An interesting twist

I'm not sure when or why Pixar switched from a company who makes cute, technologically advanced film about toys and super heroes to a company who makes gorgeous movies about dying Americana and the wastefulness of the human race, but I like it. WALL-E definitely featured the best animation I've ever seen in any application (a lot of it barely even looked rendered). The plot was cute, but not ridiculous, and it managed to tackle some major issues. All without any real dialogue for about an hour of the movie.... which actually really added to the charm and realism of the movie. Even if you don't like animated flicks, you should go see this one. Pixar movies usually entertain me from start to finish, but this one had me absolutely entranced. There were several spots where I was on the edge of my seat, and a few where I was misty-eyed... from a cartoon. They did an amazing job, and I hope it goes up for a few awards this year.

unusual but cool

So I was walking in wal-mart with a scowl on my face mumbling something under my breath because it was 7 on a thursday and i was out buying cleaning supplies so i could go home and wipe the counters down before i got down on my hands and knees to srub the awful kitchen floors when this woman i've never seen before touched me on the shoulder and said "you should always smile, you're really pretty." I wasn't sure whether i should question her sanity or give her a big hug, So i just said "thank you" instead.

house hunting!

My husband and I are now on the hunt for the perfect house to buy. We were going to rent, but we figured out very quickly that a good rental house in the neighborhoods we wanted to be in would cost us more than a mortgage, so we decided to try to buy instead. I'll spare you all the mundane details of financing and all that nonsense, but I wanted to show you the top three of the ones we went to see with the Realtor yesterday.

This one's in Chelsea (near where we live now). It's probably my third place if we don't take into account location or pricing.

This one's in Helena, which is a nice area, but it's a ways out from where both of us work, although it's very convenient to the highway. The cool thing about this one is that the current residents finished off a little attic space and made it into like a guitar studio/music room... which we could use for the same thing or I could use for a craft room. This is probably my first place not taking price or location into account.


This one's in alabaster, which is a long ways from anything except alabaster (actually it's not too far from the helena/pelham area). There's plenty of civilization in the alabaster area, which was one of my big concerns. This is a very close second if we don't take location and price into consideration.

If we had to buy one of those three right now, I'd probably be happy. But since we don't, Were going to go look at about 8 more houses next weekend because I'm sure the realtor wants to do nothing more than spend another 4.5 hours with us on a weekend. Hopefully we can either make a decision or get it narrowed down far enough that we just need to visit two or three one more time before we make the decision. I'll keep you posted.

i haven't mentioned the job lately

It's going well. That's not to say that I don't have issues, and I don't have a lot to learn, and I don't get stressed out. But overall, I really like it. 99% of the clients are at least halfway pleasant and polite, but I would say probably 60-80% are sweet and just thankful for whatever they can get. The other nice thing is that since i's a small agency, if I have an issue, I can bring it up in staffing and we actually hash out options and discuss what those options would do and come up with a solution that works for everyone. This is a good thing.

upcoming move?

We've gotten quite tired of being cramped up and having half our stuff in boxes in storage and decided that we wanted to rent a house. The thing is that when you crunch some numbers, you end up paying as much (or more) to rent the house as you would on a mortgage. Despite the market being kind of risky down here (you buy stuff for really cheap, but if you have to sell anytime soon, you might end up selling for less than you paid), we decided to at least explore buying a house as an option. We talked to someone in the real-estate business that my mother-in-law's realtor friend knows and got hooked up with a finance person who said we were pre-approved for $220,000 based on our credit, job history, etc. We wouldn't buy that much house, but it's nice to know we can get something. We hooked up with a realtor and we're going to start looking probably this weekend.
So we will be moving once again, but hopefully this time it will be to a place where we're going to stay, and on where it's not so cramped we have stuff laying on every flat surface, even with half our stuff in storage.

geocaching fun!

Chris and I have started geoaching again. For those of you who don't know, geocaching is like a scavenger hunt that you do with a handheld GPS unit (a TOM TOM is an example of a gps for your car. A handheld gps is kind of the same, only smaller and better designed for use on foot). We've done several caches over the last couple of weekends. There's pictures and stories to all of them here, as well as all the ones we did when went geocaching years ago.
I won't Bore you with the details of all of them, but there was one that I thought was noteworthy. Someone put a cache near this alabama war veterans memorial in a nice park in leeds, alabama (about 20-30 minutes from where we live). It has a memorial with names of all the veterans from alabama that died in just about every war that's ever happened, even the alamo. I felt honored to be there, and it's in a beautiful park. I suggested to Chris that maybe we should go have a picnic breakfast with the veterans on memorial day. Maybe we could do that and then do more geocaching!

you asked for pictures

here's a link to a BIG gallery of pictures that my husband uploaded. (sorry, the link wasn't working originally, but now if you click "big gallery" all the pretty pictures will show up)