Giving Thanks Always

Once again I have something to be thankful for. I think we are all well aware that in this economy having a job is a blessing. This week I have been extra blessed since I was offered a new position in my company. It isn't a promotion, but it is a change of scenery and new people and new challenges which make the whole thing exciting. It wasn't an easy decision but in the end the fact that I wasn't super excited about my current responsibilities and the future opportunities in my new job led me to decide to take it.

I was also really thankful for my wonderful wife who was awesome and supportive as I talked through the pros and cons and waffled about making a decision. She really was a great help and I am so thankful that I have her.

I am excited about tonight, we are starting back up our high school guys small group with K-Life, and I am just praying that the guys will be excited and come so we can dig into the word together.

That's about it for now, until next time.

January Update

It's been a while since I updated. I think my last update was about Christmas with my family...and I said I'd do a Christmas #2 post...well since it's late January i decide to not call this one Christmas #2.

We did have a great time up at a cabin with the Foxes. :) We ate really well and played games and went on a hike (with no injuries this year) and watch some good movies. It snowed, but didn't stick.

So we got back home and had to go to work and I start back up with the overtime. We have a deadline on Feb 15th (yep I'll be at work the Saturday before my birthday). Both Brian and I have seemed to be busy. We just took our Christmas lights down this week (sorry for being "those neighbors"), and the Christmas tree is still up. If it wasn't so big I might just keep it up and decorate it for Valentine's day...haha...

Sadly this month I lost a friend from college. Emily Piper McGill was an amazing woman, who really lived her life for Christ and influenced so many people. I met Emily at GaTech CCF and got the privileged of studying abroad with her in Mexico with a program called Globalscope. She spent 2 semesters in Mexico reaching out to college students showing them Christ through her life. Later she went to Africa to continue to reach people for Jesus. She found out she had brain cancer after returning from Africa. She's been battling it for about 3 yrs (maybe more...) and it took her life last week. She was so sweet, funny, fun, genuine and passionate. She lived her life fully. She left behind 3 sisters and dad and a new husband, so they could definitely use some prayers.

Well the rest of my updates are happier.

Two weekends ago we helped move Brian's older sister to her new apartment and then last weekend we house sat at a gorgeous home in Buckhead. Her new place is nice and in a good location, and we'll get to see her more now that she's not doing travel nursing.

The house we house-sat at was one of the guy's in Brian's small group from K-Life, so we were hanging with him and house-sitting. I'm just blown away by the houses in Buckhead. This one had 4 bedrooms, 5.5 baths (maybe more), a wine cellar, a workout room, a man den and a huge kitchen and other typical rooms in a big house. It was a gorgeous house and really fun to pseudo-live in a mansion for a weekend and to hang out with a great kid. It's good to know there are well mannered, smart, reliable kids in high school still, well at least one. I was "yes ma'am-ed" all weekend and he walked the dog and fed the dog and cleaned up after himself. It was good.

In other news, for anyone who watches American Idol, the Atlanta auditions had the "Pants on the Ground" guy, right? Well my friend Chrissy (I added my first link!!) got to see this man in person perform on MARTA. :) hahaha I think she said this was like 1-2 weeks ago, before the show debuted, so no one had any idea what was going on, and she said she was a little nervous (i would be too). I just thought that was funny. It also turns out that one of our friends from church dated the guy from Sevierville, TN (not sure I spelled that right). It's just a small world I guess.

Gotta run...adios!

Beginning of 2010

I need to learn to be more entertaining when writing simple stories. I think if I at least convinced myself that my story telling ability was entertaining, I would blog more often. Yeah that is likely just a cop-out and all but I am sure there is some shred of truth to it as well.

Egads! I haven't blogged about the winter holiday's with my family, so here goes. We left Tuesday afternoon in the "Mary Poppins" car, aka my car since it magically can fit a whole lot more in it than our other one. Made the hour drive up to the cabin we had rented. It has really become a family tradition over the last couple years that we get a cabin in the mountains to spend the week after Christmas and celebrate the New Year.

The cabin was nice, the few hiccups when my parents checked in Sunday were remedied and it was just time to enjoy hanging out together and relaxing and vacationing and the like. We also had Christmas as a family once we got there, since we were the last to arrive. It was fun to again be childlike ripping through gifts and getting all giddy at the wonders that were inside. Once we were done it was time to kick back relax and shoot some aliens. Yep that's right, one of the best things for me at the cabin is that I get to spend time with my dad, and he loves shooting aliens. Aka playing Halo, which I got Halo 3 ODST for Christmas, (Dad may have had something to do with that). Basically every morning, since Mom, Dad and I are up before the other sleepy heads, we would have breakfast then go play Halo for a couple of hours, and then come back up and have second breakfast, now that the rest of the crew was awake. A few mornings we also played Wii and Lu and I even tried being healthy one morning by playing 30 minutes each of Wii Fit. I think it helped. :)

Also fun is that I got to play Risk 2210 which is totally awesome but maybe not the most fun for the rest of the kiddos cause it was long and boring while everyone was learning but we had a good time. We played tons of other games including playing pool and getting in the hot tub at least once. Also one of the big reasons we go up there is that we love to go out hiking.

this year our hike was slightly less exciting that last year's during which yours truly became concussed. (aka hit my head on a rock after the branch I was holding on to gave way while posing for a picture) instead we added excitement to this year's hike by not actually knowing where we were going. we knew trails existed in an area so we headed that direction. as we drove our nice asphalt curvy road became a nice gravel curvy road and got more and more narrow, so we figured we were headed in a good direction. Dad eventually decided to turn off and what do you know, he found a trail head on the first try. It was a fun hike, up and a long a ridgeline. on our way down we passed two guys on bikes (i couldn't have easily walked a bike up parts of the trail) and they said they had been riding it since the 80's... crazy guys.

saw lots of deer while we were up there, enjoyed the fire and the down time. Most of all i just like hanging out with my family, mainly because my dad and i are wired the same, we work hard and we play hard, sitting still isn't all that much of a vacation for me. Lu did get to enjoy a lazy day on the couch with my mom though while the rest of us went and played putt putt in really cold weather. well dad was running.

anywho, those are the main highlights, I might have more to add, but i should save it for blogging more later. :) hope everyone else had a fun and safe new year.

Winter Holidays and General Fun

Thought I would throw out a few short recaps of some of the fun that has been going on over the last couple of weeks.

I know Lu has mentioned her friend Molly getting married. The event happened the weekend before Christmas and it was loads of fun. It was my first time seeing a Jewish ceremony. It was very interesting to learn about the customs (thanks to Molly who so thoughtfully included descriptions of what was going on and the meanings behind them in the programs) Below you will see a picture I snapped before the wedding, the Temple is gorgeous. really ornate and really pretty. We had a great time and are very happy for Molly and Matt.

For those who didn't see this already, I had to go to work on Christmas Eve Eve (that's the 23rd) but my day started out so great because I go this image as a reminder of our Amazing Father Creator. It was such a beautiful sunrise, and I was blessed to have the time to watch it for a little while and spend time with God admiring His greatness.

While we were hanging with Lu's family for Christmas, we got to see several awesome movies.

First off, we saw Avatar in 3D and all I am going to tell you is I thought it was well worth it seeing it in 3D. I don't want to sit here and rave about it and give away the story this that and the other, but it was really fun. Here is Lu cheesin' it up and having fun with the oh so stylish 3D glasses that we were sporting.

Also we saw Blindside. The movie was really well done and entertaining. A great true story if you didn't know it. For those who are thinking oh it is just a football movie and weren't going to see it because of that, you should reconsider, there isn't nearly as much football involved as one would think. Sandra Bullock was cast perfectly and she played her role really well. There were tons of great and funny lines in the movie too. It was really a great movie I enjoyed it.

Finally as if we weren't already moviedout (i know that isn't a word) we also got the chance to see Sherlock Holmes on Sunday. This one was fun because it was a date, and I really enjoy those with my wife, she is the best. The movie was very entertaining, a lot of action and I was very happy that it wasn't all that predictable. I would recommend this one as well to anyone looking for movies to watch.

Now I am looking forward to time with my family, which I get to see today, so I am excited. They called yesterday and already told us they have seen at least 10 deer walking around the cabin at different times. It is going to be a fun time. I hope everyone has safe travels and enjoys the rest of their holidays and I pray that you all have a safe, fun and happy new year.

Christmas #1 (yep there will be a #2)

We spend the beginning of this Christmas with my family (Lindsey), and it's been great. My mom made some awesome food and it's been fun just seeing my family. My mom and dad got a wii and Wii Fit, and we've been playing with that all morning. I found out I have kind of bad balance and the Wii thinks I'm 31 yrs old! ACK! So I've got to work out on the Wii and redo my body test. :) My mom was really upset because it told her she was really old (she wouldn't let me tell y'all...). My sister was only 1 year off her actual age, and the funny thing was my dad and Brian were 30! We think the age estimate was mostly to do with your balance. Obviously me and my mom have bad balance.
It's still fun. My brother, the triathalete, had already left, or it would've been fun to see where he came in at. We figured his balance would be really good.

Well just a quick update for now. Merry Christmas!!

Busy Weekend

Hey! Long time, no-post, I know. :)

Well this weekend was a whirl-wind adventure! Not really, just busy. It started Friday night with an ornament exchange with some ladies from church. It was really fun to have a girls' night and just hang out and have some great desserts, and I got a cute little Noel ornament. :) Then Saturday I had to come into work because we have an Addendum to one of our projects going out today at 9am. I was planning on working just in the morning, until about 12-noon, but thankfully I got most stuff done earlier than 12. Also our office smelled like diesel fuel or exhaust and it was nasty. I found out from the security guard that it was because the building was running their back-up generators this weekend. Gross and smelly, but I guess it's good to know they work. Then we went down south of town to see Chrissy and Chad's new house! It's so pretty and it was great to see them and the Moffit's. We do an ornament exchange at Christmas too, which is really fun. :)

After that, we ventured back to Atlanta, so I could change and get ready for my friend Molly's bachlorette party! I (with help from a fellow bridesmaid, Meghan) planned the event and of course I was a little nervous about it. It all went smoothly though! We had a great dinner (at a great price) and Molly got some exciting presents (I'll leave it at that) and she wore a veiled tiara and a "Bride to be" sash. Then she wanted to meet up with the guys from the bachelor party, so we met them at Fado in Buckhead, which is a pretty cool place. It was packed and I might have been the only person in the entire bar not drinking, but it was fun and most importantly Molly had fun!

Needless to say I crashed around 1am after getting home from that. Brian and I then got up for church as usual, I was working with the hospitality team and he was working with the Media team. After church we got to go meet up with his grandma for a Christmas lunch at her place. She's so sweet and we had a great lunch. We weren't going to see her over the holidays so we met up with her this weekend.

After lunch, we drove back to Atlanta for my company Christmas party at our office. I totally meant to take a camera to post pictures, but alas, I forgot. It was actually really fun! It was a little weird to come to the office on Sunday, but it was all decorated and Santa and Mrs. Claus were there for the party too! There was some great food, but I only partook of the desserts since I was still full from lunch. The Newcomers (a band of guys from our office) played and it was fun. It's neat to see people with their families and kids.

So after getting the addendum out this morning, I'll be playing catch-up on all the work I haven't finished because of this project. However, I think I'll get to work only 8 hr days for the rest of the week after today, which sounds awesome!

I'm very much looking forward to Christmas and a break.

Next weekend will be fun-filled as well. It's Molly and Matt's wedding, which I can't believe is here, but I'm excited.

Well have a great week! I'll try and post some Christmas pictures sometime (and maybe those house pics we mentioned a long time ago).

Thanksgiving Holidays Recap.

Thanksgiving is a great holiday, and this year I had a great time with family and friends. Due to the scheduling of football, it makes scheduling the holidays pretty easy, we spend Thanksgiving day and some of Black friday with Lu's side of the family, then Saturday (game day) with mine.

I will go ahead and get this out of the way, the game was disappointing because we lost, but it is only football and spending time with my family was way more important.

So back to thursday, we went down to Lake Sinclair since a large portion of the extended family lives down there, and everyone was over at Lu's cousin's house. We has sooo much food. it was fun seeing everyone and meeting a few new people, some that are soon to me related as some of the cousins are engaged. We had lots of fun watching people play corn hole, it was quite entertaining. Then after a while of just fellowshipping, we headed back home. Lu's mom and sister stayed the night with us that night as the ladies were going out to brave the crowds and do some shopping. Happily I can report that there were no injuries and almost complete success at finishing the Christmas shopping list that day, Lu was on FIRE!

I was out shopping as well, but for a slightly more important reason, my Christmas present! We decided to buy a TV, so I needed to go check out the deals and play with the sets in person and make sure the skewing that they do for displaying in the store isn't making the TV look better than it is. I also picked up a few stocking stuffers.

Friday afternoon, we, we being Lu, her sister, my dad and I, went to the Georgia Tech Basketball game. We played Mercer and won, and although it was a double digit win, it still wasn't as convincing as I would have liked. I think this season might be another rough one for my Yellow Jackets. The game was a lot of fun though and we really enjoyed that. Then we all went and grabbed some Tin Drum for dinner. It was a great day.

Saturday morning, after taking sister-in-law to the airport for her to head back to Albuquerque, we drove on up to my parents house for brunch. Mom didn't hold back and laid out an awesome spread for brunch, which was a good thing cause we got there and were pretty hungry. Then it was decorating the house, watching football and hanging out time. It was just a fun day. We missed my big sis, who is working out in Kansas City, MO, but we get to see her in a couple of weeks so that is ok. My job for the day was to put up lights on mom's roof, she really likes the lights. I ended up having to climb up on the roof to hang them all, but again thankfully no injuries to report. Dad made some yummy korean steaks and we kept hanging out through the game. Then Lu and I headed home since we had church the next morning.

After church we volunteered at the Free Gift Wrapping booth our church sponsors through the holidays, and it was a lot of fun. I only had one box to wrap, but of course, Lu and Amy let me wrap the octagonal box. that was quite fun, but the lady was pleased with the job I did, and I guess I impressed the other two worker bees.

Then we went home, and after Lu took a nap, I set to work on helping decorate our house. Thanks to my dad who bought Lu this house warming gift:

A better close up of the front porch all lit up.

All in all we had a very awesome holiday. I am excited that Christmas is right around the corner and that I get to spend more time with the wonderful friends and family in my life.

I am very Thankful.

B-E-A-U-tiful Morning!

Good morning! I feel great this morning! The project went out, and I feel like a nice weight is off my shoulders. I still have a lot of work to do, but most of it is going to wait until Monday. :) Brian and I have kind of a decent to do list for this weekend, but it's not bad, and we'll be able to actually spend some time with each other! I've pretty much seen him for like 8 hrs this week (not counting sleep time), so a full 48 hr together sounds great!!

I was in charge of our church's Operation Christmas Child drive this year, so one of the things I still need to do is take all the boxes to a drop off location. It was exciting because we doubled the number of boxes our church made from last year! It's fun to see our church is growing. :)

I'm also excited because i plan on leaving work at 4pm today! That seems so early! It'll still be light outside! Awesome. :)

I just wanted to post real quick! I hope y'all have a great day!

It's 8:22pm on Thursday night and I'm at work

Yep, it's true. We had a pretty big project going out of the office today, and now I'm waiting on the drawings to upload to the website. I always stay and watch to make sure they get fully uploaded. It only takes about 5-10 minutes to upload because it's just PDFs. For our other project with this university, the drawings are in a 3D modeling program called Revit. Those files are enormous and take about 30 minutes to 45 minutes to upload. Good times.

I thought I'd take advantage of the down time and post a blog! So an update - I'm tired, but that's typical for it being late. I'm missing Bible study (the last one of the semester), which is sad, but there will be more. I'm very happy because I don't think I have to work this weekend. I'm also excited because I'm going to be a part of a fashion show on Saturday! Our church was asked if anyone would want to help out and be in a fashion show and I said yes. It'll be fun - Brian's going to take pictures, so we'll post them.

We do have house pictures...which we need to get off the camera and upload...one day. :)

Other things in life...hmmm...my sister is coming in town for Thankgiving - always fun. Well I guess really my whole family is coming in town for Thanskgiving since they all moved out of Georgia. I usually only get to see my sister at holidays and it's been the same with my brother since he moved out of state for grad school. It makes the holidays even better, getting to see family that I don't get to see much.

...about 5 minutes have pasted and the files are 55% uploaded...

What else is going on...hmm. Well Brian is awesome as usual. He's still very sweet and thoughtful about how he can help out or making sure I get dinner and things like that.

about 8 minutes...we're at 82%...

I keep thinking tomorrow's Saturday, because it's been a long week, but alas, it's not. Tomorrow should be interesting (in a different way, not in a cool way) because we have a 4 hr long seminar on steam design. It'll be very helpful and hopefully informative, but also has the potential to be very boring. I'm sure some of y'all are snoozing already just at the sound of that.

Oh! 100% time to go! Adios!

Illness!

So I was sick the beginning of this week, fever, congestion, throwing up, the works really... It was not a fun monday. The worst part about it was I was all alone, Lu was on a trip with work to WVU. I did get a lot of rest, drank a lot of fluids and just in general tried to get the fever down and not die. It wasn't fun, and I am still not back to 100%, I have a cough and some lingering congestion but all of that will soon go away (i hope). And Lu is back and taking care me which is definitely nice, I miss that wonderful woman when she is gone.

Have a lot going on in the next few days so should have some stories to tell and things to post about and hopefully Lu and I will have time to put together the House Tour post that we should finally have, we had a really fun housewarming over the past weekend, so maybe more on that later too.

Hope everyone out there in the blogosphere is feeling better than I am.

weird days at work...

So for yesterday and today, the rest of my team, all two of them, are off visiting a store. I have scheduled mine yet and we couldn't all leave because that would leave no one to actually run the reports. So I have had a somewhat lonely day yesterday and so far this morning. It is a bit strange that I am running reports that I thought I had successfully passed on to someone else to run. Oh well, I am not really annoyed or depressed/sad or anything like that, it is just a bit weird to be the only one here.

Being the 1 man team wonder that I am is great and all, but it makes it tough to focus, I mean there are plenty of others around, but I am not currently working on anything with them so it is just me and the gentle soothing hum of my two computers.

Does anyone out there in the blogland have any great ideas on how to remain focused at work?



Totally different note, I am pumped at how awesome my Yellow Jackets have been playing, 8-1 is great! And we should be able to beat all the teams left on the schedule, at least that is what the media keeps telling me. I think that the team has put itself in a great position, we control our post season future so just keep winning and we are headed to a BCS bowl.
What a great year to be a ramblin' gamblin' helluva engineer!

Earlier this summer - FREE Chickfila!

A while back, there was an awesome give-a-way at Chickfila. If you dressed up like a cow you got free food. So me being the chickfila lover that I am, convinced my husband to do this with me. :) When I took pictures off our camera from halloween, I discovered a lot of pictures we hadn't taken off the camera yet. So for your laughter and enjoyment:

And my sweet husband "dressed up" too, to get free food. :)

These were definitely taken a while ago, because they were taken in our old apartment. My spots kept falling off, but it was fun. We definitely got our food to go, so we didn't have to stay cows while we ate. :)

October

It's November already! I can't believe it! Where did October go?? We had a fun end-of- October though. Here at the end we bought some pumpkins (2 pumpkins and a gourd to be exact). We wanted to carve the gourd because it was so huge, but we didn't have time. So they just sat and looked pretty on the front porch.

This Halloween was our first one with trick-or-treaters. We were very prepared with candy, since we live next to an elementary school and had seen lots of kids that lived in our neighborhood. However, probably thanks to the misty rain and super coldness we only had a handful of door bell rings and maybe about 10-15 kids. Therefore we have LOTS of leftover candy.

I keep a candy box at my desk at work, so my coworkers will be very excited about all this left over! Now that Halloween is over, I can whip out my Thanksgiving decorations! I don't really have much - really all I have are these Mickey & Minnie salt and pepper shakers! :)

Aren't they cute? :)

Kaboom!

So one of the awesome things that I get to do with my job is give back to the community. Yesterday I had the wonderful opportunity of doing a playground build with Kaboom .

I was on the mulch team, below are some pictures of our hard work:

Three truck loads of mulch:


The beginnings of the Playground:


Me dumping mulch near the swingsets so we can fill in once they are set in concrete:


Getting closer, still have to fill in around the structures:


Basically all done:


The whole group and some of the children: