New House

It's hard to believe everything that has happened in the past 16 months has gotten us to right now - a house! We are so stinkin excited. It's a cute little starter house and we really love it. We stumbled upon it during an open house and just couldn't get it out of our mind while we looked at other places. Now, it's ours!

Summer 2010 Started in Kauai...

After spending 8 days here, Kauai is by far our favorite island now! I love this place and loved taking Nate there for the first time. It was such an amazing vacation! The highlight was a 5 hour sailing trip up the Napali Coast watching sea turles, whales, dolphins, tropical fish and even flying fish. We could live here happily for the rest of our life!

Pictures from the last year-ish

It's been quite awhile! I'll just do a photo-montage with explanations of the last couple months of our crazy little lives!

Where to start...
The move from Portland to our little Boise apartment. Very little. Quaint. Good for newlyweds. :) But oh my there were a few things that weren't good for even newlyweds. Like the pint-sized washer and dryer. Or the pint-sized oven that burned everything we attempted to cook. Or that time our neighbor's pit bull ran into our apartment at 10:00 at night when Nate turned to grab a bag of trash to take down to the dumpster. But like all places you live in, this one grew on us too. It was our first Boise home together, where we both accepted Boise jobs, where Nate got his Idaho bar exam results, and hey the cable was free when we signed the lease....Can't complain there!
This is us, post-move. In 24 hours, we drove from Boise to Portland, picked up a UHaul, packed our 3 story townhouse into the UHaul, drove the car and UHaul back to Boise and unpacked the UHaul into our 3rd & 4th floor apartment.The view from that apartment was a good one :)

Moving on....we went to Lake Tahoe for the first time ever for a wedding where Nate was the Best Man. It's a pretty place! We went to a casino on the Nevada side of the lake, which was just an interesting experience for me. I could not handle the emotional rollercoaster of instantly loosing/gaining money! Which was pretty sad considering we only played the penny slots...
And then Christmas rolled around. Apparently we must have been in the Christmas spirit because we put the tree up around mid-November. The funny thing about our tree is when we bought it in 2008, it was actually 3 different pieces of 3 different trees all boxed together (Made in China). So....it makes us laugh to get out of the box because they're different colors with different colored lights and different shapes. We have a unique tree I suppose. And Nate was rocking out with one of the pieces during the pre-assembling process.
I bond with my cars. I called my last car "Steve" - a Subaru, named while I was driving to Portland and it started smoking and I was all frazzled and lost in the city during rush hour. In December, we traded Steve in for a a new Subaru. It was kinda a bummer - this was the car title before I handed it over!
In January, we moved into a little rental house after we almost bought a house. We decided after all our moving, we would rent for awhile longer until we're sure we're staying put!
The same weekend we moved out to Idaho, my sister and her family moved out to Idaho Falls! So, there was quite a lot of this going on in the past year with our neices and nephew.

And then the day after Nate's birthday, they had another baby boy and asked us to be the Godparents!
We also decided in 2010 we wanted to try to take at least 1 trip a month. So, we went to McCall for 3 or 4 days and stayed in Nate's family timeshare for the Winter Carnival!
We also went to LA/Disney Land!
And headed to the Sun Valley Inn for our 1 year anniversary :)
Lots of trips to Idaho Falls.
And in May, we took my frequent flyer miles all the way to Kauai for 8 days! More on that and this awesome summer the next post.

Deja Vu

In looking back at my previous posts (and because I don't post often, there aren't many to look at) I've realized the majority of them are about moving, packing, unpacking and new places. CRAZY ENOUGH we've moved again. Just from an apartment to a house, but it involved packing and boxes and deep cleaning and all that crappy stuff moving involves, but this time, and for the first time EVER, it involved a beautiful thing: Our move involved m-o-v-e-r-s. Glorious movers. We were only moving across town, but we were going from a 3rd floor apartment (with a 4th floor loft) to a house, and considering that this made our 10th move in 2 or 3 years, we decided to give ourselves the gift of hired movers. We will NEVER go back to moving couches, beds, dressers, tables, desks, bikes, mattresses, a ridiculous amount of clothes, and a full kitchen with just the two of us ever again.

Hopefully.

So, long story short, we're finally in a house with a yard, a two-car garage, a couple bedrooms, a sidewalk, a driveway, a regular sized dishwasher, a regular sized washing machine and dryer, a regular sized oven, a SINGLE MAILBOX, and no flight (or 4 flights) of stairs leading to our home. Carrying groceries from the car to the house has never been so fun. It really can't get any better than that!

Pictures to come.

In other news, we've been enjoying Boise's awesome weather. After living in rainy Portland for a few years, I don't believe we will take the sun for granted again! Although, we do miss quite a few things about that rainy city...

And we are sooooo looking forward to the first summer in forever that we can have fun together! Last summer, Nate spent about 12 hours a day studying for the Idaho Bar Exam. The summer before that, he spent the same amount of time studying for the Oregon Bar Exam. The summer before that, he was still in Law School. The summers before that, we were just friends :) So, summer 2010 will be a good one!! Woohoo!

I can't promise, but I hope, hope, hope and pray that this is the last "moving" post for . . . a long while . . .