Gotta love this state

Only in Texas...



My talented wife Katherine took this picture with a camera phone, from a moving car. Nice work honey!

Not taking chances...

Hey everyone,

I hope to blog soon about last weekend (more boxes unpacked, and another trip with a carload of "stuff" to Goodwill), but I wanted to let you all know that I'm going to be moving my blog to "Private" mode.

I don't understand enough about how one can search for and find a blog out here in Cyberspace, and since I'm going to be interacting soon with a bunch of technical-savvy college kids, I don't want to risk the personal information I share on my blog becoming public.

So in the next couple of weeks, I plan to privatize the blog --- I believe I know who most of you out there are, and I'll send you an invitation to this blog (although, to read it, you'll have to have a google ID - sorry about that, but it is easy to create). If you are not a regular commenter on my blog, feel free to post to this entry or send me an email to make sure you make the list.

Sorry for the annoyance, and I'll try to update my blog more often, to make it worth the log in! Thanks!

Movin' In (still)

It's been almost six months since we moved back into our house. We're pretty settled in, and in a comfortable routine. However, we started to notice that we were getting a little too comfortable, and not spending time continuing to unpack the boxes that filled our garage, our shed, and one fairly expensive storage locker. So we've re-committed to getting our stuff unpacked --- and we've given ourselves a deadline: September 11. I return to work full time on September 1, so it made sense to try to wrap this up before our lives got re-complicated by another change. However, we settled on September 11 as our deadline, as (1), we still have a TON of stuff to deal with and (2), September 11 will mark the one-year anniversary on which we evacuated our house due to Hurricane Ike.

We are making progress. In May, Mark and his Dad (thanks Paul!) moved our stuff from the biggest storage locker you can get, to the smallest one. They also inventoried all of our stuff, labelled the boxes, and drew a map showing where all the boxes are, so when we go back for another batch, we can decide specifically what we want to bring home (Paul's system - and we love it!).

Last weekend, Mark and I finished unpacking the stuff in the garage. Then this morning, we got through about half of the stuff in the shed, followed by our 3rd trip with a full carload to Goodwill. Our goal has been to get rid of at least 25% of our stuff as we unpack it. I think we're actually doing pretty well in that department!

We made another trip to the storage locker today (see picture above), and I'm hoping to get through a few boxes while Ben naps, before Ben and I commence our weekend errands routine: dry cleaner, library, grocery store.

Wish us luck --- and I hope to post a picture of our last empty box on September 11.

That's it for this little weekend update...