A friend is doing a fundraiser, so I said I'd post her eBay auction on my blog. Take a look, it's for a good cause:

Two Front Teeth

Should I be worried that I'm now up to 17 boxes for the scrapbooking room? :) Granted, 5 of those are very small (12x12x12) boxes, but it just makes you wonder. The rest are Uhaul small boxes though - it's much easier to carry those boxes full of paper and stuff if they aren't in a large, overloaded box.

Getting rid of three tall 5-shelf bookcases, and we are taking down the 6' foot tables that line one of the walls. We actually want people to see that the room is big, and not cluttered with all my collected stuff. :)

Still haven't found a storage facility, so I guess the house goes on the market next week with all of our boxes in the garage.

Just keep packing, just keep packing...packing, packing, packing.....

Not only are we packing, we are sorting and purging too. Given the constraints of the garage in our new home, we have to. You actually *gasp* have to be able to park both vehicles in the garage! Heck, we've parked one car in the garage ONE time in the last 7 years. Big change for us, but at least it's helping us "weed" out the stuff we no longer need. My dad took one entire truck load on Sunday for the home he's remodeling, we took a truck load to Salvation Army, and we are still sorting and purging. I even have a pile for Dress for Success, dockers, jackets, etcetera.

We looked at an apartment complex yesterday. It was the only one in this area that I could find that actually allows you to have 3 pets, and we made sure that the words mean that 3 cats are okay. The apartment sure is small (1000 sq ft) compared to our current home (2300 sq ft), so it's going to take some getting used to once we move. They even offered (for an extra monthly fee) to furnish the apartment...which we might just do, since we have a king size bed...and the bedrooms are not king-size rooms. :) We're trying to think of it like an extended hotel stay.

Well, today we signed the papers for our house. The current house goes on the market next Thursday. We viewed an apartment complex today that will allow us to have our three cats. The two bedroom apartment is pretty small compared to this house, so we'll really have to condense and store A LOT of stuff.

Here's the two of us, standing behind our lot marker at the new house. I'll keep the pictures updated, especially as construction starts. :)

One of my favorites memories of my grandparents has to do with Sunday. When we lived back on the East Coast (or visited during the summers), we'd go to church every Sunday. When we got back home, there would be some time to change clothes and maybe play, before it was time for Sunday dinner. We'd have what *we* called Sunday potatoes (aka scalloped potatoes or funeral potatotes), cinnamon rolls, roast beef, and some vegetable. Just thinking about it brings back the smells of the food, the sounds of children running around, and visions of my grandparents' house. Boy, life has changed since then. My grandparents no longer live in the house my grandfather built after his retirement, my grandfather has passed away, and my grandmother no longer cooks for a horde of folks come Sunday afternoon.

One of the decisions we made when I got this new job was that we need to sell our current house and move closer (the commute is currently 45 minutes in good traffic, 1/3 of the trip on a curvy switchback one lane each direction road).

So, we've been looking for houses on the weekends and packing up to move so we can stage our house.

One of the places we saw was a development about 15 minutes away. But it had a LONG priority waiting list - we were #80 on the list! About every 2-3 weeks, they "release" homes. Today, they had a release at 9 a.m. - and it's not based on when you show up, but where you are on the waiting list among the people who show up.

There were 8 homes to be released today. Out of those 8, we liked the site/lot/floorplan of 4, so we had a good chance, IF the crowd was small. Well, the crowd was small (6 couples) but we were couple #5. Our 3rd and 4th choice houses went right away with the first two couples. 3rd couple took our 2nd choice house. And luck of all luck, the 4th couple decided to do one of the other 4 houses, leaving us our first choice house! Woohoo!

Never in a million years did we think that we'd get our house being that far down the priority list. And the 6th couple (they were #86) got what they wanted too....fortunately, these are all of future neighbors, so it's nice we got to meet today. We wouldn't have had a chance if it hadn't been the start of spring break here...I think most folks were out of town.

Now, we just need to finish getting our house packed up and on the market!

Time sure flies fast when you are having fun! :)

Friday night, we had a lovely steak and baked potato dinner with our friends.

Early Saturday morning, I woke my scrapping buddies up at the crack of dawn to get our butts to the Oregon Convention Center by 8 a.m., since our classes started at 8:30 and we needed to pick up tickets and all that jazz. When we were almost there, I realized I forgot my entry for the SS layout contest - what a bummer! :( I entered the Epson digital contest, and still don't know who won. Epson announced the results a day late at the Saturday night crop, which I did not attend because I was at the 2peas Pubster dinner at BJ's....and then I dragged my friends home so we could crash from all the excitement and shopping.

Speaking of shopping...yes I did buy stuff... :) Technique Tuesday stamps, Basic Grey papers, and some Rusty Pickle items.

On Sunday, we slept in, then headed to breakfast. Once we safely got our friends over the Pass, we headed house hunting. We had also decided to put ourselves on the priority waiting list for a home site near my new job. We filled out their paperwork and left to look at other places. Frankly, other than one other development, nothing we saw was worth the prices the builders were asking. Yes, I know the housing bubble has yet to burst here, but I wish it would...the prices are getting ridiculous.

The good news is that the home site is doing a "release" of 8 sites on Saturday. It being Spring Break, there may not be a lot of folks showing up to see if they can get one...at least, that's what we are hoping, since we are #80 on the list! :) Say 10 people show up....not only would 2 people have to "waive" picking the lots, the lots left would have to be something we'd want. We'd be satisfied with any one of 4 of the 8 lots - 2 houses each of 2 plans...the other 2 plans are just not the right flow/plan. Wish us luck! We're giving up attending breakfast with friends to go, so hopefully it's worth it!

Woohoo! My friends arrive this evening! While I've been helping AmyJo get the March de-zine out, my husband has been packing and cleaning. I've helped where I can, but it's been hit and miss. My big responsibility was the scrap room. The table is mostly clean, I need to pick up a few things on the floor and vacuum, but otherwise we are good to go. Of course, we are waiting for our guests to help us move the futon upstairs, it was quite a chore just getting that in the house with the two of us....

I'm entering the Simple Scrapbooks layout contest and the Epson digital contest at the convention this weekend. If I can get some time tonight with my friends, I will create one more layout for the Scrapworks contest. You can't win if you don't enter, and at least I'll have three more layouts to put in my albums!

2 more days until my friends arrive for the convention! Woohoo! :)

De-zine will finish up tonight, and be in the boutique for sale tomorrow. Had some DSL issues last night that required a reboot of the DSL router, but all is fine now.

Going to go see the subdivision tomorrow with my mom. She needs to get registered so we can proceed with seeing if we can get one of the homes. My husband has pretty much decided that if we can't get acreage (3 acres or more), he wants new so he can fix it up the way we want. And given our lifestyles and jobs, we'd end up paying someone to decorate anyway, so why not build it into the house from the get go?

Well, we started packing this weekend. I packed up *7* boxes alone for the scrapbook room, medium sized UHaul boxes. :) I'm keeping a running list of the major contents of each box, and numbering each box, so it's easy to determine which ones to unpack first on the other end.

Speaking of moving, we looked at a new subdivision this weekend and liked it alot. I know, I know....DH really wants acreage, but we're just not going to get it right now, not at the price he wants to pay. So, we'll buy a new home now, live in it for at least 5 years, buy a piece of land sometime in the next 5 years, and start building our dream home at some point in the future. I'll let you know what happens. My mom, who is my real estate agent, needs to be registered with the home builder so she can get a commission if we decide to buy there.

Best part is, it's only 15 minutes from work. Much better than 45 minutes, that extra half hour will be devoted to sleep, I can tell you.

I'm frantically getting ready to do final prep work on the March issue of De-zine at the Digi Chick. As soon as I get home, it's prep time! :) I'm sure AmyJo is anxiously awaiting my arrival.

This weekend, I'm going to the Creating Keepsakes Oregon Scrapbook Convention. I have 2 friends driving in from out of town to stay both Friday and Saturday nights. One friend has booked herself classes all day long, except for lunch...the other is taking it easy and just seeing what's available when she gets on site. I have two scheduled classes (The Joy of Cardmaking 2 and Creating Your Own Digital Elements) and I just picked up helping out Courtney DeLaura at one of the Rusty Pickle classes in my slack time.

My dad borrowed my camera this past weekend. I got an email yesterday that went something like this, "I see why you had issues using my little toy camera...." :) He has it until Friday, and then my husband will pick it up on the way home, so I can take pictures of all my friends at the convention.

And I'm attending the 2peas Pubster dinner on Saturday night, with my two friends (and another friend who can only join us for dinner) in tow. They've got goodie bags, and it's always cool to meet new scrapping buddies you've only talked via online message boards.

It has been an interesting week and a half. :)

Got through my first week of work. No isuses there, just getting used to being a permanent employee again. And I even get to work on a team! :D

On Saturday, I spent most of the day glued in front of my computer, hosting a trivia challenge at the Digi Chick. Slowness aside, the game was good, and the slowness meant that folks were visiting the site! :)

Sunday, my mom came over to help us figure out what to pack and how to stage our house, in preparation for putting it on the market. Yep, that's right...we're going to move back to the other side of the pass, so it's easier to get to work. As long as we work in high tech, we'll be working in that area or just beyond, it just plain makes sense. After she left, I started a load of laundry in preparation for the week ahead. Lo and behold, my dear husband left a pair of cat claw clippers in his jeans pocket, and they managed to get stuck in the holes in the dryer, and things went downhill, ending with the motor burning out on the dryer. This poor dryer was only 15 months old. *sniff* We have a new dryer arriving on Friday afternoon.

Tuesday, I had a root canal. Yes, it did hurt after the anesthetic wore off. Yes, I do have pain pills for that. :) I get the crown next Friday, right before the scrapbooking convention. I actually think I'm in more pain from the root canal than I was from the broken filling. Sigh.

I can't wait for tomorrow (Friday). Jeans day at work. One of the hardest adjustments to my new job is wearing business casual (dockers and polo shirts) instead of jeans and t-shirts. While I'm not going to wear a t-shirt tomorrow, at least I get to wear jeans! Woohoo! It's the small things in life, ya know. :)