway of a home.  No one was out with the goat.  The goat was just chillin' in the crate.  I immediately took a picture and showed it to Nicky the next day.


I also met some interesting cows on my adventures.  I drove up to a home one day and was not extremely thrilled to find that there were cows in the front yard.  Cows may look really nice eating grass out in a field, but close up, cows are freaking huge.  Sometimes they have horns.  To make matters worse, Phyllis had recently been telling me stories about her almost getting killed by various charging cows and hogs.  I sat in my car for a bit and just watched the cows.  Then the strangest thing happened.  One of the cows tip-toed over the cattle guard.  Some of you may not know, but cattle guards are supposed to keep cows in the yard, but still allow one to drive in and out of the driveway without having to keep a gate closed all the time.  The guards consist of metal rods over a pit.  Cows don't walk over them.  Well, most cows.  These cows were like ballerinas.  They just tip-toed right over.  


Well, I believe that I have written enough.  Nicky, I miss you!  You should come visit.  Bring Bean!  Also, tell Phyllis and Charlene hi!  I miss them too.  And Cathy!  <3

So...this is a blog

A friend suggested I start a blog.  I wondered if my life would be interesting enough to share.  She assured me that my life was interesting.  So, at least I will have one follower of my blog.  (love you Caitlin)

Here's some background info to get started.  I graduated from the University of Texas in December 2009.  I then went to work for the State of Texas.  I got married in June 2010 to my best friend, Lee.  Lee graduated from Texas A&M in December 2010.  We recently moved to Houston because Lee got a job.  When we moved, we left behind our roommate Kyle.  As a consolation, we got him a Lego AT-AT.  I think he was pretty happy about the exchange.

We also have a dog.  His name is Yoshi.  That should give you and indication of exactly how awesomely nerdy we are.  We named our dog after a Nintendo character.  Our favorite Nintendo character.  The character we fight over when playing Mario Party 8.  Yes, we are that cool.  Yoshi is like our child.  We proudly show pictures of Yoshi to people we meet.  We brag about how smart he is.  We take him to the park.  I even made him a birthday cake for his first birthday.  Which is no small feat.  I had to alter the ingredients because he is allergic to gluten.  Seriously.  I have a gluten-intolerant dog.

Our move to Houston has been mostly uneventful.  If one forgets about the cable and internet mishap, the furniture debacle, and that time that I ran into the pole holding up the carport.  All is resolved now.  We have cable and internet.  (Thank goodness.  We were actually having to spend time with each other.) We finally received all of our furniture, fully intact.  The pole is totally fine.  Well, mostly everything is resolved.  My car will need a new front bumper, a new passenger-side front fender, and a new headlight.  All from backing out of my parking spot at home.  Not that my car was really in that great of shape before the run-in with the pole.  It runs because a paper clip is jammed into the battery cable somewhere.

Anyway, we are still trying to get our heads wrapped around the fact that we live on our own in Houston.  We know next to nothing about this city.  From what we have gathered, Houston is the land of shopping malls and dentists.  Everywhere we turn there is another mall or a dentist office.  I have never seen so many dentist offices.  We live near at least three malls.  My favorite of these malls is the Memorial City Mall.  It treats Target like it was a department store.  Really.  There is a Target, and it opens up into the mall.  I have found heaven on earth. 

Stay tuned for future updates from the DeBooms.  Yeah, Boom.  Like the explosion.